Attic Progress

The attic work is under way, and it's going well. We pulled out the fitted wardrobe - which took a little longer than expected, because whoever fitted it had some of fetish about using lots and lots of nails. The removed chipboard and plasterboard are going into a skip, which arrived yesterday, and will be filled up tomorrow. The more solid bits of actual timber that were forming the structure, I'm hanging on to; some of them have already become the frame of a miniature greenhouse, and the rest will find uses in the garden.

The next bit was putting down flooring. First, though, it was necessary to raise the level a bit, as there are lots of wires, pipes, and other bits that cross the actual rafters. The optimal height to raise it was exactly 5cm, but annoyingly, this falls short of the floor level in the bedroom, since the bedroom floor is on thicker, deeper rafters. I looked into what I'd need to do to make the floors match in level, but it would have been difficult, and made the overall structure rather weaker than I was happy with. So there are 5cm square beams crossing the rafters at right angles, about 35cm apart, and the high-density particleboard "loft panels" rest on these. There were support beams, wires, and other things to navigate around, and by and large, it has come out very neatly. There are a few more bits to slot in, but that's waiting on the replacement jigsaw blades I bought this morning.

We had a local electrician in to lay cables for the sockets and light fittings, and those have been accommodated as well. The cables will disappear behind panelling of one kind or another when everything is finished. Once everything else is in place, the electrician will come back in to do the final fittings.

Since there's a support beam at ceiling level as well, the old opening for the fitted wardrobe is becoming the opening into the new space - a doorway without a door. This will become a feature, and I plan to put a nice timber step - only a centimetre or two high - in the opening to allow for the difference in floor levels.

We're also putting up a hardboard ceiling - this won't be the final surface; it's just to keep the insulation material at bay for now. It's about two-thirds in place, and is awaiting the jigsaw blades as well before it can be finished.

The next bit will be to put in the storage. There are various details to work around with this, as there were with the flooring; beams and access to the water tank being the main ones. Once I'm done with the floor and ceiling, I can start to measure and calculate how we can get the most storage out of the space that's there. Long drawers and pull-out rails will certainly feature. The spare mattresses, which were such a nuisance to get in and out before, are being disposed of; we got a chair-bed for the study downstairs, and we'll get an air mattress or two in case of extra need. Not having those will free up a lot of storage, and put less constraint on what we can do.

And when all of that is in place, we'll finish it out with tongue-and-groove panelling, as in the bathroom downstairs, and put something a bit nicer on the floor.

Wallpaper Stripping and Painting

We had tested a few strips of wallpaper in the kitchen; they came off pretty easily. This was a good thing, because the most recent layer of paper was a kind of salmon-pink with a smudgy, feathery pattern in vague, faint green and maybe some half-hearted blue. It was every bit as bad as that sounds, and the accents of a strip around the room at waist height - dark green in a sort of paisley pattern - didn't help. That came off easily, as we thought. But under it was a far more tenacious stuff; white with little blue flower-things in an offset geometric pattern. In larger patches, it gave me odd visual effects - I don't want to imagine what it looked like over the whole room. It had to go, but having been pasted directly onto the plasterboard, it was well stuck.

Eventually, we hired a steamer. Man, those things are genius. They're basically a big kettle with a hose attached, and on the end of the hose is a device that shoots out some steam and traps it against the wall. The wallpaper just peels right off, or at least can be scraped with relative ease - but you have to do it immediately, while it's still warm. So it's pretty much a one-man job, which was especially fun up above the kitchen cupboards, where the escaping steam gathered, and made my hair curl so much it got crunchy. That's a strange feeling. When we re-do the kitchen, we're putting in cupboards right to the ceiling there - the gap at the top is a waste of space, and I reckon it makes the ceiling seem lower, too. And we won't have to scramble up after that to paint the wall there, either.

So after all the paper was down, the room looked pretty awful. We promptly put on two coats of paint in a colour called 'Antique White', and things were vastly improved. Having done some rearranging of furniture, and pinned some game maps back to the wall, things looked considerably better in the same corner:

 

The real change, however, is in the light levels in the room. Even on a dull day, I now forget to put on the light, whereas before, it was necessary on a sunny day. 

The guy in the shop where we hired the steamer reckons we could get a second-hand one for about €120, so we'll be taking him up on that when we next go to remove wallpaper. We'll then have it for the other four or five rooms that need doing here, and can sell it on, or keep it to lend to people, and have it work out a lot better than renting at €25 a day - not that that's a bad rate.

