DIY

Five years and what do we have to show for it?

April 13, 2023 by Penny Leave a Comment

Oh how I just laughed looking back at some old posts on this blog.

Just over five years ago we moved into our new house. I know clearly that that is how long it is as we’ve just been through the whole painful process of re-mortgaging as our initial (incredibly low) fixed rate period has come to an end. Needless to say that our monthly repayments have gone up. As have everyone else’s.

Nearly four years ago I looked back at how much we’d achieved in our first year of living here and (validly) pointed out that we hadn’t really done all that much as we’d had a baby in that time. A few days later and a burst of enthusiasm had me writing about our unplanned renovation of the downstairs loo, although it seems I never actually got round to showing you the final result. A shame, because we did indeed finish that particular project and it still looks pretty good.

Then we moved into 2020 and we all know what happened next… The blog posts about progress dried up and so did everyone’s social lives.

A two year old child sat on the floor of a newly decorated bedroom looking at books. The carpet on the floor looks very new and on the grey wall is a sticker picture of a large tree with colourful leaves and moneys and owls in it.

Some things have progressed though – albeit slowly. The youngest finally moved out of our bedroom and into the box room – which we redecorated for her during lockdown conditions. The eldest moved downstairs into the room that my step-daughter had previously used and there was a Harry Potter makeover that included having to source pretty much everything online and making great use of the then newly set up street WhatsApp group to borrow practical things like a pasting table. The living room has been re-jigged and now works so much better for us as a family, but there are plenty of finishing touches in there that still need to happen.

All this has been done on a pretty tight budget with lots of learning new skills. YouTube and the DIY bible my late father recommended dad years ago have both been worth their weight in gold!

The years have also seen us become regular customers of a local roofing company – ironic when you consider that the roof was pretty much the only thing flagged as “green” in the survey we had done when we bought the house. Apart from that, and having to install a new loo when the old one suddenly cracked in two and started leaking(!), the only other thing we’ve paid anyone external to do is fit a carpet. But even then as it was an offcut being used to carpet a box room it only cost me a total of £100 and was another complete bargain.

Other things have stayed the same though. We’re still cooking meals on the “interim” gas cooker that we installed when we moved in. We always said that we’d get the kitchen done soon as we needed a bigger oven and the existing space only gave us 55cm to fit on into. Needless to say I’m still putting in oven trays at an angle to cook a Sunday roast as they’re too wide for the oven otherwise. Roast potatoes cooked “on the wonk” is now a bit of a speciality of mine. My son also still has the thin and sun-bleached carpet in his room that made the removal men laugh when they first saw it. Sorting out his bedroom is still high on the never ending to do list.

As we came to remortgage we knew that despite the new baby and global pandemic excuses our progress on the house has been pretty pathetic really. That’s why we’ve declared 2023 the year of “making things happen” when it comes to the house. I’m pleased to say that we’ve started as we mean to go on with huge steps already taken to make the main family bathroom more usable and at present the whole family is enjoying the benefits of finally having a decent shower, rather than just a pathetic dribble!

What I need to do now though is get back to actually recording what we’re up to in the hope that doing so will help us see how far we’ve come and encourage us to keep pushing it all further. It feels a bit like we’ve failed over the last five years in really turning this house into a home, and I’m determined to use this year to turn that around.

Standby for a series of updates and progress stories!

You were only supposed to change the bl**dy taps! Downstairs toilet DIY project

August 18, 2019 by Penny Leave a Comment

A couple of days back I wrote about what we had, or hadn’t, achieved since moving into our new home about 17 month ago. As someone who has blogged for years I’ve learnt that one of the most valuable things about blogging is being able to look back and see what you have achieved over time, and how you did it. It’s a lovely thing to do when you write about your kids but also when you write about projects in the home too.

When I first set up Penny Blogs that was my aim. I wanted to record what we did with our new home and show how far we’d come. Then a week before completing I found out I was pregnant, and unsurprisingly there have been more posts on here about pregnancy than anything else!

That’s going to change though.

I know I needed a kick start, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen in the way it did. I’d taken Tube Stop Baby out for lunch with a friend (never too young for her to start life as a lady who lunches!) and left Bonn at home where he’d promised to finally change a couple of taps that were so old they’d seized up. Later on in the day we exchanged a few text messages and I asked how things were going at home. He mentioned that the upstairs bathroom taps had been changed. Then he said: “Well, I’ve broken the downstair sink, but that’s a different story”.

It turns out that in trying to get one of the old taps off the sink he’d had a bit of a struggle as it simply wouldn’t budge. The tap won that particular struggle though and the result was a nice crack in the sink that wasn’t going to get any smaller.

We’d always said that the downstairs loo needed a bit of a makeover. I just wasn’t expecting to start it so soon.

To me it made no sense at all just changing the sink when it was the perfect opportunity to get rid of the old tiles that were behind it, and also freshen up the whole room and get rid of the smelly carpet that was in there. I didn’t see the point in changing the toilet itself as that seems to work perfectly well, but it’s the only thing in the room that is staying put.

