Author: Shaun

We pulled out all the old Melamine white shelving we rescued from our old shop fittings and sorted out the best ones for putting into our new bedrooms.
They were a collection of 6inch, 9inch and 15inch both white and brown.

We had decided on a shelf depth of 6inches for all our sehlves. This is deep enough for paperback, hardback books, audio books and some small trays!

We needed 42 lengths of approximately 1.2metres each split into the following sets .

Bedroom 1 : two columns of 8 shelves = 16 shelves
Bedroom 2 : two columns of 6 shelves = 12 shelves
Bedroom 3 : two columns of 7 shelves = 14 shelves

Each bedroom has three vertical uprights (left, middle and right) to fix the shelves to. We have recycled really old brown flake boards (very early version of OSB)!

Hopefully all these shelves will hold our library of old books – really old paperback books- hundreds of them!!

This morning we hired a heavy duty carpet cleaner from B&Q. It is an upright all-in-one hoover, pressure washer and vibrator machine!

The red carpet in bedroom 3 came up with the most dramatic improvements! Bedroom 2 the brown one, was fairly clean already and bedroom 1, the gold bronze, was medium dirty.

All three carpets are now quite lovely!

The underlay came today (ungodly hour of 7:10am this morning!) so that was good! We proceeded to cover the floors in all four rooms with this polyurethane 8mm thick foam costing just £1 per square metre, with a manufacturer’s claim of 5 years of life.

The lounge was the most fiddly to do as it had two doorways to accommodate and the carpet (a closed loop pile in a beige colour) had a very stiff backing!

The three bedrooms were much easier by far as they are all regular rectangle shapes and the carpets are old ones and easy to move and slice.

Bedroom 1 had the gold bronze plain colour,

Bedroom 2 had a plain brown and

Bedroom 3 had a red with white flowers!

We are going to hire a carpet cleaner tomorrow to give the old ones a good spring clean!

We pulled out all our old and left over pieces, from storage, of carpets rescued from previous homes! One of them had a totally “falling apart to dust” foam backing, we took it outside and laid it out to bash it and allow the wind to take the dust away but we resorted to using the heavy duty vacuum cleaner! It is a browny colour for bedroom 2!

A red one which is over 45 years old is for bedroom 3! A new left over piece is, a beige colour, is for the lounge. And finally another bronze goldie colour for bedroom 1.

Tomorrow it is the task of trimming all of them to fit!

The final room, bedroom 3, was completed today!

Bedroom 1 was completed today and also bedroom 2!

Just bedroom 3 to go! Then it’s carpets time!

We completed the Lounge today with the two layers of the hardboard sheets being laid down. The second layer was glued down to minimise slippage.

Bedroom 1 is now two third completed, with the foam and one layer of hardboard down. It was far simpler to do than the Lounge and it was much quicker so hopefully the other bedrooms will not take too long to finish!

The doorways in the corridor had their final white touch up done to create a nice and crisp edging around each door frame.

We were talking today whether a little “mobile” wall would be useful in the corridor to segregate the Lounge area from the piles of boxes being stored in the corridor, it might be painted the lilac colour!

The rooms in the temporary living quarters started having their final flooring laid down. A layer of 50mm polystyrene foam sheets, with two layers of 3.6mm hardboard on top.

The lounge was the first room and it was quite complicated with the doorway into the garden room and garage to fit into plus the air ducting turning the corners as well. We have managed to get the foam down and most of the first layer of the hardboard.

The other rooms should be simpler by far!

Bedroom 3 has all its four walls done in the pale purple colour. It turned out that only one coat was needed, apart from a little touch up on the joining tapes on the plasterboards and corners.

Actually there is one more little job to do .. .. the door frames on bedroom 2 and 3 to complete the white borders!