My Flat in Progress, September 2018: Putting up Pictures

After hanging the first few pictures in my flat this summer (in the hallway), we finally got around to hanging a few more this autumn.

First up: adding a bit of gentle colour to my very minimal spare bedroom.

I am truly terrible at interiors blogging, because not only have I not taken any more photos of these pictures in situ (so you can better see how they look in the room as a whole) I've also not taken any close-up pics so you can actually, you know, see what the pictures themselves look like. Tsk tsk.

Here's an earlier photo of this wall looking very empty and boring. (If you're curious, you can see more pics of my spare room here).

The group over the radiator are six prints by Geninne D. Zlatkis from her collage birds series, which I bought way back in 2008 but still really like. Everyone who visits my flat seems to love them, too - I've actually had a few people tell my off for hanging them in my spare room! (Here are some old snaps of them in the kitchen/diner in my old flat in 2009, aren't they darling?).

After years of only having art up in cheap clip frames and then several more years of having all my pictures packed up in boxes while I was living with my parents, it feels BEYOND AMAZING getting things up on the wall in actual proper picture frames.

I keep changing my mind about what I'm going to hang where, though! The other picture in the spare room - a print of this wonderful illustration by Lauren Nassef (of pottery collector Edward Sylvester Morse) - I was convinced had to be hung in my living room, because I love it so much that I wanted to be able to look at it a lot instead of hiding it away in the spare room (especially as this was going to be the first time I'd ever actually had space to hang it up on a wall somewhere, after almost ten years of owning it). But once we'd hung up the birds, my dad suggested the pottery collector print would look good in the remaining space and it looked perfect... so up it went.

We made the mistake of hanging it centred in the gap between the end of the radiator and the wardrobe instead of centred between the bird pictures and the wardrobe, but it still looks okay enough that I'm happy to leave it as it is - especially as the wardrobe probably isn't going to be a permanent feature in this room, so I may have to re-hang this picture in the future anyway once I get the "final" bit of furniture for this space. Despite this niggle, I'm really happy with how these seven pictures look in the spare room and I've loved looking at them during the past few months while the spare room has been my bedroom!

In September we also put up the first few pictures in the lounge (we'd hung up my office noticeboard in the summer which has a lot of postcards etc pinned on it, but no actual framed art). On the left hand side of the chimney breast, we hung a couple of posters by Sharilyn Wright of lovelydesign: Beautiful Conifers of Canada and Beautiful Leaves of Canada.
 

These posters are another purchase from almost ten years ago (I bought a lot of art in 2008/9!) which have never been up on the wall before so, again, I am thrilled to finally have them on display. I continue to be a terrible interiors blogger with these rubbish photos, but you can get a better look at everything on those shelves here if you're curious. (I've had to shuffle some things around in the "office" end of my living room to find a new home for the little wooden drawers which previously sat on these shelves, because keeping them here would have meant the prints hanging above them would have been ridiculously high up the wall. Like my decisions about where to hang pictures, working out where all my stuff is gonna live in this flat is a slowly evolving process!)

I still need to properly mount the posters as I only just got round to getting custom mounts to perfectly fit them, but it's still fantastic having them up on the wall even if they are hanging a little wonkily right now.

On the other side of the chimney breast are a set of four Royal Mail stamp posters, from the village Post Office my grandparents used to run.

For a closer look at these posters (& to see them in their old homes in my old flat many years ago) check out this post.

Like the bird prints (and all the other art I've owned for a long time), these posters always looked great but look soooo much nicer now I've got them in some Actual Real Proper Non-Clip Frames. I love the design of these four stamp posters, and they have a lot of sentimental meaning for me as they (obviously) remind me of my grandparents but also of my childhood love of stamp collecting (I still love a nice stamp). It's wonderful having them up on the wall together, in pride of place.

I'll take some better pictures of them all in situ sometime soon, I promise! In the meantime, here's the whole room as it looked back in September (complete with stylish furniture island full of stuff displaced by the work going on in the main bedroom).

