Lounge Room & Dining Progress
The next room to paint after bedroom 2 was this one, we spent a fortune on tester pots, but finally got there in the end, I chose was a Dulux colour, half strength Powdered Gum. I decided that this colour would be for all the main areas, kitchen, hallway, bathroom and laundry as well as the lounge area. It was a bit of a risk as my husband is quite adverse to green, but I think I have converted him. It is such a fresh relaxing colour and has inspired many guests to ask after it as they wish to use the colour in their home!
This room was the first areas to get the flooring down, we had to do this as the kitchen could not be fitted before flooring was finished.
This was a huge process, there was carpet in this room that had been glued down on top of varnished cork flooring. We already had the edges of the carpet up to allow the painting to happen but the rest not needed to come up. The floor was covered in the glue which could not be sanded off, we had to scrape most of it off by hand. It was such hard work and my hands were so sore, they became so swollen they almost doubled in size!
It took us a very long time to plan the floor out. We needed to do it so that we didn't end up with and cuts that would be too small to do or too difficult. After much deliberation it was decided that we would start from the beam and get two rows stuck down through the centre of the room. as it would be easier to cut the corners off four planks that to reach the beam and have to do a u-shape. There is no skiting board in this cottage and although we could have used quadrant we didn't really want to as that would be annoying to paint. We instead opted to make really good cuts!
As the whole cottage was having the same flooring and it all on one level we also needed to decide how we were going to deal with doorways. The planks would not be running the same was in all areas due to the sizes of the room, we decided that we would cut a piece to fit between each door way as that solved our problems and finished it off nicely
The flooring is loose lay vinyl planks, however, after taking advice from the supplier we decided to glue it down. The boxes of planks are very heavy so served really well at applying pressure whilst the glue dried enough to grab.
We were getting pretty good at our cuts!
After the floor was down we covered it in cardboard whilst the kitchen was being built, once the kitchen was in I worked on the beam. My husband had already sanded it, I really do not like sanding! I used a stained wax and a little buffer to added an oak stain. It still came out more yellow than I would have liked, but I was not doing it again. It was hard to do as I had to be careful not to get it on the ceiling. I developed a ceiling protector using plastic binding sheets and masking tape - it was not a fun process! We ran out of time to give all the other beams the same treatment, so that is a job that remains on out 'to do' list. The post and the left side of the beam have been stained at this stage.
We then fitted the blinds to this room as we were getting tired of tipping over the boxes they were in!
All that was left in his room was to finish the fireplace and add the furniture. I had hoped to make a new fireplace out of oak, but we ran out of time, all I was able to do was paint the original one white.
