The lounge room

 Hiya! Some of you may have already heard the tale of how our lounge room was transformed from an icky, poo brown, dust bucket to the light, fresh and airy room it is today, but I'm feeling like re-telling it today. Sorry wonderbugs, bear with me for a bit, I'll have some new stuff happening soon. I think. Maybe not. Whatever.

This is what the room looked like when we first clapped eyes on it during an open house inspection....

 Brown no? Despite it's brownness, I still fell in love with it's panelled walls and bay windows. It all came together in my mind of how it would look if it were mine.

Being a first home owner though, I had some really wacky ideas about how renovations happened. I mean, you're talking to somebody who had never even painted a wall before! I honestly thought that people who owned their own homes could just do what they wanted to a house when they wanted to. Somehow, I didn't take into account how much having a mortgage would affect our cash flow and I also didn't realise how much work was involved.

After a few months of letting our bruised and battered finances recover from the strains of buying a house and the accompanying move, Husband suggested that we start working from the ground up. Re-flooring. To which I thought, yep, piss it in, no problems.

Can anyone say naive twat?

A layer of carpet, two layers of tiles and whole lot of literal blood, sweat and tears later we could get started on the clean up process, which entailed shovelling four rooms worth of broken tiles into a trailer and taking them to the dump and grinding back the tile glue to clean concrete. Which is hard and time consuming and altogether very sucky work. 

Then the tiling began. Two complete tiling novices who'd taken a crash course on YouTube on how tile a floor. It took five days to finish five rooms, but we did it. And I'm so proud of us for that. 

Once the flooring was all done and dusted it was just a matter of painting the room a lighter colour - we used Fair Bianca full strength on the walls and half strength on the trims - and installing blinds in the windows, adding new curtains, light fittings and pretty much redecorating. 

It's so easy to type those words and it all sounds so effortless, but the fact is that it's a process and it takes a while to get these things done, especially when you have to save the money between projects. 

That's what I know now, that I didn't know then. The naive twat is now a lot wiser, let me tell you ;)

Have you renovated? What do you know now that you didn't know then?

Cas x

p.s. feel free to tell me how much you love our lounge room redo...I really don't mind receiving compliments at all ;)))

Partying at Natasha's today