Master Bedroom Renovation Progress

At this stage, I should probably write a post called "how to plaster your walls" and give loads of great advice about plaster consistency, tools, helpful hints etc, but actually my best advice is to just sodding well pay someone to plaster your walls, because although Andre has done an absolutely amazing job and has basically taught himself to DIY plaster to a really professional standard, it has taken four months of pretty solid effort. And when you work out how much it would have cost versus how long it took us, it works out at around £30 a week and we probably spend more than that every week buying orange juice (we drink a weirdly massive amount of orange juice). 

Anyway, here's where we started in February.

And here's what happened next.

And here's where we are now. The giant desk has been moved against this wall while we sanded the floor on the other side of the room. Long-term it's going to move into the cellar once we've converted the utility room, but for now it's going to live here because this is where the movers left it and it's huge and there are not enough hours in the day to be moving monolithic furniture from one room to another. 

Here's a close-up of the typical plaster situation we had to deal with. The woodwork is actually in reasonable condition so, as with the other rooms we've tackled so far, we're just giving it a light sand in places to remove the worst lumpy bits and then slapping some white paint on top. I'm happy to invest time and money into renovating wooden floors and staircases because the final results are amazing, but I truly don't notice the skirting boards so for us, it's not worth the effort. 

We used to have a corner sink located hazardously close to the plug sockets.

When we started chipping away at the plaster it all crumbled off so we had to take the whole thing back to brick (in fact we had to take a decent amount of the room back to brick). This is the stage of renovation where you think sod it, let's just glue the wallpaper back on and call it a day.

No more brick!

We've also finished sanding the floor and have started work priming the windows. Again, renovating the windows is something we're going to tackle at a later stage (I can't face the heinous thought of replacing them with PVC, the cost of replacing them with wood so we need to fully repair them) so they're just getting a coat of paint for now. And then we can paint the walls and oil the floors. I reckon one more weekend and week of effort and we'll be done.