Before and After

Here's the before...

...and here's the after:

Fellow dog owners may understand the link between the two - take one poorly dog with an upset tummy (he'd been eating Eva's modelling clay, the fool) who felt it was necessary to defile our delightful dining room and hall carpet, couple it with a spell of very warm weather, and the result was Andre calling me at work to announce that he felt he had no choice but to remove the offending carpet and did I mind? Bearing in mind that the last time Andre removed a carpet on a whim we ended up spending 300 hours patiently scraping lead paint off the stairs in the height of summer, I wasn't overly keen, but the alternative was clearly worse so I gave executive approval and the carpets were duly spirited off the premises forthwith.

Note for the benefit of anyone wondering why we didn't rip the hideous 25 year old carpets up as soon as we moved in - we decided to keep all the carpets on the ground floor in place in order to reduce draughts from the freezing cold cellars below that we can't insulate because the builders will need access to the cellar ceilings to install the new gas, water and electrics for the extension. However, we're hopefully a hop, skip (more likely several hundred skips - muwahaha) and a jump away from starting the building work (yay!), plus it's nearly summer, so we'll just have to cope with the occasional blast of cold air. 

Andre thinks it looks like a French house now and I can kind of see the logic - there's probably people who pay a lot of money for this kind of distressed chic :-)

Next up - wardrobe update!