Slow progress

It's really difficult to make any progress at the moment - I'm so short of money - but tins of paint have been forthcoming from family members, thankfully, so I have done some work.  

I have painted the living room white...

That thing on the right is the front door, and immediately beyond that is the right-hand wall, so you can see how small it is.

I thought before I started that I definitely wasn't going to paint everything white - I'm really not keen on minimalist, white interiors - but that's exactly what I'm doing.  It was just intended as a blank canvas, from which I can hopefully go on to other more exciting colours, but actually in the front room, the white looks really good.  It goes well with the pine; the whole thing looks bigger and airier.

Having said that, I'm re-considering whether to actually use it as a living room.  It seems very goldfish-bowl-like, even with the voile curtain.  I will try a blind, which is how a lot of people in my street seem to deal with the public aspect of their front rooms; otherwise it might just end up being a very large entrance hall, and I shall cram everything into the back room!

In the back room, I still haven't sorted my lime plaster wall out.  I was a bit confused for a while - someone suggested that it looked more like concrete than lime(!) - but the builders have just started and they reckon it's lime, so when I can afford to, I'm going to buy some kind of lime-based product and have a go at patching it up.  In the meantime, I have painted everything around it white...

I'm not so taken with the white in the back room.  It's a very strange house for light - very flush on the east-west axis - so in the morning, the front of the house is gorgeous and the back looks like hell; in the afternoon - if the sun is shining - it's the other way round.  At any rate, the back room seems to be darker more often, so the white paint generally looks a bit grey.

I've also stripped out the little cupboard under the stairs.  It did have little shelves in it - about 6 inches deep - that had been wallpapered over several times.  That seemed like a bit of a waste of space though; it's not big enough to be a walk-in cupboard; so I thought the best thing to do would be to take out the little shelves and put a more substantial shelving arrangement in there.  The walls, again, are lime, and rather crumbly so the shelves would have to be free-standing, but that would be fine - that would work.  

I am very attached to this cupboard!  Despite the 1960s-style slatted doors, it seems like one of the most authentically Victorian parts of the house.  There's a bit of me that thinks it would be a terrible shame to fill it up with shelves so you can't go in there any more.  (It is, in fact, a walk-in cupboard, despite its lack of grandiosity.)

As I said, the builders started this week.  They have chased all the electric cables in the kitchen, installed concrete blocks on the left-hand side of the steps, to match the right-hand side, and prepared all the walls for the plasterer today.  This is what it looked like when they left yesterday...

And this is what it looks like now...

Woo!  Isn't it beautiful?

Also, at the risk of one too many basic photographs, there was an engineer at the house the day before yesterday...

Excited as I am about the plastering, I cannot tell you what a difference a broadband connection and a new rug make to comfort levels.  Ooh, new rug...

It is second-hand, from Facebook Marketplace and I'm really chuffed with it.  When I turned up to collect, the gentleman had a whole bunch of other rugs he thought I might be interested in, and there I was with my tight budget, and my thrifty £55 in cash, thinking how wonderful they all looked.  Sadly I couldn't afford any of them.  Maybe another time.

Next week, the kitchen floor gets levelled and (fingers crossed) tiled, and the fridge arrives.  Oh yes, and right at the end of the week I'll actually be moving in!  Sometime in the middle of all that, I'm hoping to get the sink fitted and the kitchen plumbing reattached.  It will be a very exciting week.  Then the week after, fingers crossed, I go back to work.

Lime plaster walls!

 Good morning!  

When I first got the keys to my house, I thought 'one room at a time; first off: kitchen', but of course, there's always some waiting to be done between stages - waiting for stuff to arrive, or builders to arrive.  At some point, it was [gently] suggested to me that I might get on and paint something else while I'm engaged in said waiting(!)  So yesterday, I tackled the wallpaper in the dining room.  Naturally, it immediately turned into an enormous job!

This is what it looked like before.  I don't think it's terrible, but it wouldn't be my choice, so I thought I might as well get rid of it.  It turned out it was covering polystyrene-backed lining paper.  There was no way to separate the floral wallpaper from the lining paper (no layer of paint in between), but the polystyrene is supposed to be dangerous anyway, so I took it all off.

It also turned out that what initially looked like a slab of plaster board or particle board (is that a thing?) or something underneath, was actually lime plaster!  This substantially survived my wallpaper-stripping efforts, but there were areas where bits crumbled and fell out.

You can't really see the holes properly from here - but there are chunks of plaster missing.  I'm not sure whether to panic about this or not(!)

The other thing is, not only are there now holes in my lime plaster, but the surface itself isn't particularly smooth - like you'd get with gypsum plaster.  I'm not sure whether the lime is meant to be like this, or whether it needs some kind of finish.  I'm not going to put gypsum over the top, but is there an appropriate lime finish?  I don't think I've ever seen a finished lime plaster wall up close to inspect it.  (Next time I find myself in an old period building, I shall definitely be inspecting the walls closely!)

Weirdly, although it's a mess at the moment, I do think it's quite attractive in a rustic kind of way.  

Having lime plastering done professionally is apparently phenomenally expensive, so my options will be, either to leave it au natural (and I'll be honest, I haven't yet warmed to the mould marks), at least until I can afford to have it done properly - which might not be for a few years. B and 2, fill in the holes as best I can with some kind of cheap filler, and reapply lining paper, then paint the wall, and hope it'll be alright.  C and 3, grab the bull by the horns and try lime plastering myself!

Given that a lot of actual plasterers who contribute to online forums and discussions boards seem to think that lime plastering is messy and difficult, the idea of doing it myself is probably laughable.  On the other hand, given how long it would take me to save up to have it done properly, I don't think I have anything to lose by trying.  It's not a major job, after all, just a few repairs.  And if it goes wrong, the house isn't going to fall down (hopefully).

Anyway, also yesterday the plumber came to shut off the water pipes in the kitchen and remove the old sink unit, and this morning I have ordered the new one.  Just the sink, and sink unit, with a bit of worktop to go over the top.  The rest will have to come later.  

And I put up the bed I inherited.  First outing for my electric drill!  I am dead chuffed with it - and with the bed too(!)  The bed is rather larger than I expected.  It turns out that the little box room I wasn't sure what to do with will be needed for holding all other bedroom stuff apart from the bed.

Anyway, today I have plans to demolish the sink unit, and take it home to be scrapped, and remove the polystyrene coving from the front room.  I'm hoping (please, please, please) that the wall will be alright underneath and it won't be another candidate for my non-existent lime plastering skills!  It would be nice to have one room to actually sit in while the rest of the house looks like a building site.

If the coving removal goes well, I shall get rid of the wall hooks and fill in the holes, and sugar soap ready to paint - woo hoo!