Renovation - Lounge

The lounge is one of the rooms which has had the most work done in it. Initially it had yellow polyrippled walls, an art deco fireplace, a manky old TV cabinet plastered into the corner, smashed ceiling light and drab uplighters:

The first thing I did was rip up the carpet, good riddance!

I then decided that the fireplace was awful and took a sledgehammer to it. Now, some people really like Art Deco stuff and I’m not averse to it myself but that fireplace in particular wasn’t doing it for me. The chimney had also been removed previously so a fireplace served no practical purpose.

Obviously that TV stand (if you can call it that) had to go, God knows how old it was but it was well past it and wouldn’t have been any good for all my kit anyway. I didn’t think it’d be too hard to take out, ha! It was so old that there were two plaster skims on the walls that had gone on after it had been put in. This meant that a lot of plaster fell off whilst I was getting it out and it went right back to brick at the back of it:

At this point I left things for the builders. They bricked up the fire for me and plastered up the corner where the TV stand had been. They took all the plaster off the back wall as it was shot and then re-skimmed the entire room. This was expensive but worth it as it was the only way to nicely get rid of the polyripple and I though it was worth it seeing as this is the main room of the house for me. I also ran cat5 and cat2 cable runs to upstairs at this point and had them plaster these into the wall for super-neatness:

I undercoated the new plaster and then fit new 7" skirting all round. 7" is a big skirt but that’s what came off and so that’s where the plaster line ran to:

I replaced all the socket covers and light switches and I also inlaid an ethernet socket into the skirting for the network connections to the rest of the house. There’s wireless as well of course but cat5 patches are still very useful, especially since the extended part of the house is at the other side of a 9" exterior wall made of super hard 19th century bricks! I also ran two telephone extensions, one to each of the office and master bedroom upstairs:

I painted the ceiling and then did the walls with Dulux Once Tuscan Terracotta and magnolia for chimney breast. The Dulux Once stuff is quite good but in all honesty it could have easily stood a second coat. I also varnished the new skirting and fit a new ceiling light and three matching uplighters:

Finally I fixed one of the floor joists and then layed down fibreboard underlay and ‘Washed Maple’ laminate flooring finished with maple scotia.

Getting the floor level wasn’t easy as the floorboards are very old and somewhat warped. The hearth was also standing proud of the floorboarding quite considerably and as you can see from the second picture I didn’t even run the fibreboard over it so great was the difference. I also ran a further telephone extension under the trim into the corner of the room for the Sky box:

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