Well 2021 was rang in at midnight, I watched a bit of telly till 1 then nodded off to sleep (OK I did fall asleep during the Last Leg at 10:30 pm but that was because I was tired!
My intention on the Friday (1st) was to get the gloss finished in my bedroom and then finish the Snug (gloss on the stairs, strip the walls around the door and get the coloured emulsion finished). As it was, I also ended up starting the white emulsion in the lounge and a bonus job of lifting the carpet to expose the floor boards!
The gloss in my bedroom was pretty straight forward as it was just a couple of skirting boards and door surrounds. Basically all I have left now is to make a small curtain for the back window and await the grey gloss paint for the inside of the door then its done. I will post some pictures under the Ymlacio category once those small jobs are complete. All in all a really practical transformation and has created the space for the en-suite to go in later this year. Oh and my new rug arrived yesterday which was quite nice.
Once the bedroom was done, it was time to try and finish off the Snug. This is basically the front room as you come in the front door and has an incredible decommissioned fireplace and the hallway / staircase. The main issue as well as a paint refresh was that the structural report highlighted some high level of damp by the doorway and this was evident by an amount of lifting wallpaper. My plan is to refresh the area with a new colour on top of the existing paper but where it has lifted take that paper off and lay down two coats of white then two of colour then leave it 12 months to monitor the damp. I’m hoping with better heating and air circulation it does not reoccur but if it does at least I have a starting point for treatment.
Stripping the paper and laying down the two layers of white emulsion took longer than anticipated but at least I go into tomorrow with it all prepped to finish it off.
So as it was getting to the end of the day but I had an hour left to kill, and I had a white emulsion brush in my hand and a few easy access walls it made sense to end off with an easy white coat. If only it was that easy!
The problem hit when I got to the second wall which had no skirting to so the emulsion did touch the blue carpet no matter what I did. Luckily this was going to be behind the sofa and the carpet would be replaced at some point but I would know about it, so the only “illogical” thing to do was to rip the carpet up!
I say illogical as it was now 5pm and I had been going since about 09:30 and I genuinely did not know the state of the floor underneath. I knew it was floorboards as it is the floor above the cellar but it could have been in any state! So bread knife in hand to cut it into sections and watched as the foam backing disintegrated in front my eyes (I can not estimate how old this carpet was), an hour later I was presented with a fantastic starting point of a new floor for the lounge.
Once swept and vacuumed, what I have been left with is a solid set of boards but with two new sections. My decision now is whether I sand it all back and re-stain it or keep the original board patina and try and color match stain the two small sections.
We will see…..