Project Payne: Finished living room and kitchen – a huge difference on a landlords budget

I’m so behind with my property renovation blogs!! Getting a shimmy on the Photoshopping / blogging front by finishing off showing you Project Payne, an apartment we renovated in record time and now have rented out, so then I can get onto Projects Pizza, J and Tofu! Never mind Project Tosca which is motoring on already *wipes brow*

The main challenge in this apartment, apart from it’s dark 80’s dullness, was the fact that a poorly positioned stud wall separated the grotty narrow kitchen and over-sized entrance hall from the living room, shown above in the rough sketch plan. The pink lines show where the kitchen used to be on the top right, and the entrance hall is the area on bottom right. I decided to take down the stud wall which went all the way the ceiling, opening up the kitchen to the living area, and re-studing a smaller entrance hallway with a lowered ceiling to allow the new tenant storage space on top of the newly created space. This would also make the room feel bigger as visually you’d see the coving running all the way round the room, plus I wanted the chimney opening up, thermal plasterboard on all the walls to reduce any heat loss and the picture rail keeping. Easy!

We got stuck into ripping everything out: the broken furniture & grotty carpets, the wood chip wall paper with accompanying long-ago-powdered plaster and manky curtains all got piled up waiting for the skip to arrive….

The aforementioned stud walls were taken down making the room easier to measure and replan (though I already knew what I wanted to do!). Bizarre how the previous builders had just studded over the picture rail and over the coving to create the hallway, it was such a rough and badly designed job. It was the kitchen which once had the chicken fire, hardly surprising the previous tenant didn’t want to go into it really.

The entrance lobby into the flat was made smaller to allow for the bigger kitchen and increase the space in the living room, you can see the old stud wall line on the coving to the left of the pink plasterwork below. It doesn’t look like much but meant the small kitchen could have an extra 600mm of work top and a washing machine, that all the coving was exposed making the room feel bigger and that the tenant can throw suitcases etc up on top of the new mini-room.

The old plaster literally fell of the walls, mostly consisting of soil from the foundations I suspect 😉 I spec’d the internal wall to the right to be thermal boarded too, to give some sound protection from the communal entrance hallway. It makes a HUGE difference and I think is worth the extra spend.

So does it look different? You betcha it does and all with my rental landlord’s budget head on!

The walls are all plastered and painted Vanilla White, the oak floor is down, the B&Q cream polished porcelain tiles are laid in the kitchen area, the Topps Tiles cream metro tiles used as an upstand, the Ikea Stat & Lidingo kitchen with Duropal Oak worktop is fitted and the chandelier is sparkling. Just a slight improvement 😉