At Chez Janes we are very good at "making list" of what needs to be done, we get very excited about all that we can achieve and how lovely it will look. These converstations tend to happen in the car and this weekend we headed up to our beloved Chester, so as predicted Mr J was "on one" about what DIY we needed to do. What then tends to happen is that we arrive home, have a cuppa, sit on the sofas, watch The Big Bang Theory and basically procrastinate futher. However part of the reason for this blog is to be a virtual "kick up the bum" to get Chez Janes finished...so here is my list to be done before Crimbo. Like Santa, I have made my list, checked it twice and hoping Chez Janes will not be naughy, but nice.
1) Finish the hallway:
One of our favourtite things to do is to start a job and then move on to something else...yep, not a great trait. The case in point for this is the hallway....where we still need to cut in the paintwork, get the doors stripped, sanded and painted, paint the stairs, find some artwork, lay the carpet, lay the flooring....I think that is it. I have found a fantastic company that will take my doors away and strip them for mega cheap, just need to find a time where we can go without a door on our bathroom for a few days!
2) Bedroom 2:
This spare room currenly has a big hole where the fireplace was (I knew I was never going to grow to love that) and all the fitted furniture has been removed. So we need to fill the fireplace in and plaster, put in electrical sockets (there is currently one) and re-decorate. I also need to decide what colours I want to go for....I am currently thinking grey. I absolutely LOVE Carrie's bedroom in SATC and the soft grey she has there...but maybe because if I was just 10% as cool as Carrie, I would be happy.
But I also love a deep, blue grey-just not sure I am brave enough to go the "whole hog"....something like these lovely rooms:
3) The little room:
Luckily when we were going through a super productive stage we stripped all the wallaper here (thumbs up Janes') and so this also just needs decorating, oh and flooring and electrical sockets. Again, I need to decide on colours/style...I really want to go down the "country route"-so may venture into wallpaper. I feel a trip to the Mother Ship aka Laura Ashley coming on.
4) The floor upstairs:
We have decided on wood- its cleaner, it looks nice and we like it. Mr J and Daddy Cool will be doing this themselves and they have assured me that as it is rooms, as a pose to fiddly areas- it should be "easy"...we shall see.
So that is it...all to be done before we tuck into our Christmas Dinner. Yeah.....
Here it is...Chez Janes' lounge-the most finished room in the house! We decided to have a separate lounge because we wanted a grown-up, cosy, sitting room and when the fire is going (it is a real working fireplace, one of the things we got very excited about when buying the house), we think we have hit the nail on the head-even if we do say so ourselves!
Here are some of my fave things about the room:
1. The Sofas....
They are from good old DFS and right up until we walked into the shop we were buying them in brown, but this lovely aubergene colour was on display and I am so glad we went for it. We have a three and two seater, so in this compact room we did have to squeezethem in! But I really wanted two sofas, rather than a sofa and chair and reluctantly Mr J agreed. He did have to use his initative to make them fit however....
PAH! We will tidy this up a bit at some stage, but that is one of the beauties of DIY in your own room-you can hack away at things as no-one can stop you!
2. The Fireplace....
I HATED this fireplace when we bought the house, against the green carpet it looked even more blue and ugly. I was busy researching other fireplaces and was all ready to rip it out, but luckily I was pursuaded to wait and it grew on me. I started to think that I would regret removing an original feature of the house and even though the colours are....interesting, against our grey colour scheme, we think it works.
3. The Storage....
I will dedicate a whole post to the alcove unit in here because Mr J came up trumps in designing and building this lovely built in unit. However I LOVE that we built the storage to suit us, so there is space for a lamp, our bigger books, our DVD collection and various electrical leads etc that I have no idea what they do. Putting the TV on the wall also saved loads of space and my "russian doll" effect boxes are ideal for shoving stuff in when people come over!
4. Finally putting some things we love out....
One of the most frustrating things that I find about DIY is that all the "nice" things to decide upon happen right at the end, by which time I have really run out of steam! In "The Snug" we have been able to put a few things we love out and here are a few of them...
Mr J's mini globe
One of the three mirrors left behind and definately one of Chez Janes' treasures, a bit of the 30s alongside the modern light fitment and the grey curtains.
You cannot beat a smelly candle...especially not one from Liberty Bell in Chester
I love this card and I think it really sums us up, I just need to get a nice frame and find a good spot for it.
This old phone looks amazing...but scares the crap out of you when it rings.
I love getting furniture that has a bit of a story and everything in our house is from different places, as personally I would hate for my house to look like something out of a catalogue. The little tables in this room were bought by Nana J at a car boot and this lovely cabinet was going to be thrown away. It is really unsual, as it was made for sheet music so the draws collapse when you pull them out. Might not stay here...but we will definitely find a home for it somewhere.
The next thing to do in this room is to find some artwork for the walls, as they are a little bare at the moment....just got to find something we agree on! The hunt will continue....
I am so proud of this room, even though we had some issues with it. My decorating skills are not great, so left to my own devices in the run up to our first Christmas, I decorated and it had to be done again-oops. This room was also affected the worst by woodworm, so our dreams of the original flooring was replaced by a lovely grey carpet and LOTS of extra work. Oh well, overall we love "The Snug" and when the fire is going and a good film on the telly, there is no where better.