We didn't do any other DIY in September, but I did get very excited about MIRRORS.

I spent ages trying to work out what picture I could hang in the empty space at the gloomiest end of my hallway, but everything looked truly terrible (you know, because of the gloom). Everyone always goes on about how great mirrors are for adding light to a dark space, so - even though I'm not really a fan of having mirrors as decorative items in my home - I decided to have a look for cheap mirrors online, found a highly bargainous round one that looked like it might work, cut out a paper template the right size to test it out and it looked kinda awesome, sooo...

... now I have a mirror in my hallway. Do I have a photo to show you of said mirror in my hallway? Of course not. (It does look great, though! All those "put a mirror in a dark corner" articles in interiors magazines were right all along!).

Full of mirror enthusiasm, I then ordered a much fancier round mirror to hang on the chimney breast in my living room. It was the perfect size for the space and I'd oohed over it a lot when I'd seen it on Instagram but sadly, in real life, the colour was too coppery / rose gold for my taste so it went back in the box and back to the shop.

Such a shame, but one successful mirror purchase and finally getting more art up on the walls still feels like good decorating progress!

I'll share some more updates (and hopefully some better pictures) sometime soon. In the meantime, click here to catch up with my home renovation progress so far.

My Flat in Progress: July & August 2018

Time for another DIY update!

After getting stuck into lots of projects in May and June, we pressed pause again in July because of the hot weather. I totally wilt in the heat and so does my dad so neither of us really wanted to be stuck in the hottest room of my flat during a heatwave.

I continued to think about things like where to hand pictures and what furniture I was (eventually) going to put where, but all I really achieved in July was ordering a bigger light shade for the living room ceiling and hanging it up slightly wonkily. (It does look good, though!)

In August I started framing more pictures, mounting them nicely and adding some acid-free paper at the back to help protect them from my cheap frames. I also added D-rings and picture cord to a whole bunch of chunk box frames which had hooks so far inside the deep frames that it was almost impossible to hang them as they were.

I'd only noticed this, er, helpful feature after I'd bought the frames and put pictures in them, and I was a bit worried I was just going to have to buy another batch of frames from somewhere else and that my cheap frames were going to have turned out to be a total waste of money... so I was very happy when the D-ring and picture cord plan worked out! (Buying a bunch of D-rings and picture cord was much cheaper than replacing the frames would have been).

While I was busy prepping pictures, my dad hung the first thing up on the wall in my lounge: my noticeboard. (Very important!).

I'd already stuck a whole load of postcards up on my old pinboard to decorate it last year, and it had been hanging around waiting to get hung up ever since. I'm glad we waited, because this summer my mum decided to buy a bigger noticeboard for her kitchen and I got to snaffle her old one... which was bigger than my old one, and a bit fancier too with proper fixings for screwing it to the wall instead of being held up by a slightly wobbly bit of cord. Of course, this meant that I had to do a bit of rearranging of the decorative bits and bobs but that was no hardship (rearranging decorative bits and bobs is the best bit!).

My workspace is at one end of my living room, with my desk in the bay window (perfect for photo sessions!). The noticeboard is actually behind me as I work but it's still really convenient for pinning important work and life stuff where I won't lose it.

 

The wall of shelves look nice and organised but it won't be staying like this. The two bookcases will be moving into my bedroom when it's decorated, and a second unit matching the one with my printer on it will be going in this space instead. I'm not sure what (if anything) will go next to that, or where I'm going to put my stereo... but these are problems for solving on a future occasion.

If you stand back a bit, the lounge doesn't look quite so tidy!

As you can see, I still have an island of furniture and other stuff in the middle of the room while we're working on the bedroom. There are pictures spread everywhere, too, as I'm gradually getting everything framed and mounted and trying out possible arrangements.

After hanging the noticeboard, I finally made a start on pulling the tabs of all my curtains about a year and a half after we first hung them up! They still need a bit of tweaking but you can see the difference it's already made: the curtain on the left is unpulled, and the right pulled. 

