At the end of the summer last year, my partner and I swapped rooms for our home office. This meant that we both needed to redecorate. As I had more stuff/junk, we decided to do mine first. It took us ages, for a number of reasons but we finally finished it before Christmas and I’m really happy with the way things turned out.
Our house is over 150 years old and it’s had a lot of DIY done to it over the years, some good, some bad, some very, very ugly. (Artex, I’m looking at you). All of this means that every bit of work we do on our house causes us a real headache and generally takes twice as long as it should.
In my office, we took down part of a built in cupboard to make way for some shelving and to increase the space in the room. We repainted the walls, ceiling and woodwork, including the remaining built in cupboards and we swapped the curtains for a new blind.
One wall was in a bit of a mess. It was the original wall and was pretty uneven. We probably should’ve had the walls replastered, but as we were on a budget, we decided to try the Polycell Smoothover instead. It’s not an easy task, but it is definitely worth it. While it isn’t as good as having the wall plastered, it is a lot quicker and easier. While stripping the wallpaper, part of the plasterwork came off the chimney breast, right down to the brick work underneath. To repair it, we used the Polycell Deep Gap Polyfilla. We didn’t do anything fancy to it, other than layer up the Polyfilla. It worked a treat and we were able to finish it off quite nicely, without any fancy tools. Then it came time to paint. We repainted half the room and then I decided that I didn’t like it. It was too blue and I wanted a grey colour. In the end, I went for Dulux Night Jewels 5 and I love it! It’s really calming. We painted the woodwork using Milk White and it really compliments the grey.
One thing I did learn, after painting the entire room using a satin paint, is that if your walls have imperfections, then you should you use matt paint as it’ll help to hide the imperfections. To be honest, there are so many imperfections in the walls that I don’t think any type of paint would hide them!
Fortunately, the office my partner now uses doesn’t need this type of work, as we had the walls replastered when we moved in, though we’re not redecorating that just yet. I need to get over doing my office! Do you find redecorating completely exhausting? Or is that just me?!