As we already told you about restoring the outside of our front door, we should probably update you on what else we’ve been up to. This is what the inside of the door looked like when we moved in. We are lucky, and still have the original stained glass around the door, but sadly the panel in the door itself is missing. From a distance the door doesn’t look too bad, but as soon as you get close, it looks more like this: You can see that the paintwork is chipped and that the hardware ... Read the Post
How To Restore A Cast Iron Fireplace
** This was the first fireplace that we restored. Since then we have also restored another Edwardian fireplace using a slightly different and so much more effective method. You can read about it here. You can also check out our complete guide to Restoring, Maintaining and Running a period fireplace here!* One of the only original features we still have in the house is the cast iron Edwardian fireplace in the master bedroom. When we moved in, it was completely covered in yellowish ... Read the Post
How To Make Silhouette Art
With a house full of newly painted walls and empty shelves, we have plenty of areas that are in need of some art. For a quick and cheap solution we decided to make our own silhouette pictures. This is the easiest ever, cheat’s version how to make silhouette art. Anyone can do it! I started by taking a photo of Jan, facing sideways. It’s probably a good idea to take the picture in front of a window or lamp, just to make sure that the edges of the face are crisp and clear (that’s where you ... Read the Post
Edwardian Front Door Restoration
Want a quick makeover? Well, so did we when we decided to paint our front door, but it turned out to be a lot more time-consuming than we had imagined and we ended up embarking on a full-on Edwardian front door restoration. This is our Edwardian front door before. As you can see, the paint was chipped all over and the brass effect fittings had seen better days. We started by removing all of the redundant door furniture. We were planning on replacing it anyway, but there were loads ... Read the Post
Crawling In The Dark
The first winter in our new house was extremely cold. In fact, it was so bad, that Christine got chilblains on her toes! One of the first things we did to tackle the cold, was to install insulation under our suspended timber floor in the living room. Thankfully we have a little dummy cellar that allowed us easy access to install the insulation boards from below so that we didn’t need to take up the floorboards. You can find general information about insulating under floorboards here. We ... Read the Post
Bedroom Makeover
After we brought you up to speed on all of our previous master bedroom endeavours, we thought that it’s probably about time to show you some of the nicer stuff that we’ve been up to. After the more major building work, we initially we primed the ceiling and walls with a mixture of PVA, water and white emulsion. Then we painted all the walls white until we could decide on a colour. We seem to have a bit of a white and greyish theme going on throughout the house and wanted something that would ... Read the Post