Doing It Ourselves

  Sometime in late July, we decided it would be a great winter project to renovate our master bedroom.  It was quite a cold, damp room, with a bit of mould coming up in the corners and on the ceiling tiles. The wardrobe was in a need of a complete overhaul, and really, we just wanted to add a bit of colour.

  Being complete DIY novices, but ambitious young folk that had quite the knack for 4th Form Woodwork back in the day, we figured "how hard could it be?".

  So in a great deal of excite one Saturday afternoon, we set about destroying the room with a mallet hammer and crowbar to see what lay beyond those old wall boards...
By late evening, we were quietly surveying the chaos we had caused.


  After a bit of a clean-up (there's lots of that in renovating) and some direction from our seasoned renovater, we fixed a couple of leaking weatherboard cracks and set about lining the room. First, up went the building paper, to hold off the wet and damp getting in through those old weatherboards. Next, in went the batts, creating a cozy wee pink cave.
  Now that we had something decent between us and the outside elements, we set about putting the walls back up. Upon the discovery that there were no noggins between our studs, we decided to use Braceline GIB board, just to give us that extra sturdy factor.

  Not too happy with the state of the old ceiling panels, we decided to replace them with GIB too - which turned out to be no mean feat. It did give us an interesting look up into the ceiling though, and we couldn't help wondering if there would be enough room up there for another bedroom one day...

  Nothing had been too tricky up until this point, except maybe trying to get the most out of our cut GIB.  Now that we had the walls in place, the next step was plastering the joints and nail holes. Armed with a couple of metal spatulas, we used a plaster that had a working time of about an hour and a half, which was useful to us novices.
Our thoughts on plastering were simple; "smooth it on, sand it off". Piece of cake.

Plastering was definitely one of our more labour intensive tasks. It took a good few weeks of our spare time to complete the room, during which there were constant big white work-boot footprints throughout the house, and a thin white film of dust settled over everything.


Finally, one day in early September, the architraves and skirting were back on thanks to my husband's crafty carpentry, and we were ready for the finishing touches!
Details of which will be continued in my next post...