Sunday 24 April 2016

Our first try at wallpapering x

Hi guys,

It seems as if it was 5 seconds ago I was writing my last blog post, and already it is the end of April already, how soon has that come around?

For those that follow our progress on facebook you will know that we are ALWAYS doing something, usually every weekend is taken up doing something or other, however when finally sitting down to write this blog i'm as a loss about what to write about!

I guess the bigist thing that we are currently planning (by planing i mean saving money big style) is our kitchen. I will write another blog post about that soon, but all I will say is that it isnt what you would think that mark and I would get. we have spent 5 weekends now getting quotes from different places, we have gone to wren, magnet, b and q, wicks, and finally howdens. The howdens quote has been the hardiest to get as we have to go through our builder garry, but they have come up quite alot cheaper. We are just waiting (patently...ok mark is waiting nicely me not so) for his quote to come up for the fitting of the kitchen and all of the other jobs involved in it. But I finally know everything that we want so that is half the challenge.


So today I wanted to share a few shots of our lounge that I have taken over the last month or so. Its not completely finished yet, but mark and I had a go at wallpapering. Okok...it was more mark than me, but I did help, and considering he had done it for the first time I think he did pretty fab.

As it was our first time I decided to use quite a cheap paper (because I have huge structural plans for in here in 2017) but one thing at a time.

The paper was from B an M and is a mix of tropical leaves and colorful flowers which I love, there are pink flowers and teal butterfly's on it which pick up the teal from the sofa and the pink of the curtains. (please ignore the floral canvas I have removed it now, it didn't relay go)







 I also found something to put the TV into, but i need to find a way of covering up the glass doors.

And finally I covered my radiator cover with marble sticky paper (Fabilon)

I hope you guys are all having fun now the weather has started to pick up, like I say we have so many plans over the summer with family and friends aswell as at home. I have my birthday in june aswell as the birth of my second nephew,, we have our holiday in greece planned in july and who knows when the kitchen works will begin!

Love to all our family and friends
Hayley and Mark xxx


Wednesday 17 February 2016

Another reason I have the best husband ever!

Hi guys,

Todays post is so exciting. We have been upto to much in our lovely house, and once I have a nice light day to take some pictures and finished the final touches I will certainly be posting them here. Since Christmas we have done so much including painting our huge lounge, dining room, and all of the wood paneling. We had our kitchen plastered (if you follow me on facebook you will know we had a cowboy builder) so we had it plastered twice and a new boxing added to our ugly boiler, We also just last week had a lovely walk in wardrobe added to our bedroom. All of which I will be showing you soon.

For today though, The praise goes to my lovely husband...you might know him, its my best friend and partner in crime mark. (cant find a pic of him on his own lol)

In our old house we had somebody come and fit the flooring. It looked very tricky and we didnt think we could do it - We had more spare cash then and we could justify getting somebody in when we were at work all day. We were also only paid the floor guy £60 ish to do one room. When getting quotes to do our hallway we were getting quotes of like £180 onwards to lay some floor in our hallway. It just seemed so expensive for such a small space, But I guess you are paying for somebody's time, and there are quite alot of angles etc, and I am cheap!

Anyway after weeks of not doing it (we kept putting it off), mark one day decided to borrow my mums jigsaw (thanks mum) and do it himself. He did such a good job, and considering neither of us knew what we were doing I think it was a a huge success!

Before: I know what your thinking, the tiles look nice, But they were cold, dirty and weren't in looking for the look I want, So we covered them with some good underlay.



After:




The floor is affrican wallnut and is from wicks. Question, Should I paint the kitchen door?





A few weeks after we moved my mum put us the striped wallpaper up, As I got it for 50p each from a car boot last year,it was only meant to be a temp thing until I found something else I liked (it is one of those walls which needs paper lol) I have now found some lovely yellow floral paper so watch this space for the hallway makeover part 2! And then 3 when I can actually afford a new front door!


