Constructive Destruction

We have been busy little bees in the last two weeks, the house has transformed. We have reduced it to a shell and the start of rebuilding has begun. I stripped all the wallpaper and ceiling chipboard off the living room. My parents did the same to the hallway. Everything became covered in flakes of pine that had created the textured ceiling.  We've stripped the dining room ceiling which consisted of polystyrene tiles on top of patterned paper, on top of artex, covering a leak stain which hadn't been dealt with. Such madness.  We also took the dogs to the house one at a time so we could get them used to being there.

We have totally removed the kitchen, mallets and man power was used to rag the units from the walls. Horrific discoveries of more piles of greasy remnants where discovered underneath the units. A swarm of silverfish scuttled out with every movement, some ever lived underneath the wall tiles. We ended up greasy and dusty while dragging the kitchen into the utility room, and again when we transported the units into the car on our many trips to the recycling centre.

Once one side of the kitchen was out we set about removing the tiles, which where two layered thick of plain white modern tiles over brown 70's tiles. They where reluctant to leave the wall but once the hammers came out we had fun clattering them to the floor.

The plumbers came in this week and installed a new boiler and re-piped the entire house, which was a mismatch of various peoples DIY misadventures over the last fifty years leading to a dangerous array of    weak spots around the heating pipes. They also removed the bathroom so all that is left to do is remove the tiles and start the refit. Then they removed all the radiators so we could remove the wallpaper behind them and line the walls with backing paper, which revealed even more ugly patterned wallpaper.

Then Darren the kitchen man came and removed the kitchen sink so we could finish removing the units and tiles. We also arranged with him the units, handles and worktops that we are getting, we've already picked the tiles.  He then set about demolishing the wall, and moving electrical out lets. He finished off rounding the arch in the kitchen and prepped it to be plastered over this weekend. He also did a fabulous thing of removing the 70's gas fireplace and ripping off the pine casing around the chimney breast. He also happens to have a wood burner for sale, a lovely little one with a marble surround which suits us perfectly. We've also had a tree surgeon  out to survey the sycamore in the back garden, he agreed to remove it and trim the overhanging trees so the garden will get more light.

The further we take our archaeological dig into this house the more it feels as though the house is sighing with relief. Its not long now until we can start decorating and make the house ours. 

Yours

Belinda Stepford

xxx

House progress

We got the house on Wednesday and by Saturday we had already near transformed it. Simply ripping out every single  vile stinking carpet out of the house made a huge difference and covering the house in candles. The rooms look instantly bigger and brighter. The house now smells of bleach and cleaning products not old Chinese food. It is so much more welcoming and easier to see the potential in the place. 

We also cleaned all the the windows and scrubbed the kitchen. My Mim and I scrubbed the kitchen surfaces for hours but they still felt greasy it was awful. Worst of all when we removed the tin foil from the wall there was grease underneath the foil, that was there so long it had been painted over. What cretin saw a greasy wall and thought, you know what would improve that... covering it in foil. yuck!

The kitchen despite hours of bleaching and scrubbing when I knelt on the work tops to clean the top of the units my knees stuck to the grease on the work tops. I was just trying to get them clean enough to put in the back of the car to take to the tip but they are so impossible to actually clean I think we're just going to have to put a tarp down and take them like that. My Mim tried to brighten our greasy kitchen up by bringing some flowers in from the garden and popping them in a tea pot. 

We also started de-weeding and tearing apart the garden, on a particularly sunny day. We managed to drag out four really established sycamore saplings, rather a lot of brambles and seeming never ending cleavers. All in all we've been very productive, when we weren't sitting in the sun drinking tea... 

I love playing house, its like the sims but real real life, so much fun.

Yours

Belinda Stepford

xxx

In which we acquire a time warp.

My family has finally bought a new house! As we've had such difficulty selling our current home we couldn't get a new one unless we bought a little house to do up and eventually rent our current one. So after months of messing about with lawyers and difficult people we managed to buy a new little property.

Inside was not exactly brilliant, though the rooms where of an okay size they where decorated horrifically, I mean seriously badly. Every surface was patterned and or colourful in the worst possible way. Everywhere was covered in grease and dust as though the place hadn't been touched since the sixties.  The entrace hall to the house had this horrid red carpet and everything smelt like Chinese food. The hall is actually surprisingly spacious and we think would be a good location for our huge mirrors that currently live in our living room. Moving from a relatively large Victorian house to a modern one is part of the challenge.

 The living room has a large plastic wood style gas fireplace that is going to ripped out and large sliding glass doors that lead out to the garden.  The garden is the main reason that we bought this house, it is large enough to keep the dogs happy, entertain in and have chickens in.  The house is really bright, the kitchen is decent sized and its in a really lovely area so the house isn't too much of a compromise. It will also hopefully be a decent investment in the slightly more longer term. 

As I mentioned before the kitchen is fairly large, when we got it they had 50's units that had probably been there as long, everything was covered in a thick layer of grease. They had put tin foil up on the walls to act as a splash back from the grease, that had been there so long the sellotape holding it up had been painted over. Grim. We plan on gutting the kitchen and knocking the wall between that and the little dining room down as the dining space is sort of wasted. 

 

The little dining space we plan to knock through into has the weirdest set of patterned wall paper, horrid flooring, swirly boarders and odd ceiling tiles. It seems like an awful lot of work but it is mostly cosmetic. 

The last room on the ground floor is the utility room which runs the length of the house that you enter through the dining room, which will make so much more sense when we knock through the dining kitchen wall. Who designed a utility room off a dining room in the first place. The utility is where the downstairs loo is and is probably going to be the most work as it needs totally re plastering. 

The utility also leads onto the garden, the garden is rather large and has a little concert patio at the moment. We plan on removing the sycamore tree and all the saplings around the edge of the garden, we also need to remove a ton of brambles and creepers from the over grown garden. The patio is being redone bigger so there is a place for a barbecue, table and chairs, and entertaining space.  We also need to replace parts of the ramshackle fence. 

Back in the house the upstairs is in a similar state to the rest of the house, sixies carpets and horrid mismatched wallpaper throughout. And equally as filthy, a lovely collection of cobwebs amassed everywhere. The weird thing is the house was lived in by a family all the time so how it has become a time capsule from the sixties is beyond me. how could you live like that and not go mad?  

There are two double bedrooms that look out on to the garden with huge windows and one small single that faces the front garden. They are actually really bright nice rooms if you can get past the car crash decor.   The wallpaper is all textured and the carpets where geometric oddities. 

The single room was particularly badly decorated with blue and silver striped wallpaper mixed with the worst carpet in the whole house.  It has a funny little step where the stairs cut into the room so we plan on turning that into a little bench type thing or wardrobe depending on how the room looks when we have thing in it, as each time we've returned to the house it feels bigger and bigger. This room is going to become the guest room.

Lastly is the upstairs bathroom, a delightful *ahem* grey and an pink faded tiled room with strange flowers and enough grim to classify as a biohazard. At one point my Mim was attempting to clean the bath and the side fell off it, she just threw it away. That shall be a total over haul as well.

So thats it, the beginning of our new home, a fun little project. What fun!

Yours 

Belinda Stepford

xxx