Moregeous Monday Moments

Despite what life may throw, it’s always best to react like Rocky. A short growl, then quickly find a shaft of sunlight, a lump of wood to rest on and bed in for forty winks. My world has been a tad challenging this last few weeks but an enormous amount of positivity has come out of it, with job offers, amazing support from people I respect, a brilliant reaction to the Beeb show we filmed earlier this year and a surge of activity here at Moregeous Mansions.

Some of you have asked if Getting The Builders In is getting a second series and I have absolutely no idea. Ours is not to reason why, just to enjoy the experience, but you’ll be the first to know if it does. People seemed to warm to all the fab builders we worked with so who knows eh!

Whilst we wait to see whether we might be telly bound again for 2018, we’ve cracked on with lots of hard work here at home. Nothing’s straightforward here as you well know, nothing so simple as a quick day’s work laying a carpet or getting a team in to turn stuff around fast. Maybe I’ll ask Santa for a crack squad of burly builders in my Christmas stocking, hmmmm, there’s an idea.We’ve trimmed and glued down all the giant parquet, made from our original floorboards cut down to regimented sizes. They all look different because they come from different rooms around the house and some are reversed to get a darker feel. That eclectic shadowing is totally deliberate. It now runs through from the living room into the newly emerging dining room, newly emerging as I’ve refused point blank to eat my festive lunch on my knee this year. I felt shame last year with Queenie eyeing my from the telly with my TV dinner, it really won’t do this year.

Where that mirror above is leaning will be where we’re building fixed in seating and there’s going to be cabinets fixed to the plywood wall above. At the start of last week the big chimney breast was bare plaster with boxes of tiles sitting in it patiently waiting to be opened, but by Friday…. ta daaaaaa!! I’d tiled it all 🙂
Bloody nora, his fingers nearly froze off doing 100 wet mitred cuts outside in the garden as the temperatures plummeted. My hero. For those of you thinking of tiling in your own renovations I’m doing a post on mitred cuts, which are so much more professional than flat just for edging, and mean you don’t have to use the dreaded metallic edging strips. They’re ok in bathrooms but a bit naff anywhere else really, and cheapen the whole look, especially if you;re using expensive tiles or going for a heritage look.

Tip from me: Use the best adhesive you can afford. My absolute go-to is more costly than the regular trade bags of adhesive however in the whole scheme of a reno, plus being in mind the advantages of using it, it’s a no brainer. Check it out HERE.

The next job is plastering the room. No we’re not doing this. No way. There are limits to a DIYer’s talents you know. Can you skim a room? Exactly.
Nope, the boys are booked for the end of this week so we’re frantically boxing off, wrapping soil pipes from the bathroom above, running new lighting cable and sound-boarding the party wall ready for the wet work to begin. I know it’s backwards to have done the floor first however we can cover it up and now all the piles of timber are out of the way and it’s one less massive job to do post-skimming.

Just to further complicate matters and make my brain explode, I decided to carry the lushtastic wallpaper in the Moregeous living room round onto another wall. It’s an investment paper, i.e. not £20 a roll, so this was a decision not taken lightly as there’s still so much to do. In for a penny, in for a pound though right? Feature walls are so last year, it’s all about maximalism. That’s what I told him. Several times. Persuasively.

However because we’ve high ceilings, another single roll still wouldn’t be quite enough to come round to the new opening the dining room, so I had to get smart…

Transitioning one material, pattern or finish into another is playing a big part of the design here, and you can see above how I’ve left the the old damp, damaged section of the original cornice unpainted and beautiful in it’s rawness. Where the green painted section meets this eclectically patterned area, I’ve dropped the wallpaper away, almost pixellating it.

What this gives is the effect of the wallpaper transitioning into the white wall, which is staying white and then shoots off the the left around the other section of the living room. Obviously this image above is part way through and there’s now another two drops next to the vertical drop of the paper shown. What it also meant was that less paper was needed, thus allowing me to get away with one roll – two birds one stone, result 🙂

What I can’t get away with is not doing anything about the absolute crap job done to the large span of guttering across the front of the new extension. Over the last two years since it was formed (not by us), the plywood (terrible choice of material) has decayed both from weathering and the never properly sealed gutter (grrrrr). We’re taking it all down and I’m playing with a couple of different choices as to what to replace it with. One is a grey RAL 7016 powder coated steel to match the dormers and the other is a product by Millboard which looks exactly like wood but doesn’t rot, because it’s composite. I could also use this to clad some of the vertical brick pillars and make some planters for exactly the same practical reasons. Can you tell I’m kinda leaning to the latter? Watch this space.