I still haven't decided on what do decorate the space with just yet, The blue canvas has already changed to some of our photography of our lovely sea views, I am relay into feng shui at the moment and were you can see the table is my wealth area, so I am trying to increase it by having some lovely flowers, a blue vase and my favorite quote in gold, which is 'A miracle is something that seems impossible that happens anyway'

we have also added marks interesting 50p collection - Because we are cool like that!




 Thank you all for reading.

Hayley and mark xx

Thursday 26 November 2015

Our Bathroom reveal x

Hi guys today I wanted to show you the first major project that we undertook when we first moved into our new home.

One of the reasons we chose the house was because of space, our previous home (yes yes I know we made it so so lovely) we loved, but one of the reasons we decided to sell up (apart from that we wanted to live closer to family and to a more lively a town, well more than stoke town anyway) was because we longed so much for a nice upstairs bathroom. Its been so long since I had a bathroom on the same level as the bedroom. When we saw the house the bathroom did not seem that bad, I could see potential with the rest of the house, and I honestly thought I could live with the set up we had for a good year. Here are the pictures in the advert before we came to see the house:


As you can see, when we saw the word en suite we were like 'oooh fancy' however, the more acurite disruption should have been: a narrow sliver of bathroom with a wobbly loo, freezing bathroom and shower were the curtain sticks to you - No I am not exaggerating! Basically, the previous owners had divided half of the bathroom into half an en suite, and half a cave like bathroom with no window, a over bath shower , sink and loo. both bathrooms had what only can be described as VILE VILE VILE chintzy cornice which we are slowly but surly wining the war on, the whole of the extension part of the house was covered in it, it hurts my eyes and offends me! 

As you can see I had to do something - anything! to make it feel better. So I painted it, and it did look better:




,but still I woke up every day hating the house, Showered without feeling clean etc. So 4 weeks after moving in I posted an add on my builder, I wanted to see how much the quotes were to have it done in the new year, that was the plan honestly! I knew roughly what I wanted in my head, mark ever the sensible one agreed, (he trusts in my vision) I also knew what I wanted In the bathroom as 10 weeks before the move date I got this:





A brand new roll top bath still boxed, I won it on ebay for £100, the RRP is £850 so I was very happy with it, but it meant that we had to find a place to put it while we were packing up and waiting for the sale to go through. It ended up siting in our dining room and became a mini playpen/pallpool for the 2 most favorite people in the whole wide world (apart from mark) Layla and hayden. 

Anyway, being new to renovations I expected the quotes to be alot more than they were, Mark and I talked and we decided to go for it, Financially it would be a stretch and every penny would count, but the bathroom fitter was a nice guy and he seemed to get my vision, I found that all of the others tried to curb my enthusiasm, tell me how I wanted my bathroom to look, but Sam had worked on quite alot of bathrooms and mainly high end ones, which was fab, He helped me plan the bathroom of my dreams and didn't pull that sucking in of air pinched look when I asked for the most difficult of things such as alcoves for my shampoo and loo. The project was to take 2 weeks, Wed have a loo, but would need to shower at mums and use the kitchen sink for teeth etc.

Anyway - Day one of the reno and this is how it looked once the wall was down and tiles down:









On day 2 - I get a call. The call was basically to come straight home! I got home to find some of the ceiling on the floor and a very very dusty bathroom fitter. Basically when removing the wall and ceiling, the ceiling had fallen in on him - to expose this:







Scary huh? I know, the last thing you want to see are mental joists sticking out of your wall. Immediately you begin to panic! Especially when you call a builder and he tells you that you need a new roof which will cost 70k I was almost sick! We didn't know what to do, nor did I know who to turn to for advice, Google provided no help, it either said we would be ok and this is normal, or that we needed a new roof. By mid week Sam agreed to give us a week to get some advice before we went any further. In that week we sort the advice from 4 structural engineers, 3 roofers and one construction manager. They all basically said similar things. That it looked a lot worse than it was. You see our cherished terrace is half a Victorian house (the house was a huge Victorian house split in half in the 50s to make 2 houses, and half an extension built in the 50s part of the charm of this house was the fact that it is topsy turvy. 

