A spring spruce: home updates inside and out

Over the Easter holidays we made a couple of small updates to the house and I thought you might enjoy seeing them, knowing how you appreciate domestic details like this as much as me.

The first job was to give the shed a bit of love. Here it is looking very sad and dirty.

Ever since we bought the shed, about four years ago, I have wanted the windows to look less stark. I decided to soften them by adding some strips of wood to try to create the effect of mullioned windows. I measured my windows, bought some wooden beading from B&Q, cut it to size then painted the pieces with white wood paint suitable for outdoors. 

My Dad helped me glue these painted strips onto the glass (after giving it a good clean).

Then I filled the window boxes with fresh compost and planted them up with geraniums.

I also washed down the shed and jet washed the pebbles, just to give it all a bit of a spruce up.

Before:

And after:

I'm really happy with how it looks now. The shed is so visible from the kitchen and this just makes it look a bit prettier.

Along with a freshly washed and painted decking area, and new outdoor chairs, the whole area had a freshen up ready for the summer.

We also gave our bedroom a fresh coat of paint. The floorboards and walls were really scuffed and it was looking a bit sad. I went round and round in circles looking at wallpaper for this room but in the end decided to stay with paint, but not white this time. I had to contend with perfectly good (although old) curtains and a rug, both of which are patterned and different colours, and all our bedding and blankets in a multitude of patterns and colours. The thought of trying to find a wallpaper that worked with all this (and that John also liked - he does not enjoy anything too floral or "chintzy", his word) was exhausting so I just chose a paint colour instead.

We had to work around the bed which was tricky but manageable. We painted the walls in Taupe 05 by Lick. I wanted something fairly neutral but warm.

Then we gave the floorboards a sand and two coats of white floor paint. 

When I got the the threshold between the bedroom and landing, it became clear that the landing would also need sanding and painting.

Luckily our landing is very small.

Here you get a better sense of the colour with the bedroom curtains. Maybe I could have gone for wallpaper, I don't know, but thinking about it stopped being fun so that makes me think paint was the right choice.

Here is the room from the other side.

We decided to give my dressing table a coat of paint at the same time. John did all the work on this, I have to admit. He sanded the old white paint (very scratched and stained especially on top) and sanded the top section right back to the wood,

 

We chose grey paint as it needed to work with the existing yellow chair and rug. I was going to order new handles but decided in the end to paint the existing ones pink.

I am really pleased with how it came out. Below you can see previous incarnations - when I painted it in chalk paint (such a disaster) many years ago (we still had the horrible bedroom carpet!)

And when I painted it white with grey handles maybe five or six years ago. I do still really like this look to be honest. Very soothing. 

Overall I'm pleased with the new bedroom. There is a little more colour but it still feels calm and organised. I always love that big clean out that comes with emptying a room of furniture and giving it all a really big sort and clean. 

It is still small with a tiny wardrobe but it does have so much light . We saved money by keeping all the existing furniture. dry cleaning the existing curtains instead of replacing with new, choosing paint over wallpaper and painting the dressing table and handles. Other jobs on the house need to be done (work on the chimney - boring and expensive) so we needed to keep to a budget. Decorating is always so much about compromise, isn't it?

Small home improvements

Hello! First of all, can I say thank you for all the lovely comments you leave me on this blog. It means so much and I really appreciate it.

I wanted to share a few small-ish home improvements that we have finished this winter and spring. Most of these have taken months and months to actually be completed but it is nice to tick some jobs off the list. (I love a list.) We have lived in this house for nine years now and still have not done much of the work we would like to do. Rooms constantly need to be decorated, leaks mended, plumbers and roofers phoned.

I'll start with the airing cupboard. This deep cupboard goes into the eaves from Angus's bedroom and goes back a surprisingly long way. It used to house a huge hot water tank which took up most of the space, and was really good for drying washing. However, a year ago, maybe longer, we replaced our very old boiler with a new combi-boiler, which was re-sited down in the garage. The upside to this was instantly improved water pressure, hotter radiators and cheaper gas bills, but the downside was no more hot water tank. When it was removed it left lots of holes in the walls and floorboards which we ignored for many, many months. 

We pulled up and threw out the scrap of carpet and John filled all the holes in the walls. My Dad repaired some of the broken and damaged floorboards and then Mum and I painted the whole space, walls, ceiling and woodwork, with white paint. 

John laid some ply boards on the floor, over the floorboards, and attached a plug-in wall light. Then my Dad built us some slatted (for air flow) shelves and put up a pole for hanging clothes. A team effort.

The storage is brilliant.

Shelves for towels on one side and bedding on the other, and everything clean and dust free. Handily, some hot water pipes still run through the cupboard helping to air everything. 

Next, the bathroom. Now, we had no intentions to do anything at all with the bathroom, We had a new shower, sink and toilet installed in December 2019 and as far as we were concerned, it was finished. However, we had been noticing damp appear in the bathroom and realised we had a slow leak which had been leaking into the wall between the bathroom and kitchen for a very long time.

John chiselled out the pipework, got a plumber in to fix the pipes and then left it to dry out. This is what our bathroom looked like from October to February. I stopped noticing it after a while.

Finally it was filled and sanded by John and then painted by my lovely mum and I. The final joy was the reinstallation of the towel rail - not more cold towels! 

While we were doing work, John added some more tiles to the foot of the shower - that wall gets much more splashed than we thought it would when we had the bathroom fitted - and we decided to change the paint colour since we were going to have to re-paint anyway.

The final step was to add a couple of shelves to the wall above the toilet for extra storage, something our bathroom is always lacking.

Next, the kitchen. I think I already showed you the wooden strips we added to the end panel in the kitchen.

(Can you see the water damage from the leak on the wooden floor? It will fade as it drys out.)

You can see where Ziggy chewed the panel when he was a puppy. We've looked at it like that for about seven years then finally, over February half term, I had the idea to cover it up with some strips of wood. We used pine (cheaper) which we stained with oak oil.

I liked it so much that I persuaded John to add some more to another corner of the kitchen.

We have had these shelves by the window for years. I thought they were going to solve all my storage problems but sadly they just became a dust trap and dumping ground, plus the veneer was going all yellow round the edge.

We took down the shelves, filled the holes and painted. Then, we set to work fixing more pine strips to this white, shiny end panel. We stained the pine strips beforehand, then cut them to size before attaching them. We used tile spacers to keep the spacing consistent. 

 

Finally I added a little lobster decoration from here. 

I love the warmth the wooden tones bring to the kitchen. When we had it fitted we wanted everything clean and white. I don't regret choosing the kitchen but would certainly choose something completely different (warmer, a softer colour, less clinical) today.