Monday, December 21, 2009

Kitchen Update 2.

We've finally gotten quite a bit done on the kitchen. We painted it this weekend and started putting everything back, we still have curtains we need to put up along with some other stuff on the walls. It's amazing, the change in the room from the 12 layers of wallpaper from before. If you scroll down to previous entries, you can see a floorplan of the room. This is where the sitting room was. Our sitting room is now the room marked "bedroom" on the first floor, towards the front of the house. (Not the one in the back.) Oh yeah, we also have to get skirting boards put in, and the trim around the top of the walls. We're going to be replacing the floor though, so we'll wait to do that!

Anyhow, here are photos of the new kitchen. There is no sink in the kitchen, as it is still in the small scullery area (see other pics below), which is basically just around the corner from this room...


 

 
 
 
 
 

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Kitchen Update.

We've moved on from the tv room into the kitchen, where a couple weeks ago Ray and I tore out 12 layers of wallpaper off the walls! To understand the 12 layers, you have to understand the history of the house. Ray's mother spent the last 15 years, I'm not really certain of the timeframe, caring for her ill husband and mother-in-law. Without any outside help she'd spend an evening after they'd fallen asleep wallpapering as quickly as she could just to have a change of scenery or a fresh look in the kitchen, which was the main gathering area of the house. So, as you can imagine, there wasn't much time to worry about stripping paper, or in some corners, even pulling china cabinets out. So, where in some places there were 8 layers of paper, in other places, maybe there were just 5.

So, we've torn down the wallpaper and are left with bare walls, which we're going to waterproof and drywall, and hopefully never paste another strip of wallpaper to again! Unfortunately, it'll be a couple of weeks until we get that far. But in the meantime we've bought a new fridge which was delivered yesterday. We probably needed it more than anything else in the entire house, as the old one didn't have any doors which were actually attached to it. They would fall off if you opened them carelessly.

With all that said, I leave you with photos!









Thursday, September 17, 2009

Tv Room- Done!

Here are photos of the new tv room. It's pretty much done, but the curtains aren't the ones we've put up because they needed about 3 feet taken off them. To see the before photos, look at my last blog entry.









Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Deep Purple.

We have a small, empty room in the house that we're turning into a cozy family room. Yesterday Ray and I painted it, and next week we're spending a day at IKEA to buy everything we'll need to furnish the room. I don't have good pics, as I just used the iPhone (yeah, I really need to start using the proper digital camera, I know!). Here's what I have though. It turned out fabulous! We're totally in love with it, and totally proud! I can't wait to get the furniture in, can't wait to hang out in it, less than a month to go till we move.








Tuesday, July 21, 2009

As It Looks Now

These are 2 pics of the house as it is now, yes I did this in The Sims 3. It's not completely to scale, if anything the house is a tiny bit larger than I did it in the game, and there are some details and corners and stuff that I didn't include because I couldn't get them to scale properly. Also, I don't have the staircase in it, because it wouldn't scale properly either, but here's a rough idea of how the house looks now. You can click on each picture to make it larger.

When we're done, we hope to have 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms (which we already have, but the one upstairs will be moved completely and larger as well hopefully!), a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, and a study.





Monday, July 20, 2009

The Scullery Redone.

I don't have really good photos of the scullery because the light wasn't that great, and I was using the iphone instead of a regular digital camera. Ray did a fabulous job plastering and painting, and I chose colors and together we bought a few necessary kitchen accessories. Here are before and after photos. The wall to the right will eventually be torn down to make a larger room, and the kitchen will be in another area of the house altogether, with much more space, but this was a temporary fix.



Saturday, July 18, 2009

The First Post.

Ray and I are at the house for the weekend, Rita and I are cleaning out bedrooms and Ray has a hell of a job on his hands, plastering walls in the scullery before he paints. It looks horrible in there, but they've stripped down 50 years of wallpaper and dirt. We're learning that a bit of putty probably isn't going to do the job, but mind you this IS our first home improvement project EVAH and we have a lot to learn! We really need to just redo the entire walls with plasterboard, but we're not wanting to spend a lot of money on the scullery since we're going to tear out the big wall between that room and the downstairs bedroom within the next few months. So for now, it just gets a paint job, even if it is going to turn out ugly. But there's ugly, and there's not as ugly, so it's a step in the right direction.

Here are some photos of outside, the surrounding neighborhood, and the scullery while Ray is working on it. The house is going to be twice the size it is now when we're finished.












Recently my boyfriend, Ray, inherited a small house in his hometown, Clara, Co. Offaly, Ireland. It's nearly 80 years old, it's full of tiny rooms, and needs a lot of work, but we love making plans, changing them, getting frustrated, agreeing on something, disagreeing, changing our minds again, settling on an idea, and then finding out we've planned for the impossible. The idea is to nearly double the size, redo just about everything, and end up with a place to call home, where we'll be able to raise a family and spend our lives together. This is just the beginning of a long road, and this blog is where we'll document the process.