We've still to do the painting on the woodwork there, and the old dresser you can partially see in the top photo is going to be painted as well. We're looking for a kind of eggshell blue for that - just on the blue side of light grey, I think. Pictures of the process will be posted!

IKEA Shelves & Consequences

It's been a busy couple of months indoors, and the place is still in a small degree of chaos. Over our years of renting, we'd built up a ramshackle collection of bookshelves; mostly flat-packs from Argos, with one or two more solid specimens. These moved with us, and most of them were in the sitting room - but they were beginning to bulge at the seams, sag in the shelves, and generally behave badly, as well as looking pretty awful.

So we did a trip to IKEA in Belfast, and bought a sofa, a reclining armchair, a kitchen table and four chairs, and no less than five sets of shelves; three wide and two narrow. These are IKEA's "Billy" range, and we bought height extenders for all of them, and a variety of glass doors - some full height, some half height, and small doors for all the height extensions. Having put them together over the course of two days, we now have a much better looking sitting room (or possibly library is a better term), and more storage space in there. We even managed to shelve our 1902 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  And a display cabinet that was stuck in a dark corner of the sitting room has now been moved to a much better place in the kitchen, displacing a cheap Argos drawer-and-shelf unit.

There's a slight problem, though, in that the old shelves were absolutely stuffed with goods, and having accomodated everything, there's some miscellaneous junk left over. Magazines, a few games (computer games are on CD or DVD, but usually come in a box as big as a trade paperback), and the category of stuff that can only be called oddments - ephemera from various events and museums, odd-shaped books, special edition DVD boxes, and so on. I'm responding to this by viciously culling the book collection; we have thousands, and some of them can go. The travel books got attacked last night, and anything older than about 2004 got boxed to go. That turned out to be about 70cm of shelf space in one swoop. Continuing that should clear a lot, and then the cleared books can go to a second-hand bookshop.

Then there are the shelves. The current spare room/study is about to become a pure study, as the not-quite-double bed gets chucked out. I'd love to hang on to the mattress for emergency guest accomodation, but realistically, it has to go. It hasn't gone, yet, though, so the future study is currently holding that, plus my desk, a chair, two sets of resident bookshelves, several as-yet unpacked boxes, and now three more sets of old shelves.  This weekend should hopefully see that gone. I reckon breaking up for firewood is the fate for two of those sets, and once the bed is out, one set may get a reprieve so that we can store some books in the study. That might even happen this weekend.

The main part of the study plan is to put a long desk under the window, which looks out onto the garden, and put the household's two large desktop machines there, along with space for my oversized laptop. And then the last set of 'liberated' shelves from the sitting room (currently stashed in the downstairs bathroom because there's simply nowhere else they'll fit) can go in the Lodger's room. And then the drawer and shelf unit can also be broken up, and will end up in the fire too.

So stuff has been shuffled around a lot, and we still have a degree of chaos, but we're making good progress toward being completely sorted - at least in the short term. 

Where To Paint First?

We've a decision to make, some time in the next few weeks, and that's what room we're going to paint first. We're not going to do anything fancy; just get the furniture away from the walls, strip the wallpaper (two layers in most places), and paint it plain white. Other colours, feature walls with wallpaper, and so on, will follow when we know what the light is like. At the moment, though the existing wallpaper is just not doing the place any favours.

The kitchen will be awkward to work on, and I think I'd really like to get another room done first. That would be the upstairs bedroom or the sitting room/library, really, and I'm leaning heavily toward the latter. Sure, there are lots of bookshelves in there, but the books are not in any real order at the moment, so taking them off the shelves and putting them back half-randomly won't do any harm. In the bedroom, there's less furniture to move, but we need to sleep in there, so I'd like to get it done in one day, if it were at all possible. And knowing if that's possible needs the practice of doing another room first.

I've never actually done wallpaper stripping before, though. I was considering the notion of just painting the wallpaper, but I'm told that the result is inevitably unpleasantly sagging wallpaper and uneven colour. So that's out.

Expect "before", "in progress" and "after" photographs when we get going.