I pulled the tabs of the lounge curtains (above), and the ones from the spare bedroom and kitchen (below) and I'll do the bedroom curtains when they're eventually hung back up (they're currently shoved in a drawer under a bed in my parents' house while my bedroom is still a messy work-in-progress).

I also finally turned up the last of the net curtains (the ones in the living room), which was a job that took so little time I have no idea why I'd not got round to it sooner.

Still working on small tasks because of the heat we replacced a whole bunch of the old electical socket covers and light switches around the house (because despite our cleaning efforts the old ones were still pretty grubby with old paint, etc), and we swapped some furniture around.

That empty bookcase (previously located in the oh so stylish furniture island in my lounge) got moved into the kitchen for my pots and pans and tins and things (my kitchen cabinets themselves are super musty so I'm stuck using freestanding shelving until I can get the kitchen renovated)... and the shelf unit which previously stood in this corner of the kitchen got taken to my parents house and stashed in their shed ready for repainting.

The shelf unit matches the one in the lounge that's currently got my printer on it, which is also going to get repainted a lovely fresh gloss white at some point - along with my coffee table which has been in serious need of a new coat of paint for at least a decade. My mum is great at painting furniture, so I'm hoping she'll teach me all her secrets!

Elsewhere in the flat, we tidied up the mess in the bedroom and in the hallway...

 

 

... cleaned the DIY-related dust from the bedroom floor...

... and put together the giant jigsaw puzzle of hardboard, nailing it down ready for my bedroom carpet to be fitted later in the year.

 

Oh, and I also cleaned a few of the old hearth tiles to get a better look at the pattern before we covered them up again! Aren't they pretty?

Hopefully I'll have lots more exciting home improvements to share with you guys soon! In the meantime, you can catch up with the DIY story so far here.

My Flat in Progress: May & June 2018

For the first year and a half of living in my "new" flat, I slept on a single bed in the main bedroom surrounded by boxes and furniture and general chaos while my parents and I worked on renovating the spare bedroom and the lounge.

We pressed pause last summer to focus on other important life stuff... then, almost a year to the day, picked up our tools again this May. I moved my single bed into the spare bedroom, squeezed the boxes and furniture and everything else in wherever I could find space (including under beds, on top of wardrobes and in the back of cupboards at my parents house), and we started work in the newly empty bedroom.

Just like in the previous two rooms, there was lots of filling and sanding to do to prep the walls and woodwork... and a few sections of plaster needed patching up as well.

It's a lovely big room, which will be great when I'm actually using it as a bedroom but in the meantime this just means that there's a lot of ground to cover!

We had to take up the old laminate flooring a little earlier than we'd planned, because we had to get a surveyor in to check out a possible damp problem (which thankfully turned out not to be a damp problem after all, hurrah!).

This was intitially an annoying disruption, but actually it turned out to be rather brilliant.

I'd been feeling really guilty about having taken almost a whole year off from the renovations - I knew that I'd been too busy to focus on it, but I still felt irrationally bad about it, like maybe I'd just been being lazy and I should have magically got the main bedroom finished by now. But if we'd finished the bedroom last year and had carpet fitted and bought furniture... the floorboards would still have had to come up this summer to investigate the potential damp problem, and just thinking about moving all that furniture, taking up the carpet, etc, makes me feel exhausted. Taking up floorboards when the whole room was empty because we were decorating it, though? Perfect timing.

Taking up the flooring revealed some lovely old fireplace tiles, which have sadly been damaged over the years. Okay, so they don't look too lovely in this photo but there's actually a sweet little floral pattern under there. I'm thinking about drawing it before we get the carpet fitted, so I can maybe use the motif elsewhere in the flat in the future.   

The bedroom renovations continued in June: the walls gradually got painted (goodbye dark purple!)...

 

 ... and my dad repaired more bits of plaster...

... replaced a missing section of skirting board, re-opened the vent in the chimney...

...and did a whole bunch of other little repairs which collectively have made a real difference to the neatness of the room.

