My House DIY Thread (Woohoo Photo's!)

Remove the old ceiling rose from landing as we were moving light fitting. New ceiling rose bought for this & other light in hall
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Used old reclaimed skirting to patch into this section after it got damaged
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Electrician been in and carved up ceiling and walls:
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Turn of the plasterers:
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Plastering work this pic is where the boarded up door used to be:
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new section of skirting scribed, cut to length & installed:
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Decided to make life easier for myself & go straight into wall rather than mitre it as uou will never see it:
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Install round the utility room door can you spot all the joons 😂:
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Early Christmas present arrived as a treat for house nearly being complete.

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I learned a lesson though tonight when fitting new bracket.

i needed/wanted anchor bolts to install the bracket for peace of mind. However I was in B&Q yesterday picking up some boxes & radiator valves & checked what they had & bought these Diall anchor bolts. They were roughly the same price as the rawlplug branded ones so thought I would try them out.

the phrase “buy cheap pay twice!” Is the only thing I can say about them that does not involve swearing.

i used 5 of them & to be fair bottoms are solid but the top 3 where most of the weight pulling from the wall is I was not sure about them. Put the tell on the bracket & while holding it I could hear the disconcerting sound of wall fittings that were crunching themselves loose.

so removed them and you can see how cheap and flimsy they are here:

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So sadly no Tv up tonight but thankfully I have no broken TV either.

i have ordered the rawlplug version from screwfix & will get them 1st thing in the morning.

lesson learned!!!!
 
Love seeing the updates on this one. You'll need to do a wee recap once its all done with some before / after pics. We're going to get a photo book printed once our renovation is where we want it.

I see you're stairs have turns in them, how did the plasterer get on doing the void above the stair? Any special scaffolding used? I've been doing insulation above our stair void and its a nightmare trying to get ladders balanced on the stairs to get to some of the tricker bits.
 
Thanks. I have the original pictures used by estate agent on the listing so we can see a before, during and after shots... at some point.

i want to get a sign put up somewhere saying “This house was renovated using the power of Youtube!” Or something like that 🤞

our normal plasterer could not do it due to rhe massive void. So I got another guy in and he was great and really pleased with the finish. He had massive scaffold that put my DIY set to shame so he had a set of legs on the landing and frame over the top banister then other legs on different steps about 1/2 way down. Not easy but they did it in 3 days instead of anticipated 4 days.

good luck with yours
 
LOL! The picture does make it look squinter but it is ever so slightly out by that I mean the bubble is touching the right side line. So I need to get it bang on.

Sadly things are absolutely mental at my end getting ready for Christmas. I have still not wrapped presents and house is a disaster but we will get there.
 
Updates have been slow as the hall way has been very slow hard work just due to the size of the space, the height and the amount of prep work that has and is needed for the painting.

i have no photos of any of the prep work but I think I spent about 9 or 10 days sanding the woodwork and cornice, which was as soul destroying and depressing as it sounded. The upside is the woodwork is in better nick than when I started but the downside is it removed the old gloss paint to reveal this black substance underneath. I assume this is the chemicals involve in making gloss paint from the 80s or earlier.

I have now put on 3 undercoats on wood work (except staircase, not started that yet) and the blackness I mentioned above is still bleeding through. I have switched from the super grip primer (first 2 coats) I use when going over gloss and started using BIN 123 water based primer and it has helped but hopefully when I do the 2 finishing coats it will be ok & blackness will nit be visible🤔.

i have also spent a bit of time inbetween the various primer coats caulking gaps between the wood and walls and where cracks have appeared in the woodwork / old paint finishes. So hopefully once all finishing coats are done it will look as good as it can.

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As you can see the vaulted ceiling on stairs means at the shortest but it is about 4m tall as shown by my 3.5m fully extended pole (said the actress and the bishop 😂), at the other side of the wall it must be closer to 5m.
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Here is the undercoating starting on the cornice (and loft hatch). Check out how yellow the white paint has gone since it was last done (probably about 20 if not 30yrs ago)

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some colour options we are considering for various surfaces:

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I can cut in quicker than putting tape down first. Just takes control of an unsteady hand.
Check you! 😊
Putting tape down allows me to work quicker while still be sloppy 😊

When cutting in doing the walls & ceiling I do that without tape round cornice... does that fain me any kudos points? 🤔
 
Well I have been a busy wee fu..... individual 😂 over the last months (although you would not guess it with progress).

I put an undercoat on staircase for finishing paint coats:
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I have also painted the cornice & ceiling downstairs with final coats although you not be able to tell difference from my phone pic quality / my photography skills.

we got new lights installed in hall & upstairs landing so now all three lights look great, first time in 10yrs - will get pics taken & upload.

electrician came in 2 weeks ago & fitted them along with under cabinet lights in kitchen to replace old ones that were always needing bulb replacements or reseated.

i have also routed in channeling for lighting in oak shelving:

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be gentle it was my first ever time routing & I am pleased with result, even though it is not perfect

Just need to do final install of that to complete.

