MargoMusing

Back in May, I moved all my furniture, and myself, out into the shed / garden annex / converted garage,  in order to allow a whole string of builders and plasters and electricians and decorators and carpet fitters to transform my house.

It was in great need of it.

These are some of the 'before' pictures. The house has literally had nothing done to it for decades.

I assume the wallpaper went up in the early 80's, and nothing had changed since. Not shown here: the lovely curtain poles, which were screwed to untreated bit of wood which were, in turn, glued to the wallpaper.

I can be quite certain that they were glued on, because whoever glued them on did not clear up afterwards, so there were lots of blobs of white pva glue sploodging out around the wood.

It's actually quite inspiring to think that there is someone out there who is even more clueless about DIY than I am...

The 'before' pictures of the bedrooms are less dramatic, because you cannot really tell that the walls (and ceilings) are covered with lumpy wood-chip wallpaper, and the carpets so thin that every floorboard could be seen.

And these pictures don't show the black, sooty plaster, loose around the sockets and where the airing cupboard used to be. Or the lovely holes where the previous owners had TVs on the walls, and all kinds or random bits of wire everywhere...

Also not shown: the peeling artex ceilings in the kitchen and the bathroom. They were not fun.

So, I moved out, and the builders moved in, and made dramatic and messy changes.

It is very strange to come home at the end of the day and find that you can see all your brickwork, or can learn what your loft insulation looks like from the underneath.

(Yellow, mostly, in case you were wondering!)

But mostly what I came home to was dust. Black dust. Lots and lots of black dust.

And then some more black dust.

And did I mention the the black dust?

It was also a little worrying to see just how much stuff was ending up in the skip outside the house. I started to feel as if I might get home one day to find the entire house was gone, with nothing left but skip after skip of rubble.

Fortunately, things then started to improve.

I would return each evening to find plasterboard, and then plaster, and new skirting boards, and new electrical sockets, and all sorts of things.

And then came the decorators, and the new, non-black, walls went from pink, to  white(ish) to the colours which I had chosen.

Then, last week, after the decorators had finished, the carpet fitters arrived. I had not, originally, planned to replace all of the carpets but in the end, I decided it was easier than doing them bit by bit, plus they really, really needed to be replaced...

And so now I have new carpet everywhere.

And it does, I think, all look rather nice.

The carpet fitter finished on Friday morning, and on Saturday morning two blokes with a van arrived to move all my furniture back indoors, so I am now, officially, moved back in.

And I feel that I now have the house which I 'saw', when I first looked around the house last Spring, before I bought it.

It is not quite finished:

I don't have any curtains yet, and all of my books are in boxes (the third bedroom is, literally, half full of boxes of books right now.)

I am stalking a couple of carpenters with a view to getting some bookshelves and cupboards built into the living room, and one day I want to have a wood-burning stove in the fireplace, and some better quality furniture.

And outside, the garden needs work. But for now, by new house is all shiny and new, and I am very happy with it.

Now, I just need to get the books unpacked ...!