The advice we had was that the concrete looked as if it had been chipped away to make the ceiling more flat and that the joists were snapping because the bath was directly underneath, We also had a test done to measure the moisture in the concrete and it was all fine. we also discovered that the fan in the bathroom wasn't even working as it was stuck behind a soil pipe. Long story short but we added a vapor sheet, replaced the wooden beams, plaster, and used a good kitchen and bathroom paint. We also decided to address the broken extractor situation and replace the soil pipe aswell. 

Here is the ceiling once we had the LED spotlights put in:



Now we are a week into the build and we should have been putting tiles onto the walls, but instead we were just now boarding it out. We also didn't get started till mid week because Sam had asked us permission to go on another job while we were sorting the roof out. 

But once he started Oh my did he start, It took a while due the boxing I insisted on.






Then it was down to tiles, we were still unsure weather to go floor to ceiling all the way around, in the end cost decided for us, we just didn't have £700 extra for the rest of the room. The tiles we chose were a grey porcelain tiles we managed to get from a tops tiles clearance store in Tunstall, the tiles were the first ones i saw, and after 9 tile shops I went back to my original choice. (sorry mark) we chose smoked Steele grey grout to go with it.


With it being porcelain Sam needed a better tile cutter than he had for the job, so he got his tiler friend to help, most of the tiling was done while we were in gran canaria for a week. When home It should have been done, However Victoria plumb for the second time had sent us faulty equipment and it took 5 days to get it all swapped, This is week 6. 

Almost there!

By the end of week 6 it was finished yay. 


I wanted the bathroom to feel bright and light and modern but still reflect that fact that most of the house is Victorian. I also wanted to add a touch of luxury by adding a waterfall tap, rain shower, and a square toilet. Id also pined loads of bathrooms with alcoves on my pinintrest wall so I wanted to try and incorporate it if i could.



Our lovely tiler guy also showed us a pic of a very posh bathroom hed done in a posh cheshire town, they had used beveled granite to finish off the alcoves.

We chose quarts! we had them cut and beveled at a kitchen counter shop in Winsford and it costed £120 which I felt added the glamour and luxury that the room needed aswell as showing off my favorite feature in the room.  At some point we are going to add a huge custom made mirror here.



We set on priming, then painting it purple - only for my to bottle out at last second and go for gray, Then on a visit to b an q coming across this lovely shade of purple for £3, I had to do it! 

So here you are guys, the finished article, 6 weeks of no home shower, holes in the floors, wall and ceiling and a few sleepless nights.







There are a few things that we still need to do, like buy a bathroom cabinet and sort the door out (its so old and I cant find a replacement so it might need restoring or dipping) and add some more wallart for over the bath, I am also considering buying some sort of wire wall basket type thing. But once I have added the final touches I will post a source list perhaps. 

Anyway guys I hope you like our new bathroom, We are so happy with it. It was hard work, not physically but emotionally. We did spend a little more than we wanted but thanks to mark and his trusted spread sheet (I will never mock them again) we managed to not go way over cost, and by sourcing things from tile clearance shops, Ebay and sales we saved a fair bit aswell. 

Thank you to everybody that helped with the bathroom, And for my mum who let us shower at hers for 6 whole weeks! And if you have also gotten to the end of this blog, Thank you aswell! 

Love Hayley and Mark x

Wednesday 18 November 2015

Hello guys

Hi guys, how are you all? Welcome to our little blog.

I have decided to write this blog for a few reasons, But mainly so that our family and friends can see all of the exciting things that we have been upto in our home, As many of you live far and wide, this way you can follow our journey of our house renovation.

I have also decided to start this so I can mark the progress we have made, Sometimes you forget where you started and how far you have come. Don't expect posts daily or sometimes even weekly, we are just runing this along side our every day lives, updating when we can.

The pictures will not be perfect, My awful spelling will not be perfect, but what is perfect is the lovely home we are building together with every blob of paint and bang of a nail.

Welcome to the mad house x

I hope that all of our family and friends will enjoy following our blog as much as we enjoy writing it x

Lotts of love

Hayley and mark
 xxxxxxxx