We bought Chez Janes in August 2010 and I thought it would be WONDERFUL to have our families over for Christmas that year. However there were several things that had to be done before my vision of everyone sitting around drinking bucks fizz, tucking into turkey, could be realised. Here was my list....
Yup...that was quite a list. However on top of all of this, excited to have our hands on our own little project we merrily stripped back wall paper, pulled up carpet and took off dodgy plasterboard. The biggest lesson we have learnt is this:
"DO DIY ROOM BY ROOM"
Even now Chez Janes has half finished jobs, where we have run out of steam and moved on to something else. This was certainly true of the manic 4 months in the lead up to Christmas 2010, where we nearly killed oursleves and Mr J's poor Dad...Daddy Cool, who practically moved in to get us ready. Here is the list again and what we actually managed to do.....
Here are some pics of those manic 4 months....
The understairs cupboard that would become our downstairs toilet
Stripping back wallpaper we didn't really like to reveal horrible painted walls...which remained for over a year....wouldn't do that again.
Wonderfully safe polystyrene ceiling tiles
Moving the meters and getting ready for the toilet
Our new lodger/slave
The count-down begins
A little bit of Christmas amongst the DIY mess
We did it....exhausted and very rough around the edges....Chez Janes hosted Christmas
One of the great things about thinking about doing this blog is that it has been a bit of a "pat on the back" for everything we have achieved. When you start every greeting "sorry about my house" when people come over, you forget that actually in the two years we have slowly and surely been updating Chez Janes. So, what have we done....well the easiest place to start is probably the layout, which was the first and biggest change.
Something we were not shy about was making the house work for us, even if that meant moving rooms and layout around. The feel was very traditional and although we were limited in what we could do at this stage (we have very grand ideas for an extension but "The Plan" is very much money/time dependant and not something we can't do right now), we wanted to make some changes. Here is my childish drawing of what the house looked like when we bought it....Layout Pre Janes.
The main area that I wanted to change was the kitchen and dining rooms. My favourite design for houses is the kitchen/diner feel. Something like some of these google images....
I love being able to talk to people when I cook and I feel that separate dining rooms can sometimes be a bit of a redudant space. As the kitchen is a galley style, really the only option was to knock down the left hand wall between the kitchen and dining room. This meant that the door to the dining room was no longer needed and so we blocked that in too. This was a massive job involving RSJs and checking joists and so as it was the first job we did, we asked a professional to do this. Mr J now thinks he would be happy to do this himself....I am not convinced, as it is one thing to build a wall, it is another to knock one down and make sure you don't bring the rest of the house with it!
The second debate was what to do between the lounge and the dining room as I always wanted separate rooms. The fireplace works in there so I wanted to create a cosy lounge with book shelves and a nice TV to snuggle up and watch films. However, we did toy with some other ideas and even now when we have a party, I wonder whether we should have made it such a permanent divide. Our main alternative idea was sliding doors like this....
However we stuck with the permanent change and as "The Plan" includes extending the dining room, I don't think we have made a bad choice. I also love that our friends call the lounge "the snug" and it is the cosy, grown up lounge that I always wanted...more on that later.
The last change to the layout was putting in a downstairs toilet. This was a deal breaker for us in buying the house, as my Dad is disabled and I obviously wanted him to be able to come over. The toilet was a nightmare to put in...again more on that later...but does now mean we have a sink, WC and extra storage where the meters were moved too-all under our stairs.
So here is the new layout, Post-Janes....
In 2010 Mr J and I bought our first home, like most people our age (or for anyone I think nowadays) getting on the coverted property ladder was hard.We moved in with family, saved all our pennies and the day we got the keys was a very good day. We had this romantic notion that we could renovate and restore a 1930s home, which was in dire need of some TLC...but getting on "the ladder" had taken all our funds, so we would do this with no skills, not much spare time (both working full time) and no money. Two years later we are still plodding along, so this blog is really a little kick up the backside or spurring on to get this project finished. On a slightly more positive note we have learnt so much already, picked up so many skills and created so many memories (aaah), that I want to keep a record of them. I am slightly annoyed at myself that I didn't do this earlier, but "better late than never" I guess.
However here is a little trip down memory lane.....
Here is it....my lovely little house....my first thought was how exicted I was to have proper wheelie bins. Mr J was very excited by his garage, which for about 18 months he thought was the perfect place to store anything and everything..."put it in the garage" became his favourite words.
No matter what you do decoration wise, that front door is too ugly for words....
The lounge....hated the carpet, hated the fireplace....but luckily Mr J convinced me to put the sledge hammer down and wait (one of the biggest lessons we learnt), now the fireplace looks lovely jubly now it has been separated from the ugly carpet.
The dining room....complete with a "mock roman fireplace"
The "master bed"
Bedroom 2 with the lovely green carpet
The hallway complete with "safety first" polystyrene ceiling tiles
The garden/bramble areaTo sum up, we had bought a 1930s Semi that had been smacked in the face by every decade since. The best and worst of the 60/70/80s were on display and whilst we wanted to create a "homage" to the 30s, we definately wanted to get rid of a lot of the work completed by the previous owner.
The layout is as follows... upstairs has two double rooms, a traditional "box room" and a equally compact bathroom. Downstairs has a lounge, a dining room (at the time separated by plastic sliding doors-yup) and a kitchen. Outside is the garden, a coal shed, a garage and an outbuilding.
More space than we ever dreamed of having, but so much to do to put our stamp on it....Chez Janes was born.
