ONE ROOM CHALLENGE | WEEK TWO: THE BEFORES AND NEW FLOORS

Has it only been seven days? It feels both simultaneously like the past week has flown by and also that I’ve spent half my life working on flooring.

I realised after I put my post up last week that I had been a #badBlogger and failed to include any before pictures of the dining room.

The only picture I seem to have of the dining room area before any changes were made is this one from the estate agent listing. As I’ve mentioned before, the previous owners used the dining area of the kitchen as a casual seating area and the conservatory as a dining room. Then there’s this one taken just as we were clearing out the space the night before work on knocking through the wall to the living room started. Hopefully they give a bit of an idea of what the space was like before. Once the building work had been completed we were left with a space like this…When the guys came to work on the floor plan changes I had also asked for the portion of kitchen tile that was in the soon to be dining room to be taken up. However, to save some pennies I didn’t ask them to do any work on finishing the wooden subfloor underneath. I regret that decision now.

The picture below shows how the floorboards looked after the tile was taken up so, before new flooring could be laid, all the leftover adhesive that was stuck to the subfloor needed taking up. I have a small mouse sander and, whilst I thought it wouldn’t exactly be a fun task to crawl around on my knees sanding the floorboards it seemed doable. It wasn’t. Hiring an industrial belt sander then seemed like the thing to do. It wasn’t. The parts of the floorboards that had no adhesive on were super smooth but the leftover adhesive wasn’t budging. I have no idea what tile adhesive was used but it took almost four days just to get the floor back to a clean slate to start lay the new flooring.

In the end my handy helper and I had to resort to hand scraping the adhesive of the floors using brute force and a combination of chisels and “sharp pokey tools” before giving the whole room a final sanding. The end result is smooth floorboards and a sense of amazement that we still have a full complement of fingers and functioning limbs. Don’t try this at home kids! When moving on to putting down the underlay and new flooring I realised my second “error of judgement”. The plan has always been to have continuous flooring laid in the conservatory (which will be used as a casual living room), dining room and the living room. I hadn’t taken into account when thinking how much work needed doing that, as the dining room is in the centre of the three rooms, flooring would need to be laid in all the rooms not just the dining room.

As it is, most of the flooring has been laid over the past three days. There’s still some to do in the living room but that can be left if needs be so I can focus on the dining room. Although admittedly it does look a bit like Crazy Town in the living room at the moment. But that’s Future Amy’s problem… (sorry about all the dreadful pictures BTW. The flooring only got to this stage last night so I didn’t have change to take any shots in daylight before writing this post.) But, BEHOLD MY SHINY NEW FLOORING. I’m excessively excited about this, even if the rest of the place still looks like a building site. The flooring I picked out is the Sotto Caramel Oak Real Wood Top Layer Flooring from B&Q and I used the Diall 3mm Foam Underlay underneath. This picture from B&Q’s website gives a clearer idea of what the flooring looks like in daylight / in a picture not taken by someone who was halfway through a bottle of wine to help get over the trauma of The Week Of Flooring. This flooring project has taken far longer than I initially thought, because apparently forward planning is not within my skill set, so I’m a little behind on where I wanted to be. I have three weekends away over the course of the One Room Challenge so I’d hoped to get a lot more done last week to make up for that.

As it is, the only other progress I’ve made is ordering a new ceiling light fixture, I went with the one from Made.com. Perhaps I should end this post now and actually get on with doing some work in the dining room.

Here’s how the to-do list is looking…

{PROJECT LIST}

• New flooring
• Paint newly plastered walls
• Paint final colour on walls
• New coving / crown molding
• New skirting / base boards
• DIY fauxdenza
• Add in sliding doors between living and dining rooms
• Bring in furniture
• Replace light fixture
• Decorate (rug, artwork etc)

Next up is giving the new plaster a couple of coats of watered down white paint. It’s all glamour over here at the moment!

See you next week, when hopefully there’ll be some slightly more impressive progress to report on.

Don’t forget to check on the progress of the other guest participations over on Calling it Home.