Weekend 1 – Our first weekend as first time home owners
“Let’s just rip it all out” we said.
Note to all first time renovators…
don’t try to do this all in one weekend! You will end up crying into your wine over how much work it is/ how much worse the house looks now. (I’m pretty sure the house is now worth less than we paid for it!)
We were both so excited to get started on the house that we decided to take Friday off work to get in there. Craig’s mum Julie drove up to Yorkshire from Wales to lend a helping hand – and boy are we grateful that she did! She stripped an entire room with her bare hands in under an hour! DIY Wonderwoman right there!
The entire house was covered in Woodchip. Woodchip, for those of you who are unfamiliar with this wallpaper-reincarnation-of-the-devil, is wallpaper with teeny tiny chips of wood all over it. It is usually covered in glossy paint, stuck over the top of several layers of other wallpaper, and a nightmare to remove! We will post how we removed it in our “Tips & Tutorials” section.
Anyway, after 2 days and 3 steam strippers, operation Woodchip is complete! We are now oficially “Woodchip free” (I’m pretty sure we should get some kind of award or certificate for this).
Operation Woodchip begins…Craig still has enthusiasm here!
Julie aka DIY Wonderwoman at work in what will be the master bedroom
We also knocked through to open up the fireplaces. There was originally a fireplace in every room but at some point they had been removed and blocked up with shelving. We are going to put reclaimed cast iron fires back in every room.
Dad opening up the fireplaces
Not content with knocking out walls and ripping off skirting boards we decided to knock out the false ceiling over the stairs too. Turns out that false ceiling was hiding a dustbin lid (why?!) and almost 3metres of extra space above the stairs! I’m already obsessing over the huge light fitting we’ll be getting to fill the space!
Heres a list of some other stuff we did this weekend:
– Removed all of the dado rail
– Removed the skirting boards downstairs
– Removed the gas fire from the dining room
– Lifted all of the carpets, underlay and carpet gripper rods to reveal ORIGINAL WOOD FLOORBOARDS!!! I think I’ve died and gone to heaven!
Swoon over these bad boys why don’t you!
– lifted the laminate flooring downstairs
– Removed the radiators
We also had our first disaster. Whoever installed the skirting boards had nailed one of them into the mains water pipe….when we ripped it off, the nail came with it and we our very own Noah’s Ark moment. Fortunately my quick-thinking brother-in-law was there (plumber = handy) with all the tools to turn the water off! Crisis averted!
After all that hard work we (and our army of helpers) were exhausted so we sat down for a glass of wine in the sunshine. I obviously got my phone out and started scouring Pinterest like a mad woman for the next round of ideas!
Casey