Fireplace Progress

Easter was a washout projects wise as we both went down with some flu like illness that we are only just recovering from. However there has been progress on the house since my last post! 

Today I will just focus on our fireplace. It still needs quite a bit of work: painting the wall, mantelpiece, hearth, dado rail, spray paint the candlesticks and plant something in the 3 pots. In our house though, that counts as almost done...

Here is the before and after (well during):

The things that we really have done are:

- Gas fire disconnected and removed

- MDF cut to size to seal the hole and painted with a spare test pot

- Cut down a conifer that was in the way of our new shed's foundations

- Cut 1" slices of the trunk 

- Glue to the painted MDF

- Spend weeks looking for a mirror

- Then buy a discontinued bathroom cabinet and hang it on it's side!

I am really pleased with the mirror, it looks very retro. If you didn't know I don't think you would realise that it has secret storage (currently hiding any sweet treats in our house). It does look like there are twice as many though as the inside is mirrored as well.

So there you go, we have been doing something and in truth we have mainly been doing little bits and pieces around the house, but eventually all those bits will add up to a finished house. Or that is what I am telling myself anyway.

Gallery Wall (1st of many)

We have made loads of progress on the front /dining room over the past few weeks. However we have been too busy working on it for me to take photos or update you!

One area that I do have photos of is our stag gallery wall in the front room. Although we have not yet finished painting the bottom half of the wall we decided a great way to tidy away this box of stag artwork/frames was to just get it up on the wall.

We have planned this project since February 2012 when we bought a large hand printed stag artwork while we were on our 'mini-moon' in Brighton. Those few days away we sat down and discussed general themes for our future house - so that we could focus only buying things that worked in one of those rooms.

After that we have slowly collected a group of brown frames, and a couple of 'stag heads' (fake ones) to put together as a gallery wall as well as making some items to go in the frames as we really wanted these to be handmade (and only a couple not by us!).

First of all we laid them all out on our floor and I shuffled them around until we were happy with the arrangement.

Then Martin hung them on the wall - they look great! They will look even better once we finish making the rest of the stags to go in the frames. Since we took this photo we have already completed 2 more pictures (I am aiming for 1 per week) so we don't end up with the empty frames forever!

I will update this post when all of the stags are complete....

To mist or not to mist - that is the question

Before starting to paint all of our newly skimmed walls, I thought I would do a little bit of research about how to deal with new plaster. I wish I had never bothered!

I don't think there is any other subject that there are so many different 'experts' all strongly suggesting completely conflicting advice/instructions...

* Sand vs don't sand

* Filler before vs filler after mist coat

* 50:50 paint to water / 70:30 / 75:25 or any other ratio you can think of...

* PVA mixed in vs never put PVA near your walls

* No mist coat vs 1 mist coat vs 2 mist coats

Even as far as arguing whether it is a 'mist coat' or a 'miss coat'...

In the end I have decided to go with:

* A first pass of a 50:50 ratio cheap white emulsion to water ( I am not going to use this on the ceilings though, it is messy enough on the walls!)

* A second coat of 80:20 (approx) - starting with the ceilings

* Then 2 coats of the room colour 

So far I have painted half of the room with the 50:50 mixture, it is the consistency of milk so pretty messy. After trying a brush, a normal roller, I am now using a 'radiator roller' and a paint kettle - this has worked the best for me so far.

I didn't think it was working very well at first

However once it had dried overnight, I can see that it did what was expected. The water was soaked into the plaster and drew the paint pigment in

It looks much less patchy, even though I haven't actually done anything different to the first picture.

So now just to get the rest of it done...

If anyone else is interested in mist coats (hahaha) the most useful thing that I found was this YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTuaH-6rGRw

We are plastered!

Well the whole of downstairs is anyway!

This does make the room look quite dark, but remember that it is all wet plaster currently and it was pitch black outside (this photo will never win any competitions!). It has also served as a reminder that we don't want to paint the room floor to ceiling brown.

In fact these are our planned colours for the front room (on the wall before the new plaster), brown for below the dado rail and cream for above - GWR colours.

And the dining room will be slightly different as well, so of course we also tested those out...

So just a couple of weeks for the plaster to dry out, some sanding, some mist coats and then we can actually start painting!