Living room

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10 Oct

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Ahhh, the living room. Here’s what it looks like now:

A cosy space to relax in, with bare wood floors and a log burner.

Although a picture of calm and serenity now, it wasn’t like that we when moved in. Here’s what it looked like when we viewed the house:

Before

It felt really small as it was full of bulky furniture.

On the day we moved in, one of the first things we did was rip up the old carpet in the living room to reveal some lovely (but very much needing some work) floorboards. It was a room we could get to work on straight away, but it did mean not having a space to relax in during the evenings. We ended up using the biggest bedroom as an upstairs living room to tie us over!

The day we moved in…I stood in the middle of this room and questioned what on earth we had done!

Walls

We really had no idea what we were doing but cracked on regardless. The first thing we did was to strip off the wall paper (buy a decent steamer and you will save yourself ALOT of time!). We couldn’t afford to have the walls plastered, so we painstakingly filled in any holes or marks with filler and sanded them over until the walls were smooth. This was the really time consuming bit. When this was done we were then able to paint a base coat on and then, once more, fill and sand until the walls were perfect.

We were going to do the same with the ceiling, but our friend Ali came to the rescue and plastered it for us (phew!).

Paint

We chose Farrow & Ball’s ‘Peignoir’ for the walls and ‘Wevet’ for the woodwork. Peignoir is a lovely pinky/grey which looks different depending on the time of day. It’s very warm, and contrasts nicely with the kitchen and dining room which has a much fresher and brighter look, making the living room a cosy space for curling up with Netflix/wine.

,We did the floor at the same time as the walls as we wanted to apply the top coat of paint after the floor had been sanded.

Floor

We were blessed with solid floorboards that were in good condition, but unfortunately the edges had been stained black (this was common in the 40s/50s when most people didn’t have the luxury of wall to wall carpet, and preferred the wood under the rugs to be painted). The floorboards upstairs were the same too.

We agreed that the best solution would be to sand them, so we hired a floor sander and my brother got to work! It pretty much took the whole day to complete this, but the result was worth it. TOP TIP: Don’t even think about sanding a floor like this with a hand sander. It will take you ten years. Believe us, we tried.

Evan after sanding, the boards were looking quite orange, and we were after a lighter look, so we did some research into different floorboard treatments. We agreed that paint would be a nightmare to maintain and wasn’t practical for us, so we went down the wood stain route.

At first, we tried the Osmo Oil Clear, but the boards still came up pretty orange. See below..

After that attempt, we tried Osmo oil with a white pigment, which counteracts the orange. We layered it on pretty thick and got an amazing white wash effect, with a really hard wearing finish. It can be mopped, and three years later it is still looking good.

As well as fully redecorating, both windows also needed replacing which was a big expense for us, and one of the reasons we had to do pretty much everything ourselves at this point in our renovations. We (my brother) also ripped out the old gas fireplace as we had in mind a new wood burner to replace it (we had to wait and save up for this luxury!!).

Fire place

We were itching to get that fire off to see what was behind!

We were in luck - original open fireplace was mostly intact.

With a wood burner in mind, we cleared out the old fireplace and had the chimney swept. We also had a survey done on the chimney to see if it was even possible to have a wood burner. Luckily, as long as we had a flu liner fitted, we were able to.

The chimney sweep dealing with all of the soot.

We chose not to use a fire surround, and instead plastered around it creating fresh, clean lines for a minimal look whilst still keeping some of the original brick exposed.

We eventually got our tiny but perfectly formed wood burner - a dream come true!

With a very limited budget, we weren’t sure how to go about installing a new hearth. We wanted something that was flush and didn’t stick up. At a loss, our friend suggested a simple and very budget friendly solution - to fill the existing concrete hearth with more concrete, so that it sat flush. He did it for us that day, and neatly surrounded it with a thin wood border. This was approved for safety, and was all ready for when we could afford the wood burner.

Furnishing

The fun part!

Again, we were limited on budget, so we mostly had to work with what we already had. There were two things we bought new; a book shelf from Ikea which we cut down to size, and use as a sideboard, and a new rug, also from Ikea.

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The curtains were added later on - my mum found the unused vintage material in an antique shop, and they were made up into curtains and matching roman blinds by the brilliant Deborah from Hursley Workroom.

The drinks cart belonged to my grandparents - we absolutely love it, and it’s always commented on!

Custom

We had a shelf custom made for the archway next to the fire place. We ordered the right size piece of wood and our builder fitted it in. We store logs below and Alex’s fave cook books on top of it.

We also decided to replace the original door leading from the hallway into the living room with a sliding door. To do this, we took away the door frame and plastered it, and up-cycled an original door so that it fitted in the doorway. We sourced the sliding door track from Ebay (it was around £50).

If you have any questions about this project, do get in touch. We did this quite a while ago, so it’s hard to remember every detail and i’m tending to forget the pain of past renovations - apparently it’s like child birth?!