We got tiling done last week but before that could be done I sanded & finished worktops.

Pre/During sanding:
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finish sanding / applying finish:
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tiling:
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once work is complete I will get finished pics of tiling & lighting

big project I have been working on is another garden project:


Just need more time to get garden deck cleaned & oiled as well as walls repainted.... again photos will get posted once complete.
 
Hey all been a few months since I posted an update and while nothing major has changed there has still been activity ongoing.

The hallway is being held up due to replacement floorboards not being available. There is a company locally that are getting floorboards in that are slightly wider than mine, ours are 140mm where as the others are 150mm) which should works as are only about 2m from the door into the hallway and there should be a runner down and some furniture/sofa disguising this difference.... hopefully.

so hallway is unchanged from earlier.

However with shelf I routered for the lighting we had a bit of a disaster fitting that, we decided to move the shelf brackets to assist with the new channelling I put in and when I drilled the wall I hit an electrical cable that caused the power to short in the kitchem.

We move the backet over just slightly and drilled the holes wirh no issues. But to fix the cablign issue, the lovely tiling had to come off, electrician came out and fixed the cabling and then tiler came out and retiled the tiles I had removed, with new spare tiles we had left over.

One of the holes I had drilled for the new location was on a tile that had to be removed so I quickly redrilled that hole to the wall plug and screwed it in. However I do not think I removed enough of the debris from the hole so when I screwed the screw in it pulled that debris out but with nowhere for it to go it crakced the tile................ SAKE! :)
I could not bare calling the tiler out again so asked one of my neighbours if I could borrow his tiler cutter, bought some adhesive and did it that way. Now the fix I did is noticeably different when there is nothing there but with the shelf up and all the stff on the shelf you can barely see it so that is a bonus:

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We then moved on and got the walls all painted (you would never notice the difference in the colour change as we tried to match it as best we could and it is almost exactly the same colour) and a new feature wall paper put up in the kithcen diner area. We decided to get a professional in as he would take about 3 days (turned out to be 3 and a bit due to us not having enough wallpaper to finiish the job) whereas I would probably need at least 2 weekends and time during the week to do everything he did in that time. Sometimes throwing money at something like that is a better option when the weather is so pleasant and we just want some of the rooms refreshed which is easier and quicker done by professionals... Even if spending the money I think I could do it for so much less but take so much longer....

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The decking lights we had installed when deck was first put in were all nearly dead and to be honest due to them being cool white I was never their biggest fan. However the lights were not replaceable so the whole units needed to be replaced. I decided to buy GU10 decking lights so I could replace the bulbs as well as insert my own bulbs of my choosing.
so I got the lights of Amazon and also (of Amazon) used IP68 electrical connectors to join th emains power cable to the light fitting which made the job so much more quicker and easier to do. I then used cable ties to keep the connector of the ground as best I could. Even though they are IP68 still best to keep them as dry as possible rather than tempting fate.

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We finally needed a new bin store as one of the lids on the previous one had completely rotted away. I potentially could have made a new one but with a lack of space would not be able to take my time making it so it matched which was a shame but there were lits of other issues brewing on it like all the hinges were rusted to the point they had broken etc, so while not loads of time or money there were issues with it.
So I pulled the triggeer and bought a new one which I built up this weekend... I may need to plane one of the lif guides down as the fitting is a bit tight just now when it is dry so it could very well become an issue in the winter when it swells up.

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Our back garden has come a long way since I installed the new fencing this year and has made the garden an even more enjoyable space to be in. The weather this year has been incredible and has made the enjoyment this year even greater especially with all the brickwork hidden behind some lovely lookiing wood:

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Right time for another update. I have not been very good with the photos recently as I have been racing against time to get stuff done.
We started work on the hallway last year with the plasterwork and at the start of the year I did a whole lot of work to get the carpets up but after lifting I found the hall floorboards closest to the front door were a disaster and needed replaced.
I also had to strip the staircase stairs of the paint, that was a chemical induced barrel of laughs I can assure you.
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It took nearly 9 months for reclaimed Victorian floorboards to become available. Only issue is my floorboards are 28mm thick & 148mm wide, the new boards are 20mm thick & 168mm wide.
So my amateur joinery skills get to make an outing once again 😂.
I got a t&g router cutters & also got my track saw out. Cut the boards to right width and add new tongues:

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Lifted floorboards and then added 9mm plywood packer strips to bring new flooring up to 28mm level.
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Had to also add new joist supprts as some of the floorboards had to be cut different points (round loo door) to stagger joints. Also left side of door joist was about 4 inches from wall which was causing a lot of flex in about 6 boards:l (picture does not do justice to the amount of time and work I put in under there 😊):

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Finally floor is now finished:
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Reason floor was time critical is we were getting a new door installed the following week:
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Got out house number etched into top pane (but allowed sun to hide that 😉)

Got another update very soon for other side of front door as well as getting the hall completed (hopefully) before Christmas.
 

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