Elsewhere in the flat, we got the bay window roof repaired and (no longer paranoid that the roof was going to fall in) I moved everything back into the living room. It was really great to unpack boxes, put stuff back on shelves, and move my desk out of the kitchen where I'd been working sandwiched between the oven and my drying launding for weeks.

There's currently an island of furniture and boxes (displaced from my bedroom while we're working on it) in the middle of my lounge but it's still wonderful to have the rest of the room looking nice again.

Here's how my office shelves were looking this summer - I'm so pleased with them!

I've been doing lots of tidying and re-organising and decluttering this summer and I'm sloooowly getting things set up how I want them.

I'm also slowly working on my "finally frame and hang all the artwork I've collected over the years" project. It was really exciting getting the first things framed. It turns out actual proper frames (even super cheap ones) look approx a zillion times better than clip frames. Who knew??

As you can see I've opted to frame pretty much everything in simple white frames. I might upgrade them to something fancier in the future, but for the moment these are working really well. It's easy to find cheap white frames like this in all the sizes I need, collectively they're not breaking my budget too badly, and they'll look really great on the plain white walls of my flat.

It's obviously time consuming buying frames and custom mounts and getting the pictures neatly framed and mounted, but the real time-suck is the hours spent thinking where to hang everything! I've accumulated so many different pictures over the years, and there are so many different possibilities for where I could hang them all in my flat. I've changed my mind about the grand picture-hanging plan a frankly ridiculous number of times over the past year and will probably continue to change it again with great frequency over the coming months.

Despite all this indecision, at the end of June we finally got the first batch of pictures up on the wall.

I was beyond thrilled when we hung these eight pictures up - it was a much more exciting moment than it looks from that slightly gloomy photo! They're a set of pages from a vintage book, The Good Housewife's Enyclopedia, which has some really gorgeous illustrations in it - you can see them all here.

 

I had three of the pages on the wall in my old flat and the paper darkened gradually over time due to the sunlight, so they no longer matched the rest of the set. I was a bit worried about how they'd look hanging together because of this but actually the reason that photo is so gloomy is because we've hung the pages up in my dark and gloomy hallway (which gets very little natural light)... and the gloom helps hide how the pages are all different colours. Hurrah!

It might seem weird to have hung pictures up in the hall when we've not decorated that part of the flat yet but the joy of this space is that I'm not going to be putting any furniture in it, so I don't need to wait until I've bought and/or planned furniture to work out where the pictures need to go. Decorating the "big" wall in my hallway is also soooo far down the priority list of my renovation plans that these pictures will likely sit happily on this undecorated wall for years before I need to take them down again.

More flat updates soon! In the meantime, you can catch up with all my home renovation posts here. 

My Flat in Progress, Spring 2018: Chaos & Calm

The wet and windy winter of 2017-18 brought me a "fun" surprise: a leaking roof! Woohoo!

It was just the little roof over the bay window in my lounge (a tiny rooflet! a mini roofling!) and we got it fixed pretty easily but it still freaked me the heck out.

I noticed the problem pretty late one night in January, and stayed up into the wee small hours moving everything out of the lounge and into the other rooms of my house in a state of OH MY GOD WHAT IF THE ROOF FALLS IN WHILE I'M ASLEEP??? panic. The next day my neighbours recommended some excellent local roofers, and a few days later they'd done some emergency repairs to stop the leak and we'd arranged that they'd come back later that spring (when it was no longer raining constantly) to replace the whole bay window roof.

The roof was no longer actively leaking, everything was going to get fixed, but I still couldn't shift that WHAT IF??? anxiety and was (entirely irrationally) convinced that if I moved everything back into the lounge before the roof got replaced something terrible was bound to happen. So... I just went back to living surrounded by boxes for a few months!

This was slightly chaotic and very ridiculous (I know I'm an idiot), but the weeks passed quickly and the weather improved and the lovely roofers came round and put a shiny new roof up in double-quick time... and I breathed deeply and moved everything back into the lounge again.

My oasis of calm during these weeks was my spare bedroom. I'm going for white and pale neutrals when decorating my flat to make it as light as possible and give me a blank canvas to work with when I start adding colour... and the spare room is looking very minimal at the moment!