It’s only a small room with the loo and sink at opposite ends and a small window over the sink. It had ended up being a bit of a display space though for the various bits of train memorabilia that we’ve collected, and some well positioned shelves over the loo make a great place for storing board games too!

Design isn’t really my thing. I know what I like and what I don’t like and those are really the two “design principles” that I work from. We both wanted a vanity unit style basin, so that we could make use of the storage below it for things like cleaning products etc that can then be kept out of the children’s way. Trying to replace the old pedestal sink with one of those though means quite a bit of other work first. The project manager in me loves a bit of planning though.

The stages involved are as follows:

Remove old sink
Remove wall paper (easier said than done!)
Sand walls and fill cracks and holes
Put up lining paper on the bits of wall that can’t be saved with filler alone!
Two coats of primer on walls
One/two coats of paint
Tile wall where sink will go and window sill above it (oh how easy that sounds!)
Put down new flooring
Assemble vanity unit
Plumb in new sink (easy I’m sure!)
Put shelves back up, put board games on them and then put pictures up
Think about finally getting some sort of blind for the window

Maybe a weekend project when you look at that list?

Well – as I sit here at 11pm on Sunday night I can proudly tell you that we got as far as two coats of primer on the walls!

Firstly, the old sink didn’t want to budge at all. Everything we read in books or online about how pedestal sinks were attached to the wall was completely wrong in this case. Instead of any screws holding it to the wall the basin was instead attached to the pedestal by a bolt, but one that we could only see if we had a camera at a weird angle and took a photo looking up. In the end it was brute force that helped us get it out off the room.

Getting the old wall paper off also took forever as we basically had to scrape it all off by hand. The top layer separated from the base easily enough, but the latter was held firm to the walls, even after we think about 40 years. When we got it off, there were a couple of bits of wall where there were so many holes that we knew that filler alone wasn’t going to do the trick, so instead we opted for putting up some lining paper which we then planned to paint over. The first coat of primer showed where the walls still had loads of problems and imperfections so we also ended up with a huge amount of filling between the two coats.

Neither of us had hung wallpaper before, so that was another learning curve. My rock n roll Friday evening was basically spent learning all about lining paper, and it’s amazing how excited you can get about a helpful article online. Thanks B&Q.

The actual hanging the paper was no where near as complicated as trying to get the wallpaper paste right when you’re trying to only make a small portion of it rather than a whole bucket’s worth!

There’s no grand reveal in this blog post, simply because there is nothing to reveal as yet. But in terms of achievements for a weekend, I think we should be pretty proud of how much we’ve done. Especially with a 9 month old baby who only naps for about 30 minutes a day to look after! The challenge now is going to be getting it finished though. Finger’s crossed we can keep the momentum going and show you the finished room soon.

A year in our new home – what do we have to show for it?

August 16, 2019 by Penny Leave a Comment

This is the blog post that I should have written back in March. That’s when we marked a year of living in our new family home. The home that I had huge plans for. I think the reason I’ve been putting off the blog post though is that we’ve not managed to achieve anywhere near as much as I’d hoped to have done. Or expected to have done.

In fairness to myself, it’s not like I’ve had a year just sat doing nothing. Tube Stop Baby joined the family in November, and it goes without saying that a new baby (as well as juggling two other children) takes up rather a lot of my waking hours. And without many sleeping hours it means that many of those waking hours are spent trying to get as much caffeine into my system as possible!

As I look back though I can’t deny that I’m a bit disappointed that we haven’t done more. We’ve had to have the roof repaired – a hole in the garage roof and then a gutter blowing down revealed rotten felt under the main roof that also needed dealing with. The other big job has been getting new double glazing, which was something that we knew we needed when we first bought the house as many units were blown and you couldn’t even see out of our bedroom window properly. That’s made the house look far better from the kerbside, but there’s still so much more to do and other things that look bad. Especially inside.

We’ve only managed to paint one room so far, and that still hasn’t been finished and was just the porch! A bit pathetic really.

And then there’s the garden. I’m not even sure where to start with that. Possibly with a chainsaw – but that’s another story.

We need to save up to extend the house too, as at the moment TSB doesn’t even have her own bedroom and it looks like sharing with one of the others isn’t going to be an option for a variety of reasons. That’s going to take some time and means I need to concentrate on work a fair bit to do so.

This week efforts to finally change some taps (again something that we had been meaning to do since we moved in!) has resulted in a cracked sink and the need to replace the sink before we end up with a bigger problem that needs solving. Hence spending most of yesterday wandering round B&Q and suddenly having to choose new tiles for the downstairs loo. It’s given me the kick start I need though. I need to put my stamp on this house and make all those changes that I’ve had in my head for ages.

There are many jobs around the house that scare me, but I’ve been and bought myself a new copy of the book that my dad always referred to as the DIY bible (this book if you’re wondering – worth every penny, althoughI actually found a copy for 50p in a charity shop!) and I’m determined to show that this girl can. Let’s get this house sorted!

Any tips to good online DIY resources very gratefully received.

Photo by Taelynn Christopher on Unsplash, quite simply because there is absolutely nothing here worth photographing yet!