Shady Goings On

Lately we’ve been thinking about what we can do to improve the driveway as it’s not very good looking or practical. We have patchy gravel with a concrete flagstone path made from at the moment we also have a manhole cover for the surface water drain and a few flags covering a drain access that doubles as a vehicle inspection pit.
There are a few options available: fresh gravel, concrete, block-paving, tarmac or pattern impresssed concrete.
Gravel won’t really acheive any of our aims as it’s what we already have.
Concrete is quite plain but it’s quick and easy to lay, cheap and extremely practical. We can also do this ourselves.
Block-paving is next up the list price-wise and is very practical too, it also looks very smart. It can be time consuming to lay though as some bricks have to be ‘chopped’, for instance round the border.
Tarmac is also a good solution as it’s practical and quick to lay, however persitant weeds will push through over time and engine oil will cause it to degrade (so not good for working on the car).
Lastly there is pattern imprinted concrete which is basicly the same as plain concrete but they put a colour on top and use a rumbber print to make it look like real stone.

So far it looks like we’ll be having either the block-paving or pattern impressed concrete.

A few links:
www.presscretenottingham.co.uk
www.cedarscape.co.uk
www.leicestercobblecrete.co.uk

Yes, the staircase is done!
No more sanding, scraping and blasting the old paint off!

I’ll post some photos as soon as I take some but the difference is unbelievable.

This week we’ve been mostly… sanding back the staircase, oh joy! I’ll keep my mough shut the next time I have an idea like this! Although it looks good it’s been such a pain to do. After taking of most of the gloss with a heat gun we were left with a crappy brown covering, some old paint maybe? Anyway the heat gun wouldn’t bring it off, so it was out with the sandpaper.
Well that was a month or so ago and now we’re all but done. Tonight is the final assault! We’ve got to finish a little sanding, just neaten up some filler and replace a section that we took out. We’ll then dust and wipe it all down before using a clear varnish. Two (maybe three) coats of that and it’ll look spot on
It better anyway!
Tomorrow we’ve both got the day off and we’re having carpet fitted.

Also in a few weeks we’ll be having french door fitted at the rear of the house in the living room.

Once agin it’s been some time since last posted… partly due to doing loads of diy until recently anyway. We’ve not done any diy this week but we did get plenty done at the weekend.

Since last time I wrote we’ve given the paintword a second coat, changed the pendant light fitting in the bedroom and finished stipping the banister of paint. The bainister still needs sanding down to bare wood and then treating with a clear varnish or wax.The rest of the woodwork on the staircase needs to have it’s paint stripped and this also needs sanding back.

To help out with this time consuming task we’ve bought ourselves a detail sander. It was only £25 (or there abouts) from B&Q and as it’s their own brand we also got a 3 year warranty for free, so that’s not a bad deal. It’s got a sandpaper triangle that vibrates so that you can get into all the tricky corners, because the front tip usually wears out first you can remove the pad a rotate it round to use the next corner. Cool eh?

We’ve ordered carpet and that’s now arrived at the shop, but we need to finish the hall, landing and bedroom before we can have it fitted. Que ‘to do list’…

• Strip paint from staircase
• Sand back staircase and banister
• Fit iron balusters (yes that’s one from the dictionary)
• Change plug sockets in bedroom
• Fit ceiling spot-lights in hallway
• Refit radiator in bedroom

There’s probably more besides but that’s enough to be getting on with!

It’s been a while since I posted so I though I’d better write something!

Since we got back from holiday we’ve both been really busy at work, and now we’ve kicked off the decorating again.
We’ve now made a start on the master bedroom, well a bit more than that actually… we moved into the spare room so we could empty ours (a luxury not everyone has!) and now we’ve stripped the walls, painted the ceiling and skirting boards and we’re now on with wallpapering.
We’re getting near choosing some colours for the walls. I think we’ll have Roasted Red for the main wall and a lighter colour for the other walls. We’re also thinking about making a stencil for the main wall and painting a silvery design on it.
We’ve also started doing the staircase. We’re stripping the gloss off the wood and sanding it down, we’ll then replace the plywood part of the banister with iron balustrades (or maybe wooden spindles). We’ve already ripped off the plywood from the landing and tried out the look with some balustrades and it looks cool…!

What else?

Well there plenty more for me to talk about but I’ll come back later as I’m off to bed now… but here’s a taster (and a reminer for me!)

• ToughGuy
• GTM Libra roof mod
• Holiday photos
• More Libra stuff like fancy dash systems, led lights, fibreglass splitter…

As the days draw longer we seem to have less and less time to do any DIY, although we don’t do loads on a night it all adds up, however we can’t do much at all any more due to the shortage of daylight hours. It was dark by yhe time I arrived home last night. To make matters worse the clock go back soon (next weekend or maybe the one after?) so we have even less light.
We did get a lot done at the weekend, we finished stripping and painting the skirting boards and door frames and got some wallpaper up.
This coming weekend we’ll finish the wallpapering and maybe even choose a colour for the walls We’re just using lining paper you see, so that we can paint on top and have nice smooth walls.

Getting there….