Rainproof House

We had record breaking rain in Ireland yesterday, and I'm happy to note that effects on the house were minimal. The back door, which was facing directly into the oncoming rain, had some water creep in at the top, and even lodge on top of the door itself, but I'm putting that down to the sheer quantity, and the west wind driving it in. All the other windows, or at the least the ones that were closed, kept out the rain perfectly well, and the drains nearly coped. Given the volume, I think some overrun was allowable. I do need to get some sort of rain butt for the garden, though - it's a complete waste of water to have it run off into the local drainage system, and overburden the already swamped drains and sewers.

The rain itself was spectacular; a dense haze of water, thicker near the ground where raindrops were rebounding by about a metre off concrete and tarmac. We were just in the door of the local supermarket when it started, and even the roof there sprang a few leaks. Other people weren't so lucky, and I understand there's been plenty of flooding, with the M50, M3 and M1 hit badly.

House Pictures from Portugal

We're recently back from a short holiday in the Algarve, in Portugal. I spent a good bit of the time there, when I wasn't reading or zoning out, rubbernecking at the architecture and design. I was fascinated by the houses; all steps and softened corners and white and tiles. I think there must be a strong remnant of Moorish influences, because really, they're like nothing I've seen anywhere else in the West. Here are a few pictures, which I'm keeping for inspiration.

This one I like because of the sprawl of balconies and roofs and chimneys. Note also the solar panels - we saw a lot of those, often on houses that were quite old, and on modern apartments and the like as well. The level of greenery was unexpected - there had just been a three week spell of cloud and rain, and it showed.


These outside steps are typical of the houses - built as integrated parts of the structure, decorated with tiles and arches and small details of paintwork. All this is facing the Atlantic coast, and in the blazing sunshine, the white walls are almost blinding. My prescription sunglasses usually give a sepia tint to things in Ireland, but confronted with this light, all they could do was dull it enough to let me escape without a headache.


And this house was just over the hill from the hotel we were staying in. I love the combination of round and angular structures, the way in which it combines wall and roof and stairs to form one frontispiece, and the organic look of the whole thing. The picture doesn't quite do it justice, unfortunately, but as with many other buildings here, it was impossible to find a place from which you could take a single picture that showed the whole building - there were always details out of sight, or trees blocking the view. In some ways, that was part of the charm of the buildings; there were always new details to be found.

(All pictures by my wife, whose camera skills trump mine every time)

Kitchens

I've been poking across the web at various aspects of kitchens. There's a kitchen shelves post here by Holly of Haus Maus, which illustrates a concept she's looking at for her new kitchen in Germany.

There's also a set of scans of kitchens from an old issue of Marie Claire Maison from Automatism.

There are a few things in common between these - open storage being a big one. But I don't think it'd work for us; it's very easy for open shelved storage to get messy, and I suspect it means cleaning everything on a regular basis, even if it's just because of dust. I'd rather the dishes not get dusty.

There's also a lot of light in those designs, which is another argument for letting light in from the south side of the house to the kitchen. I expect the computer room door to be open a lot, which will let in some, but I'm going to have to look at the actual light fittings as well. The current ones are a set of three small directed shades, which aren't nearly bright enough as they are. I'm thinking spotlights pointed at the counter-tops and tables would be very useful.

Stairs

The way the front of the house is set up, the first thing you see stepping in the door is the stairs. That's all well and good, but it's rather dull, even with a set of bookshelves at the top.


Those bookshelves are now filled with books, of course - we've been moving books since we got the keys, since they're the largest single category of stuff we own. I've been looking for a few ideas on what we can do with the stairs. The first idea was from my wife, rather than me, and that was to put bookshelves up along the right-hand side. Busyboo has a very good example of staircase-with-bookshelves, (with a great idea about drawers in steps, too) but that's not going to work for us, at least not on both sides. And the staircase is already narrow, so shelves might reduce it too much. On the other hand, it'd look great, and it's not really a public-use staircase, being as the only room up there is the master bedroom. So as long as they were only one paperback deep, we might be ok.

There's plenty of advice out there as to what to do with the space under the stairs, but very little on what you can do with the stairs themselves. One of the long-term proposals is to put a porch on the front of the house, and remove the wall between the hall and sitting-room, and that would allow us to do a bit more with the steps themselves.

The stairs are carpetted at the minute. Ordinarily, I'm much more in favour of wooden steps, but in this case, they're quite steep, so the carpet allows a bit more grip for the feet. Finally, the dark wooden bannisters may need replacing with something a bit lighter in colour, or possibly even painting. I'm starting to be greatly in favour of painted wood; it reminds me of a lot of old country houses I saw as a kid.

