Saturday 22 August 2015

Life lately...



Well, I didn't intend to neglect this blog for a month - work has been continuing on small jobs around the cottage...it is just that many are still only partly complete.

I did spend a weekend in Dublin at the end of July to attend a friend's wedding. I lived in Dublin in 2002-3, and used to visit several times a year to catch up with friends. However, it has been quite a while since my last visit. The wedding was lovely (if somewhat of an endurance event!). The service started at 1pm, and I left the reception after 1am and it was still going strong! However, on Saturday morning I had a chance to walk through some of my favourite streets in Georgian Dublin and have my fill of beautiful doors, before venturing into a very sunny St Stephen's Green.


On the home front, I have recently purchased a couple of items of bargain furniture, so the last few weeks have been spent giving them each a makeover. Two are now complete and so I will show you the updates very soon, and one is almost complete.

I've also started the redecoration of the bathroom. Unlike other rooms wherever I've done all of the work in one go, I am spreading this one out a little (both from an energy/inclination and a financial perspective). I've been sharing some of these snippets on Instagram, but to date I have...

Started covering the dark blue wall paint with white primer. It has had one coat so far, but I think I will do another before the final wall colour.

This actually resulted in a bit of indecision regarding wall colour. While the walls had been dark blue, I was convinced that the wall tiles were white. It transpires that they are actually a beige colour (with a small hint of pink). So my extensive range of Little Greene colour pots came out, and I think I've decided on Wood Ash (top right swatch).


The plumber has been and replaced the modern towel warmer with a more traditional style radiator. 


And this weekend's task is to strip the paint from the cast iron fireplace. I think I will likely re-paint this, but it had so many layers of poorly applied paint, a lot of the detail was ill-defined. The test will be tomorrow when I try removing the peel-away paint stripper.

In other (negative) news I had to call out an emergency plumber this week as I arrived home on Tuesday to find that my water-tank in the loft was leaking, and dripping through to the upstairs landing. The plumber was able to come within a few hours but I have sustained some damage to the hall ceiling and the ceiling in the second bedroom. It also must have been more water than I thought as I discovered yesterday that the water had also made its way down to the bottom floor through the hall floor as I have damp stains on the dining room ceiling. So I'm giving it all a chance to fully dry out, and then some ceiling re-painting will be added to the 'to-do' list.

But in other (positive) news, the UK food network channel has started showing some HGTV programmes - you may recall I became a little addicted to HGTV when I spent a month in the US two years ago. So, I can now have a daily fix of Rehab Addict and Fixer Upper - which both certainly help to keep me focused on getting on with my own projects...

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