Seven days ago, we rolled up our sleeves and started the ultimate DIY project. You see we’ve upped sticks and moved further down the coast to Shoreham-by-Sea, to take part in what must be our biggest fixer upper experience. So without doubt, we will now be cluttering your social network feeds with shiny, happy scenes on how well we are doing fixing up an old house.
So all good right? Well not entirely, it’s an old place and we are a little rusty on DIY skills. Plus, there’s currently no kitchen, so odds are blogging about food might be on the slim side these next few weeks.
We started with the floors. We’ve always wanted big dark stripped down floorboards, like we’d seen in all those fancy magazines. That should be easy to acheive? Just rip up the carpet, a quick rub with some sandpaper and job done…oh, how wrong we were.
The carpets were pink, so Barbie or an old lady with bad taste clearly lived here before us. They needed to go, so off we went ripping it up and pretending we weren’t inhaling 20 years of dust. We discovered chipboard under it. Yes that’s chipboard, not big lovely solid wood floorboards. Two hours later and garden filled with chipboard, we finally got down to the floorboards. Only there were holes everywhere, hence the chipboard. By this time, our dreams of a large wooden floor were dwindling quickly. Secretly, I was now thinking that maybe pink carpet wasn’t such a bad idea.
A trip to our old friends at the reclaimed timber yard was clearly in order. We manged to find loads of matching floorboards to fill the holes. Bingo right? We’ll let’s say, I learnt a valuable lesson to never nail floorboards down in the middle. It’s likely there’s a water pipe there and you’ll knock a nail into it…or three nails, on three separate occasions if you’re me.
Sanding the floorboards was fairly easy, but super boring. Up and down the grain of the wood all day long, only breaking the mundane task when you get to change sandpaper. Although, I did get a top tip from a mate to mix the sawdust with a bit of PVA to make a natural wood filler. You just rub it into the gaps and carry on sanding. Genius.
After a spot of varnishing we managed to whip those floors back into shape. Whilst it was hard work, it was well worth it. The floor turned out great and I now have a new best friend in the local plumber. Plus, I have a garden full of pink carpet, give me a shout if you’d like it.
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