Gervais Apartment

This practice of looking at design sites and magazines is actually changing the things I like. I've always gone, before, for darker colours, and Victorian/Edwardian looks. Now I find myself drifting toward lighter colours, Scandinavian lines, and an emphasis on natural light. This French apartment, for instance, looks fantastic, and I've spent some time trying to figure out what it is about it that appeals. The first three pictures on that article are the main attraction; the fourth less so. So it's definitely something to do with the light colours.

Second is the fact that none of it looks actually white. That seems to make a difference. There's a definite eclecticism about the furniture and wall items, which also appeals to me. And finally, you can see under a lot of the furniture, and while I wouldn't in a million years have thought of that as being an important aspect of room design, it definitely seems to be a common theme in these; it makes the rooms look a lot more open. Stuff to consider...

House on Arrival

So that was the garden. The house itself is in good repair, but we're going to have to redecorate. The existing wallpaper and colours aren't the kind of thing that would drive you completely insane, but they're not exactly us either - mostly fairly bland, and where there are stronger colours, they're not ones we'd choose.

This is the kitchen:


(Photography by Niall Murphy)

The house came with the white goods and some furniture - all three bedrooms have beds, there's a kitchen table and six chairs, a desk, some shelves and a dresser, and there's a three-piece suite in the sitting room. Of all of them except the bed in the master bedroom, it might truthfully be said that they've seen better days. Although I'm not entirely sure the couch and armchairs ever had good days; they're a style of hard, spindly wooden furniture with cushions, which I can't even pin on the taste of a given decade. The fifties, perhaps, although the house was only built in the seventies. I suspect they were brought in to have something in the house while it was up for sale, rather than having seen much real use.

It's a dormer bungalow, so there's only one room upstairs, and that's the master bedroom. It has an ensuite shower and loo, and there's access to the attic space as well - to the front and back of the bedroom, rather than above it.

We have plans for most of the rooms, short and long term, but these may well change as we get more ideas. Our short term plans go like this:

The sitting room will be becoming a library - we'll be putting shelves all along one of the long walls, and in the alcoves to either side of the fireplace, or possibly only one, because there's a display cabinet in the other, which we might keep. The fireplace itself may have to be replaced - the hearth is fine, and even has a boiler at the back, although we've yet to discover whether or not it's hooked up to anything. I can't imagine why anyone would disconnect it, but then again, people board up fireplaces these days. Nutters. We'll get at least a couch and an armchair in there. Possibly a three-seater sofa, a chaise-longue, and an armchair.

The kitchen will have to stay as it is for now, although getting a dishwasher in there will probably be a priority. I don't mind washing up - I do it in the morning, and find it meditative - but the other occupants of the house are in favour of the mechanical option. The table is big enough to play games at, which I approve of. We'll put our own dresser in here alongside the existing one, and we've added a microwave to the other goods there already. The door between the entrance hall and the kitchen may need to be replaced with a sliding door - it's rather in the way as it is.

Of the two back bedrooms, one will go to The Lodger, who has some crazy ideas about painting all the walls white, except for one which will have floor to ceiling blackboard paint. He's liable to change his mind, though. The other will become the War Room - containing enough desks to support the computer habits of three fairly technical people. It's on the south side of the house, so we'll actually see some natural light in there as well.

There's a bathroom downstairs, with a bath in. I don't think there are any plans to change anything in there in short term, beyond making the hotpress accessible for the cats.

Upstairs, the master bedroom will see some more furniture that we already own brought in - a big, old wardrobe, a dressing-table/chest of drawers affair, and a linen chest. This should realistically provide us with enough storage space. The floorboards on the window side of the room creak something awful, so I'm going to have to have a word with them in the reasonably near future. Again, there's not a huge amount that can be done with the ensuite in the short term.

The back door will need a cat-door put in. We might need to consider cat doors in some internal doors as well, but that will come as we get used to the layout of the place, and what doors need to be open. Outside, the shed that's not in the main part of the garden contains a freezer and a clothes dryer, and has enough room to do a fair bit of storage, or possibly be fitted with a bench and enough shelves to work as a small workshop for the moment. The other shed is really suitable only as a garden shed, although if it can be stabilised a bit, I'd consider a green-house lean-to on the south side of it.

Discussion of further plans will appear on a room by room basis, and probably spin off into wild fantasies more suitable for castle restoration than a seventies dormer bungalow.