Finally we have some curtains!

After well over a year of living in our house we have finally got to the point where we are adding finishing touches and putting up curtains. It's a very exciting job that is now complete.

For months there has been no point in putting up curtains that will only get lagged in dust and debris from the house build but now the walls are painted we can finally put up the curtain pole that we bought months ago and hang the curtains.

Sometimes when your doing a house renovation for so many months it is often very boring visiting screwfix and Jewson's week after week and buying endless supplies of building materials and sometimes you just need some proper retail therapy and buy some soft furnishings. This is exactly what we did about 6 months ago and decided that we loved these curtains and that they would be perfect for the theme and colours that we had chosen. Not wanting them to go out of stock we bought them and had them in storage for months so it really was exciting knowing how long we have owned these for to finally get them hung.

Now we can close the curtains at night.... it just might be a while before we remember to open them each morning! Whoops.

Wallpapering a feature wall

After several months with the wall painted red in our living room we both came to the decision that we didn't like it! Although we both loved the colour and the same colour was used on the fireplace breast and that looks lovely but the room just didn't have the wow factor that we wanted. 

It felt quite heart breaking to have spent money and time painting this wall to then be stripping it several months later but we both felt that it wasn't how we had imagined it and we knew it could look so much better so we headed to the shops to chose wallpaper.

However choosing wallpaper that we both liked was a near impossible task, we went to The Range, B&Q, Homebase and even a wallpaper showroom in St Austell where we spent hours flicking through pages and pages of books of wallpaper samples. After several hours we went back to Homebase and bought a brown damask style wallpaper that we both not only agreed on but both loved. 

The first strip of wallpaper goes on the wall and already the smile on my face was growing with only the first strip, I was loving the wallpaper and really pleased we made the decision to change it from the previously red painted wall.

I absolutely love the new wallpapered feature wall and is exactly what I

 had in my mind, now to buy some different wall lights as the ornate funky lights that we had previously bought for the wall with the red paint will now totally clash so back to the shops to choose more lights. 

Boxing in the old fireplace

Our house is a little bit greedy and has two fireplaces, so we are going to keep one as a working fireplace and the other as a feature in the room, hopefully filled with lanterns and candles.

But before we can do that we need to block up the fireplace and stop the small creepy critters from entering the house. Just out of the shot there is a wooden platform now blocking off the old fire place. With the back wall of the fireplace painted it is now onto finishing the bottom with a slate hearth.

We have already made a slate hearth for the first fireplace and love it so just need to make one to match now.

The ceiling beams sanded and painted

This is the one job that I have been dreading and avoiding for a long time! Sanding the old wooden beams and repainting. I sanded a few beams but instantly got very achy arms and my face, hair and eyes covered in dust and shards of flaky paint. 

After avoiding for a few more weeks my lovely James gave in and sanded the remaining beams so that they could be painted. 

Building a custom office desk.

The great thing about building a custom work area is the ability to grow your idea as you go. We always knew that we needed to create an under stair office area as it was the only space suitable in the house for an office, either that or we loose one of the bedrooms to an office upstairs and neither of us wanted that.

We purposely extended the wall out ever so slightly to create a natural divide between the living room area and the office space, this also means that when sitting on the sofa in the living room the desk is hidden around the corner and the thoughts of working and paperwork hidden away.

The desk space started with just an idea for a curved desk spanner the whole area but soon realized that storage would potentially be an issue and so the small cupboard under the stairs and draw unit were added. Next we decided it would be nice to continue the desk down in the corner and create some small shelves. Next on the list is to create another shelf underneath the desk to sit the printer on and drill a hole at the back to run the cables down from the computer to the sockets. But for our first attempt at building a custom desk i think it worked out quite well.

How many sockets to put under a desk?

In our last house we were really limited by plug sockets and had extension leads and adapters running all over the place. When you think about a modern office space you need to plug in your computer, printer, scanner, hard drive, telephone and mobile phone not to mention, like me, camera batteries on charge normal batteries on charge and it becomes a plug socket nightmare.

The really good thing about having a house with electrics from the dinosaur years is that you can plan it exactly how you want it, Here we have had four double socket boxes wired in and hope this will be more than enough sockets for the modern home office field with gadgets and tech.