It looks quite bland and plain in photos, but it's such a calming space to sit in (especially compared to the mess and chaos elsewhere in my work-in-progress flat) that it's given me a new appreciation for the kind of super-minimalist interiors which I've always thought looked a bit joyless and depressing. Because of this, I've decided to lean into the simplicity of it and keep this space quite neutral.

I've got two sets of pale bedlinen I can use on that bed: one white with a grid pattern, which I picked up for £10 in the John Lewis sale last Christmas (at the time I was annoyed they only had single bedlinen sets left in stock, but it's worked out great as this linen will be perfect for my guest room), and one white with a delicate leaf pattern, which is a hand-me-down from my parents (and possibly originally from IKEA many years ago?).

I've also picked out some black and white pictures from my "art collection" (I cannot use that phrase with a straight face, it sounds so serious and impressive compared to the reality), and a few other "quiet" pictures which were getting a bit drowned out by the bright colours of a lot of my other faves. They look lovely together and I can't wait to get them up on the wall!

The doors to the spare room and living room had been off their hinges since we got carpet fitted last summer, so our first DIY task of the year was to lop a bit off the bottom of each door and get them hung back up (partly to, you know, just have working doors again instead of door sculptures propped against walls, but also so we could shut out the dust from our other planned projects).

 

Here's how the spare room looked this spring once the doors were back in place...

The wardrobe is a smallish one that used to be in my bedroom when I was growing up. I never turn my nose up at hand-me-down furniture, and this turned out to be the perfect size for that space by the window.

There aren't any built-in cupboards in my flat for storing bulky stuff like the hoover and winter blankets... so this wardrobe is doing that job for now. Eventually I'm hoping to build a big cupboard in the hallway or the kitchen, then either use this wardrobe as an actual wardrobe or replace it with a nice chest of drawers (with a spare drawer for guests, of course!).

Up on top of the wardrobe are some useful-sized empty cardboard boxes (I am absolutely the sort of person who always has a stash of useful-sized cardboard boxes) and a lovely old suitcase which used to belong to my grandmother and which is currently full of packing materials (bubblewrap, tape, etc).

The chair is another family hand-me-down, but one which has been "officially" mine since my teens. It originally had a cane seat but now just has a bit of wood in the space to make it useable - I hope one day I'll be able to get it restored to its original glory because I love it.

The shelves at the end of the bed probably aren't staying in this room, they just don't have another home right now. Similarly, the stuff on the shelves is just... stuff that doesn't currently have another place to be. It's great having it all out of boxes, though!

I might put a little chest of drawers here if I keep the wardrobe? Or  maybe buy a little vintage bookcase specifically for this space, with books my guests can borrow?? Or maybe some modern open shelves that I can put a few plants on to make the most of the light??? As you might have gathered by now, I'm still pretty undecided about what's going to be happening furniture-wise in this room... but that's fine. For now, it's neat and tidy and functional and I'm happy.

The bed looks very low in these pictures because it's actually just half a bed - or, rather, one of a pair of stacking beds. This is another bit of furniture from my childhood bedroom: it was perfect for sleepovers because your bed could magically become two beds when you had a friend over to stay! It's already been really useful having two-beds-in-one, and the slim size of the bed means it doesn't dominate the small room. Eventually there'll be a little bedside table next to it, too, which will just fit in behind the door.

Because the bottom bedframe is quite low to the ground there's not much room for storage underneath but it's the perfect place for me to keep the big bits of paper and card I use as photo backdrops (v important). 

And that concludes the (not particularly exciting) tour. It's still a work in progress but one I'm very happy with so far - especially when I think back to how this space looked last year. 

The spare room doesn't currently look this neat and tidy (sadly) as I'm living in it while we decorate the main bedroom (more on that soon!)... but I have finally turned up the net curtains so they no longer stick out of the bottom of the actual curtains. Hurrah!

P.S. Click here to catch up on all my flat renovation progress so far.