Renovation - Dining Room

This is the dining room, or what would have been the kitchen before the house was extended. Initially I really wasn’t going to do much at all to this room, ha! I ended up doing the entire thing! The room originally had green walls, a dark cherry style laminate, fitted cupboards and a range.

To expand on the range, it isn’t original, it was installed in the 40s. You may be thinking ‘thar’ll be wuth a bob a two that’ and yes, it probably is. I had planned to sell it to help pay for the building work because I really don’t like it but this didn’t come off. I think if it was out and in a barn or something where someone could have just loaded it into a van and taken it to a reclamation yard then getting shut of it would have been easy.

However, I couldn’t find anyone willing to actually take it out and I didn’t dare do it myself for fear of bringing half the chimney down with it (having now gained 10 months experience of ripping stuff out I’d probably have a go now if it wasn’t too late…). I do know that some people lust after these things and it’s positively their mid-life ambition to get one put in their house—well this one is rusty, damp smelling, sooty, useless (chimney is blocked up) and gaudy. So, it’s still there. You just can’t see it anymore… :)

I decided to rip out the fitted cupboards to make the room bigger, I suppose they would have been for plates and things when the room was a kitchen. This made quite a mess, and as with the upstairs rooms the ceiling ran to the line of the cupboards leaving me with two big holes in the ceiling to patch. A lot of plaster also fell off the chimney breast when the frames came out but I managed to get the builders to patch that for me.

I had to do a lot of making good in the new alcoves as all the shelving in the cupboards was joined to wooden wall plugs which each left a big hole when I pulled them out.

Once the walls in the alcoves were as smooth as they were getting I undercoated them with Polycell base coat which is supposed to provide a good foundation over crappy walls. I wouldn’t recommend it though, it was a sod to paint over!

I also fit new skirting to the alcoves which unfortunately doesn’t match that well, I think there’s actually four different types of skirt in that room now altogether!

The walls in this room are polyrippled, which is horrible. I considered grinding it off like I did on the stairs but that made such a lot of dust I decided against it. I also considered trying to skim it myself with new plaster for all of five minutes. In the end it got left so is still polyrippled!

I re-painted the ceiling and then did the walls magnolia. I also fit a new light, switches and plug sockets and lifted the old laminate.

I then laid new ‘Pier Oak’ laminate finished with red oak scotia.

Finally I constructed a cover for the range out of tounge and groove and some baton. I decided this was the best alternative for the range as it’s still there as an asset for selling the house in the future but I don’t have to look at it and I can pretend it’s not there!

I fixed the range cover into place over the new laminate, varnished it and finally made a cover for the hearth.

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