House Renovations – The Lounge

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When we bought this house – we knew that we’d have to do an amount of work in every room. It wasn’t in a bad state by any means.

The previous owner had been renting it out, so it was habitable, but was decorated badly, cheaply, as in, cheap laminate floor and magnolia paint, everywhere, apart from two rooms (which were purple and pink).

One of the main criteria for a house when we were looking to buy was that we could move in pretty quickly – having a 6 month old baby at the time, and having to relocate from Liverpool, the last thing we wanted to do was any significant work to the house that might get delayed.

Me and Ashleigh don’t like waiting for things – we’re both quite impulsive, so when it came to redecorating the house, we just cracked on with it. We even roped in family to get things done for us before we arrived – things that couldn’t really be done with Grayson in the house.

I’ll break down each room in to a separate post, starting with the hub of the house, the lounge.

If you know me, you’ll know that there is one thing I cannot stand.

Cables.

They just look messy, no matter how tidy you think they are, I know they are there. It’s probably a bit compulsive of me, but I can’t sit and watch a TV if the cable is hanging down, it needs to be moved out of sight.

So it’ll come as no surprise to hear that the literally the moment we got the keys, the first thing I did was cut holes in the walls for the cables to live in. We have a cupboard under the stairs where all the technology would be living, and the TV was going to be wall mounted along with all the speakers. The plus side of being a homeowner, if you want to cut holes in the walls, you just can (more on this later, when we started moving doors around)

The living room – day one – before I started making a mess. Don’t worry, Grayson didn’t stay there whilst I was creating a dust storm!
Marking out and starting the channelling for the cables. I think at this stage, I thought “Why am I bothering!” – Too late to turn back, though
All done for the first run – this was just breaking the top layers of plaster. You can see the laminate floor in place here, it didn’t last much longer as we ripped that up on the same day
Cables all in place, and channelling plastered back up again. I think there’s about 7 cables in the wall – two HDMI (one for amp, one for spare), power, 3 lots of speaker cables and 1 optical cable, unused, but just in case. Laminate floor removed, too.

This was all one day one – so we called it a day whilst the plaster dried and the dust, literally, settled, on what had been a mammoth DIY day. The next day, we returned to wallpaper (as we were heading back up to Liverpool after). We also painted all the walls, skirting and ceiling, and went and ordered the new flooring for the entire house.

Wallpaper up – painting done. We left the fireplace – but later painted it white as it just didn’t look right being pine coloured, once we’d pained the doors white too.
New carpets in place
The finished feature wall in the lounge – TV is curved and mounted, and has ambient backlights that change based on what you’re watching

Not a cable in sight -which also means – no cables for Grayson to pull. In terms of effort, this room is probably that one that had the most planning (from my point of view, tech wise), but was the quickest to do (2 days).

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