Our DIY Projects in 2019
We didn’t intend 2019 to be a year of doing massive DIY projects - in fact, we deliberately didn’t take on anything major (like a bathroom reno) as we just wanted to treat ourselves to a year of not working like dogs for a change. We look back on the early years in the house with mild horror, remembering how stressful it was doing DIY until midnight, and taking it in turns to take our then very small children out of the house for the entire day while the other stayed home and tackled big, dusty projects like sanding bedroom floors or plastering walls.
Nonetheless, we managed to churn through a decent amount of mini projects considering this was supposed to be a year off…
In January I (mostly) finished painting the spindles and skirting boards on the upstairs landings. I say ‘mostly’ because some have had their first coat of primer but haven’t actually been painted yet… they look fine though as long as you don’t look too closely…
Furry painting companion.
Spindles primed, squiggly wooden bits still to do.
In February we stripped the last pieces of wallpaper the house had to offer from the landing on the first floor. The walls are nearly 5m high in this part of the house, so my wild husband rigged up a wallpaper streamer and a scraper attached to a pole to get the job done.
He then painted them (I hate painting walls) while I indulged in my new favourite hobby - framing and hanging pictures using upcycled frames. It’s taken the whole year to get round to hanging everything, but we now have three gallery walls on the top stairs - school photos, family portraits, and foxes :-)
I found the fox tapestry in a charity shop. Someone must have put so much effort into creating it - I just had to give it a home.
My husband also fixed the lights in this part of the house, meaning we have a light outside our bedroom for the first time in seven years.
From about March we cracked on with building the reclaimed brick raised beds that we’d begun the year before. I planted them up with David Austin roses, dahlias, peonies, sweet peas and cosmos, creating a cutting garden that lasted well into the autumn. At one point we were both kneeling in the rain and mud in our old clothes, slapping dirty old bricks onto other dirty old bricks with mortar, when my husband turned to me and said: “do you think any other couples are bricklaying together right now?”. I’d like to think they were.
Always a family affair…
In May, I finally purchased and installed the Ellie Cashman wallpaper I’d been eyeing up for several years. I’m not into interior design trends that require one to switch up the decor every twelve months when you get bored of it - once the wallpaper is up, it’s staying there for the next twenty years. So I like to mull design choices over to make sure it’s something I truly want before I invest.
Painting dark stripes on the walls to better conceal any gaps, gin in hand and slipper-shod.
We also, at our neighbour’s request, extended the garden wall between our two semi-detached houses, and installed a slatted fence along the top.
Original wall on the right, new/old wall on the left, built using bricks left over from our house renovation. We considered chipping out alternate bricks on the right to dovetail in the left, but ain’t no one got time for that kind of malarkey.
We also finally finished off the missing grey panels in the kitchen, seemingly solving the mystery for a decent number of folk on Instagram as to why I’d made such an odd design choice of leaving the white strips…
And I finished wallpapering the downstairs WC with the Cole & Son wallpaper that I’d bought about two years ago.
We didn’t do any DIY at all in the school summer holidays… but we did push a wheelbarrow full of children around Bluedot Festival, ate sardines by the sea in Cascais and custard tarts in Lisbon, camped in Nefyn on the Llyn Peninsula and spent the day on the beach outside the Ty Coch inn, camped next to a wild beach in west Wight for a week, threw a Gatsby-themed party for my 40th birthday party, and finally I spent a long weekend in Ibiza with my girlfriends. So we kept busy…
The main beach in Cascais
Chilling at the Ty Coch along with everyone else in Wales.
Oh, and we did finally move the massive desk that had been sitting in our bedroom since the removal firm abandoned it there seven years ago when we moved in, creating a pretty reading nook on our bay window.
And my husband rewired the decking lights after our electricians fudged the connections to get the job done faster, and they all leaked in the heavy Manchester rain.
In November I de-cluttered the kids’ bedrooms in preparation for the great Christmas toy onslaught. The two younger girls didn’t have the right kind of storage, so we installed upcycled scaffold board shelves for our middle daughter to display her ever-growing book, dinosaur, Lego and craft collection, and I upcycled an eBay chest of drawers to hold the enormous amount of hand-me-down clothes possessed by our three year old.
I used clear Annie Sloan wax on the shelves, and coated the black metal supports with bronze spray paint.
I bought the chest of drawers on eBay for £25 - originally it was black. I used white chalk paint on the wood, and various emulsion paint samples on the wicker panels.
This reminded me how much I enjoy upcycling furniture, so I’m looking forward to doing more of this next year. The world simply doesn’t need more new furniture when there are so many existing pieces waiting to be loved.
In December, my husband installed an electric timer socket at the front of the house, so we could realise one of my Christmas dreams to run twinkly fairy lights through the branches of our little cherry tree and spread festive cheer to passers by. Meanwhile, I have been mostly consuming cheese, stollen and mulled wine… cos even Craig David gets a day off ;-)
I’ve been busy planning all our projects for 2020, so will share those soon. Happy Christmas, DIYers!