So a while later

Yes it's 2015 (like, when did that happen?!?!) and the house was finished off, so i'll update a little as to what I've done progressively.

The house has been let as of June 2013 and we've uprooted and gone closer to work and where the Mrs is doing her Masters, so all (so far so good) has been rather successful.  Looking back I can't believe how little I've done in terms of updating this blog about the actual work that was done, so I'll try and get it all down!  Rather than do it chronologically, room-by-room might be an easier approach, given I can't remember what I did for breakfast yesterday!

Anyway, one of my previous posts I wanted to come back to the subject of woodchip paper on the walls.  there are good ways and not-so good ways of getting this off.  First i'd like to say prevention is better than the cure, if you can avoid buying the house with woodchip, do it, it takes a loooooong time to get it off!  If you do have it, may I say unlucky to your knuckles, you won't be needing them anyway.  There's every chance that the plastering underneath the woodchip will be the old horsehair stuff they used in the 60's, so don't worry about ruining it as you'll probably prefer to skim for a proper finish afterwards.  The easiest way to remove it in my view is to score it diagonally in each direction with a stanley knife down to the plaster (leave 2-3 inches between lines) to make little diamond shapes, get hot (not boiling water) in a spray bottle and give it all a good coating.  Leave or about an hour, give it another spray and it should glide off with semi-ease (the same process could probably be done with a steam wallpaper remover).  It's worth putting vaseline on your knuckles before scraping as they're gonna catch on umpteen coats of gloss, emulsion and whatever other crap is on there, the vaseline will help you glide!

When you've done it all, congratulations!  You've just got the least fun bit of modernising out of the way!

The dining room (as you've seen before) had woodchip all-round, apart from the infamous wooden wall.  I had a cracking time painting the wooden wall (still too chicken to get rid of it!) - it's all white now... here's what it looked like halfway through after the primer coat:

It did take a while but the results were good at the end.  You might also have noticed the dark blue carpet had gone, as had the layer of lino underneath, the next layer of lino, the newspaper and the felt!  The carpet contributed to making the place look dark, for anyone looking to let out rule number 1 is to make it light and airy, so I opted for laminate flooring.  I'm not against laminate flooring, but I do prefer walking on a nice carpet with my bare feet on a cold January morning, which brings me to rule 2; don't make the place how you like it.  It needs to be how others like it. My new favourite saying is "if you make it how you like it, you're going to be paying the rent".  The market likes light and airy, make it for the people who're going to be paying.

To bring a bit more light into the room we also installed a french window where the old window used to be.  It's made such a difference, but in order to save money I asked the double-glazers to leave the brickwork untidy and I would make it good and plaster myself, a task quite daunting when i actually got down to it.

Thankfully (and many thanks to Hugh Baird college in Liverpool for the 10-day free plastering course) getting it sorted wasn't as bad as it could have been.  I did manage to get the rocky brickwork you see above either side of the windows to look something closely resembling a decent wall:

So all in all after lots of paint, laminate (at a decent £5 per square metre), a curtain rail and a little bit of spit and grit (and influential sunlight!!) managed to end up with a room I was actually really rather pleased with:

As you can see, the old gas wall heater still exists (which I'd been advised was unsafe so had been disconnected from the gas anyway).  When I get the house back next I'll rip that out, and maybe I'll be brave enough to get rid of that wooden wall once and for all.  Who knows what lurks behind it!  I may also end up opening the teeny tiny kitchen into the room.  That was the original plan but money was a major issue at that point... I'll embellish on the kitchen... *shudder*... next time.