Project Update

We made significant progress on our To Do list last week, and by “we” I mean Niels & Ole. Niels came over for a week to basically be our house project slave. The two of them worked tirelessly, laying down the wood floor in ours and the baby’s bedrooms; building/creating bookshelves for the living room; painting rooms and skirting boards and picture rails; and generally doing maintenance stuff around the place. The transformation is amazing! We absolutely love having the new floors in the bedrooms – it looks so good and is much cleaner than manky carpet.

With our new wardrobe (aka the Spaceship), our bedroom is pretty much project done. Just need to hang some pictures, figure out what how we’re going to use the bookshelves (my vote is for shoes), and do something about those awful curtains (but waiting to see when we can replace the windows first – I rather like the Roman blinds around the house, although we both would love wooden shutters, but they’re rather expensive). Photos are therefore of “in progress” rather than “completed”.

Same goes for baby’s room. Artwork to hang and crib to buy (which we won’t need for awhile, so holding off on that for now), but otherwise it’s done!

Living room is also done, minus the window situation (this goes without saying for the whole house). It’s been painted, bookshelved, and tidied up. Gotta hang artwork and that’s it!

Guest quarters are looking good. We haven’t done any work in the attic room, but I think it looks respectful just the way it is. We finally got a guest bed so people have a place to sleep. What more do you need?! We’d like to paint it all white, but other projects have taken priority.

The dining room is looking better, especially now that it’s no longer a major dumping ground for rubbish and project material. We’re holding off painting it though because – drum roll – we have a plan for the window this summer and don’t want to have to paint twice with the works that’ll be happening. It’s one of the biggest windows our builder has ever seen and we got to thinking – the structural work is already done, why not just continue knocking out the lower bricks and put in French doors? The additional cost to do this (vs just replacing the window) is minor and it would make the room brighter. Plus, we can then partially brick up the door in the kitchen (which needed to be replaced because it’s ridiculously drafty and cold) and gain a little more usable square footage in that tiny area. So, that’s the plan. Then one day, when we’re rich, we can knock through between the dining and living rooms and have this massive open, bright space, and it will be wonderful.

Feels good to have accomplished so much in such a short amount of time.