changing rooms

well ladies you may well be right (just called liz a lady )
as that is all we have done for the last 48 hours it is really all i can talk about
we have stripped quite a lot of the room now

as soon as we have finished i will work out how to put up pictures ... i did know how to do it but i've forgotten ... we are trying to do some pictures of before, during and after

the wallpaper is all off which is a relief as i hated one wall which had all blue flowers on a white background ... very old maidish ... we have removed the old picture rails (yeah we know it is bad to strip out period detail but they had been cut in various places and they looked naff) ... we have kept them for future use in the house ... and taken out the old skirting boards (look at it this way remove and replace or strip and sand) ... time versus backache versus cost

after being all manly and removing all the old wood i spent the afternoon stripping paint with a heat gun ... the smell is disgusting ... and i reckon some of the paint is the original victorian stuff ... they lived such dismal lives if the paint colour is anything to go by

found a few pages of The Sun from 1980 … which is ironic as i usually don't let a copy of that paper inside my house ... and all along it was lurking behind the skirting :)

we have decided to put a wooden floor down ... well actually we have found pine floorboards that are tongue and groove so you get a no gaps smooth floor that is easy to varnish ... we are going to lay it on the old floorboards a bit like you would with laminate but we hate laminate floors it is like having a photocopy of wood ... why do that when wood has been kinda proven as a building material over the years

we are also going to plaster ... well we are going to try and plaster ... tomorrow we are going to go and get a bag of plaster and try one wall ... the wall that is all crumbly plaster since we removed the wallpaper ... on the basis that we can't make it any worse than it already is ... if it looks ok we will do the rest of the room ... i have watched our builders do it for years so i figure i have enough knowledge of the procedure to give it a go

a friend plastered a bathroom for the first time recently and it looks fine so i figure it is just a case of having the confidence to give it a go ... all theory at the moment ... i could also seriously regret all of the above decision making process ... we shall see

now i am off to holy joes and try and forget for a few hours the ton of work waiting back here ... tomorrow is another day

the saga will continue ...