Some changes to our sitting room – Part one

We decided to go straight from having our dining room floor laid to making the changes we wanted in our sitting room. It seemed to make sense to have our neighbour continue more or less straight away with the works for us rather than return at a later date.

Throughout the entire house all the walls and ceilings are smoothly plastered and painted except in the sitting room. The sitting room has plain paper on the walls and textured paper on the ceiling.

We have painted over the paper many times. We have never liked it being papered as in places there are bubbles, lumps and bumps, joins coming up and the textured paper on the ceiling is difficult to paint and goes patchy. We know that the reason it is papered is probably to hide a multitude of sins and we have never wanted to do the work involved in getting the paper off and putting the plaster right afterwards.

We are aware that the paper will probably pull off lumps of plaster and there will be a lot of making good needed. Also the plaster above the fire place has blown and the chimney breast moves when pressed. We think it’s probably the paper and paint holding the plaster on.

This is why we have decided to employ someone to do the work for us. We would also like to put the room back to how it would have been originally with a dado rail and cornice. We would then paint beneath the dado rail in a slightly darker colour.

We are also going to put a moulded strip of wood on top of the square skirting boards to give it a bit of shape and are having a larger, more decorative ceiling rose put up.

We feel these additions will make the sitting room look more special.

As usual the photos don’t really show the imperfections but I thought that I would do before and after photos anyway.

The sitting room before work begins

The fireplace

The opposite wall

A corner of the room

We are hoping the work will start within the next few weeks and are prepared for a lot of upheaval.

Work begins

The day before the work was due to start we emptied the sitting room. As it’s having a new ceiling everything had be taken out. We put as much as we could in our dining room and some bits of furniture upstairs in the spare bedrooms.

The empty room

The plaster board is fixed to the ceiling

On the first day our workforce (our next door neighbour, his brother and his nephew) got the plaster board up ready to start plastering the ceiling on the following day.

On the second day our neighbour and his brother plastered the ceiling. On the third day they started stripping the walls. They took the old, loose, plaster from the chimney breast and exposed the hundred year old brick work. We toyed with the idea of leaving it as a feature but it would look rustic as the pointing was never meant to be seen and therefore quite scruffy.

The original brick chimney breast

As we are trying to make this room look a bit more grand we decided rustic wasn’t in keeping with the look we are trying to achieve.

The paper is now stripped from this wall

This wall is quite solid and they are just going to skim this. The other walls are having plaster board and then new plaster as they are in bad condition.

The brickwork is now under plaster board and the ceiling has had it’s first coat of white paint.

The ceiling will need three coats of white paint. We are now at the end of day four and our neighbour is away at a wedding tomorrow so work will continue next week. I will continue next weeks work in my next post.