Sitting room lights

No sooner than we get a nice smooth ceiling do we make Swiss cheese out of it. The lighting plan for the sitting room is simple but copious. The ceiling has 14 wall washes, 5 task lights and a pendant. Additional lighting will be standard and table lamps. The pendant is in place but 19 holes had to be made. The first job was to mark them, no mean feat as we had to decide what each group was to line up with.

Marking out the lights

Then Andrew got to play use his new toy gadget tool. Actually the variable hole cutter, with debris collector, is brilliant. Not only does it cut the holes perfectly but it also stops  the dust going in your eyes.

Cutting the holes

Once all the holes were drilled we could get the lights up and start to position the angle of the lamps for the wall washes. These won't be finalised until all the decoration is done and the furniture is in.

Fireplace end

Front of house

Mortimer helping with the lights

Lights in

As the room had been plaster skimmed we painted it with two coats of white emulsion to act as a sealer before the coloured coat. I can't believe how this transformed the space back into a room. The only annoyance is that it doesn't look like we've changed much as most of the work is hidden.

But the fireplace looks so much better. Remember this?

Next is to finish painting, cast a new hearth and tile it and put in new skirting boards. I've got to make the curtains (fabric arrived this afternoon), restore a cabinet and sort out flooring. But we're nearly there.

Until next time



Sharon

The Sitting Room so far

The first job was to hack off all the plaster as we were going to use foam board as insulation with plaster board on top. Some of the plaster came off easily, all we needed to do was run a scraper behind it and off it fell. Other areas were much harder and progress was oh so slow. I became best friends with my ear muffs, goggles, mask & thick gloves. What was amazing was the amount of rubble it produced, we lost count of the amount of sacks we filled and number of trips to the dump.

Just some of the rubble bags

We needed to investigate the fireplace as well. We knew that there had been a log burner there before but it had been replace with an electric fire. So first the plaster and render came off.

Fireplace reveal

Although the original brick arch support was intact we're a bit of a 'belt & braces' couple so decided to install a concrete lintel as well. One advantage of this was to square off the opening to give the fireplace a more contemporary feel.

Lintel in place

Clearing out the old brickwork

The fireplace had been altered several times in the past so Andrew decided to clear out all the old and badly put in bricks and rebuild it internally before it gets rendered.

Waiting for the rendering

Until next time.


Sharon

P.S. There should have been some exclamation marks in this but Andrew cleaned my keyboard and this punctuation mark has gone AWOL.  As did the W but that's back so I'm keeping my fingers crossed :)