Indian wall hanging

We got a beautiful Indian (we think) wall hanging from a charity shop. It's up in our dining room, which persuaded us to theme that room as our "world" room. We have lots of lovely things from all over the world - a hand carved aboriginal lizard that my Mamgu brought from the outback in Australia; some lovely Shiva and Ganesha  statues that I got from a lovely little hippy shop I used to work in; lanterns and frames and all sorts of things.

We're also going to make curtains out of recycled saris and scarves, to match the room.

Missing streets

They took down a load of streets behind my street. They were on a map dated 1965 and were built in the late 1800s, but are now an industrial estate. If you look closely at Moorland Park you can see the crop lines of the old streets. Where's Tony Robinson when you need him?


I also discovered this evening (thanks to some detective work on 1901censusonline.com)that Moon Street in Splott was knocked down sometime in the late 50s/early 60s. Here's a picture of it on an old map:


And here's the view looking down Moon Street as it is now:


You can see the grass part curving over the hump where the old road and all the rubble is buried.

Aberystwyth Street update

I have been working so hard, and the house looks like a shithole. It's quite disheartening. My mam and dad have been telling me that as soon as we start to put things back, it'll all go quickly. I'm just waiting to be out of the rubble! I am very happy with how big the living room is, now that I've totally opened the stairs up.


I kept all the original tiles from where the fireplaces were, and I'm going to use them as edging to the patio. They're free, and they belong to the house. Perfect recycling!



I decided to keep the fireplace in the spare bedroom/studio as I found out it's a proper old cast iron one. Under layers and layers of gloss paint that my mam has been scraping away at, this is what it looks like underneath. Beautiful.


In the rubble and mess underneath the stairs, I found the original suspended floor from about 1890-1900. Something caught my eye, so I leaned over and pulled out a lovely Victorian black glass hatpin! I gave it to my mam as she collects them. I felt like I was on Time Team.

View the whole project: before, during, and in 4 weeks (hopefully) after.

Tools

I went home for the weekend to say goodbye to my parents (they're off to France for five weeks), and to see Justin, Gail and Jess (and get stupidly drunk on cola cube vodka); and my Dad has given me a toolbox full of useful tools to help with renovating the new house. Here is a list of things Patrick and I will be doing in the next five weeks:
*Stripping wallpaper
*Taking up carpets
*Knocking down a partition wall (to open up the living room)
*Knocking plaster off the walls downstairs
*Damproof course (but we're getting someone in to do that)
*Start digging the garden

That's pretty much all we can do without my Dad there, but he'll be busy drinking copious amounts of red wine and eating out in restaurants!

I'm going to book Tuesday (a week tomorrow) off work; Patrick and I are going to sleep in Aberystwyth Street on Monday night in a sleeping bag, I'm so excited! We're going to spend the day mapping out all the rooms on graph paper, and all our furniture as well, so we can start planning where everything is going to go. Fair play, we started off with just a bed and a kitchen table, and we've already got a houseful! Unless we start refusing furniture, we're going to end up living in a junk shop. A beautiful, shabby chic, country living-style junk shop, but a junk shop nonetheless!

More mood boards

Kitchen, dining room, bedroom. I'm liking how the whole house has started taking on lots of bluey-greens: petrol, stone, moss; muted colours of seashore and driftwood. I can't wait to buy paint.

Y Gegin

Y gegin is Welsh for 'the kitchen', which is what I'm thinking about at the moment. Our new house has a teeny tiny kitchen that we are going to extend in a few years time, so we need to design a dros dro (temporary) kitchen that has maximum storage, and is easily-wipe-down-able. This is because I'm a skinflint who won't pay to have a damproof course done in the kitchen walls, as we are going to knock them down in 2 years time!
I've seen some lovely (and cheap) galvanised shelving units in Ikea. They're £6.99! I want them to store food - cans and things like that.

I love this tiny kitchen redesign. It's actually smaller than our kitchen! If you Google image search 'small kitchen ideas', all the kitchens are huge, not small at all - so I was really pleased to see a proper tiny kitchen, and it's just lovely.

No good for my kitchen, but I love this idea of using an old chest of drawers as an island. I've filed it away in my head for future use.

Badly want

I want all of these drawers in my new house. There'd be no room for a bed or kitchen, but who would miss those things when you could spend all day looking at these beauties!

Forest room

I have plans for my new living room, it's going to be a woodland glade. Wallpaper from wallpaperdirect.co.uk, and beautiful grassy rug from Ikea.
I'm also going to make little crocheted mushrooms, to look as if they're growing out of the rug and nooks and crannies.

Ikea rug

Wallpaper from wallpaperdirect.co.uk

Aberystwyth Street

I've had the completion date on my house! It's 10th of June... and OMG that's next week!

I'm planning to document the whole process of renovation, redecorating and moving in. With that in mind, here are a few photographs of the house (with the current owner's stuff still in there) which we took on the second viewing; and a few pictures we made of our garden design. Made using Google Sketchup, an amazing free 3D program.

Here's the living room


Here's the master bedroom


Here's the lovely turquoise bathroom, that's coming straight out and a new plain white one installed


Here's the spare bedroom/studio (what that means is LOADS of shelving units, and a table for me to make things on!)


And here are the beautiful 3D garden pictures. And Yes, we will have a secret garden, complete with ivy-covered walls and a garden shrine... always wanted a secret garden!