A New Shower Room

Last week it was the utility room, this week the shower room that is off the utility!

We demolished the original shower room completely.

It was running the length of the room and meant there was a small utility, tiny shower room and useless dark corridor to the back door that was on the front of the house... This is an extension that was apparently architect designed, hmmm!

The shower room is now the width of the utility with a plain white sink and toilet and a decent sized shower.

The tiling, what can I say, we have wanted to tile a bathroom like that since visiting the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 2000 and have finally done it. The tiles are not really sloping, it is an optical illusion!

Finishing this room means we have done all the rooms downstairs and only need to do the hall and stairs for downstairs to be officially complete! Who knows when they will get done though, if only money grew on trees, or I could find a job that only worked school hours and had school holidays off!!

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Utility Room Renovation

Wow this post has been a long time coming! For those new around here we moved in to our house 2.5 years ago and it was a mess, it needed total renovation but was in the perfect location with a big garden.We have been slowly renovating, see here and here and here.

The utility room when we moved in was awful, in fact calling it a utility room was a bit of an exaggeration!

The downstairs toilet was running lengthwise in the room leaving a corridor to the back door (which was on the front of the house...) and the rest of the area felt small and dark with another door out the back. It was just odd. We knew it had to be totally stripped back to bare walls so, after Big E's birthday in January, we started demolishing!

We have put in new windows, blocked up the (front and back) back doors and put one in the side of the house which makes far more sense. The toilet is now along the width of the room at the end and the whole thing feels massive. It is bigger then the kitchen we had in our first house!

This is what you see when you come in the back door. The drawers will be painted eventually and the old freezer replaced when this one breaks.

Behind the door is the shoe storage, from Ikea, and the coat hooks made with scrap wood and hooks from B&Q.

We have stacked the washing machine and tumble dryer and put in a sink.

I am in love with the tiles (from Tons of Tiles on ebay).

We are going to do something to the front of the boiler eventually but for now it is a white eyesore!

Laundry cupboard and tall cupboard are from Ikea and are brilliant, no more piles of washing, each hole has a built in basket behind it - so clever!
 
The door goes into the downstairs shower room, I will do a seperate post about that next week!

The worktops and white units are from Ikea and the floor tiles and other units are from B&Q.
I ordered the doors and mis-matched knobs on line. Also, to save some money we used painted MDF as end boards for the units, this saved us £150.

I am officially in love with this room, I think it is the only one that feels right, the rest of the renovated rooms are missing something, mostly things on the walls but good pictures and mirrors are not cheap!

Next up are the windows in the living room and our bedroom which leak...

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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of house renovation...

Good:

Hint at the 'ugly' on the wall behind...

New Wardrobes and chest of drawers (for our room that we are not doing yet but couldn't let the wardrobes get away)

Bad:

Old Wardrobes, not the nicest looking things in the world!

Ugly:

What we found behind the old fitted wardrobes...

A wet wall and ceiling with lots of mould

painted with plastic stain stopper paint

that was bursting off in places

and needed completley peeled off

and to add insult to injury in an area that was actually quite dry we found some dry rot.... Now to find a roofer to check whether the roofer a year ago actually fixed the roof (I doubt it since the wall is soaking wet...).

After all this my desire to craft and sew has been non existent and I have been spending a lot of time in the garden weeding, admiring beautiful flowers,

being eaten alive by midges, and having a steak out at the hen coop to stop them eating their own eggs...

Hopefully I will be back soon with something from the craft room :)

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Finally, a spare room!

It has been 4.5 years since we have had a spare room so it is great to have one again and be able to ask people to stay!

Since we moved here a year and a half ago the spare room has been a general dumping ground for all 'stuff' we have no where to keep while we renovate so getting this room done has meant a lot of tidying and sorting but it is worth it.

This is it when we moved in...

Pretty horrible with awful skirting, a window sill that didn't fit and matting over the floorboards.

Every room we have done so far has involved stripping the wood battons off the ceiling and getting it re-plastered. We chose to keep the battons in the spare room as the ceiling was in a lot better condition than in the other rooms. It also means we can show people what the house was like when we moved in!

This is the room now:

 

I wanted to re-use the curtains we had in the Master Bedroom in our last house so picked the aqua colour from the curtains for the walls. We got an Ikea Hemnes day bed second hand on gumtree and I had fun making cushions for it!

The kids have been banned from this room now because their toys get everywhere and I want this room to stay tidy, who knows how long that will last though!!

Linking to some of these fab linky parties!

I am having a Country Living Embroidery book giveaway, entries are low, click here to enter!

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A New Kitchen!

Finally, pictures of the almost complete kitchen. We went for white painted oak doors with an oak worktop. The floor tiles are honed slate and the splash back is multi-coloured slate mosaic. I love it!

Before:

When we got the house, before stuff arrived!

Utter Chaos!

After:

Before:

When we got the house

Chaos!

After:

We still have to seal the splash back tiles and attach the doors then we will be done, phew!!

Now on to the utility room...

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The joys of living in an old house...

Our house is old, how old we are not sure, but we think it was built in the late 1700's. We are slowly renovating and have just (almost) finished the kitchen, hopefully will get some good photos soon to put on here but here is a peek (you should see the chaos in the rest of the room).

Our next job was to be an easy one, the spare room, hahaha....

We thought we would just clear the room, give it a splash of paint then lay some carpet...

Until we found this behind some of the junk we had stored in the room..

Oh the joys, now to find the leak...

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