Reno Diaries: The Living Room – a painfully slow update…

I thought it was time to check on my original living room wish list post to see how we’ve been getting on but felt more than slightly deflated when I realised the post was written last May, nearly a whole year ago!

Looking back it feels like progress has been very slow but this year we will finally move forward. When we’ve spoken about plans for this room in the past, we’ve realised that there has to be some kind of logical order to how things are done – for example, there’s no point in decorating until we get the floor done since we want to replace the skirting boards and there’s no point replacing the floor until the fireplace is changed. Sigh.

sofas

There is now a light at the end of the tunnel, in just two weeks time the windows across the front of the house will be replaced. This includes the bay-fronted living room, the bedroom that’s directly above it and the little fourth bedroom that’s now our home office. I can’t wait to see what a difference it makes to the appearance of the house as well as hopefully much greater sound and heat insulation.

Then in June, our hideous gas fire is being replaced with a beautiful Danish log burner that we chose a few weeks ago.

fireplaceold

The brilliant little community on our estate houses a wealth of very useful people – one of up the road neighbours is a chimney sweep and his best friend fits log burners – he’s taken us through all the different options and recommended a great shop nearby to go and pick the burner. After quite a lot of research we’ve chosen a simple design with a large window.

fireplacenew

We’re lucky to live in a part of London where fires are still possible since it’s restricted across much of the capital.

In the meantime, we did sell OH’s old sofa that had been taking up all the space in the bay window, that went just before Christmas enabling us to fill the space with a lovely big Christmas tree, our first Christmas as home owners. It also seems as though the damp patch on the ceiling above one of the windows was a legacy issue since it hasn’t got any worse in the year we’ve been here despite a lot of rain. I’ve also started gradually repainting all the bare plaster since damp proofing but if I’ve learned any lessons it’s that white is not conducive to life with a dog!

I’m both excited and nervous to see what kind of difference the windows and log burner make to this space, especially since OH has left the windows pretty much entirely up to me and has neither met the company who are doing the work or had any say in the design or style. Fingers crossed they turn out ok…

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