Today Duncan left for work as any other however what met him at lunchtime was complete Chaos at home. It is days like this I realise how lucky I am to be married to someone so laid back and trusting.

He left a house in one piece recovering from my previous decoration exhibition. He returned to Jessica and I stood with Hammers in our hands and a hole in the front room!

Chaos at Home commences!

  • From this beauty
  • To this mess
  • unfortunately we couldnt repurpose this elsewhere as planned.
  • Last chunks of plaster and no more nails
  • To this by time Duncan finished his lunch lol

So how would such a change come about without warning I hear you ask? quite simply with the rest of the house done. I knew what I wanted for this room and I knew the surround didn’t fit. We thought taking it off would be easy. It should have just been the case of a few bolts.

Nothing in this house is ever that easy though. the surround was broken so they had cemented it to the wall! then used something like no more nails to glue further bits together.

My plans of keeping this for the other brighter side of the house. To surround in the future a new log fire that side. where gone. it had been in such bad shape when botched together and on the wall. There was no saving this beautiful piece of what we found out was Black Granite stone and painted marble effect.

It wasn’t wasted and went to a local stone mason to be repurposed.

More Chaos at Home as the BIG hammer comes out!

I took Duncan’s help to remove the outside slabs stuck in the space before the hearth. But Jessica, Emily and I smashed up the 1-4.5 inches of cement found below.

we even found a other random phone extension wire!
It was gruelling
However we finally got there.

So we had to tidy up the mess and plaster it.

So by the end of the weekend we were ready for the paints to come out!!!! We were also in disagreement on the colour combos! We went with Proud Peacock for the chimney breast. I had already picked this and wanted it with the Grey.

  • The Warm pewter on the opposite wall
  • Proud peacock against white and a own mixed lighter grey
  • Mixing the right lighter grey
  • Finished chosen colour

However this room is quite a dark room so I didn’t want the Warm Pewter making the room too dark. So as I was nearing the end of one of the 15litre Pure Brilliant White pots we decided to just keep pouring in the grey until we got the right light grey. (after first making a mess with a darker shade in a glass!) but we got it eventually.

We have now Officially finished with decorating! Just one big clean up left and then life and continuing embellishments as the room evolve to our use.

If you wish to follow our families DIY you can here. If you want to see what else we get up to during this lockdown you can find them here.