Category Archives: the living room

gallery indecision sorted

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Jus and I have some great framed pictures that we have collected over the years. They are a mixture of our own photos, and photos or artwork by others that we have collected on our travels. When we go somewhere new we always try to get a piece of artwork by a local artist, it doesn’t have to be expensive just something by someone local that reminds us of the place. It’s something we started a couple of years ago when we went to Barcelona together. It has been fun seeking out local artists on trips since, both abroad and in the UK. All these pictures have been sat in a basket waiting to go on the wall above one of the sofas. Jus and I both love gallery walls, and we kept lying the pictures out on the floor in various arrangements, but just couldn’t come to any decision about where to put them on the wall. Plus after sanding and filling and painting the walls for days I don’t think either of us could face hammering a loads of nails into them.

Then I remembered Ikea do these great little shelves for your pictures, and they are only £8.29 too. This way we get to change our pictures and rotate them as often as we like, this is about a third of the pictures that need to go up! We are on the search for a letter ‘J’ for Jus. They are apparently quite hard to get hold of. We are planning on spraying the letter T another colour but it can stay red for now as it does bring out the red in the pictures. We are both really pleased with them and they got the nod of approval from Tom as well, bonus! 

laying laminate flooring for girls

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We’ve had a few emails with regard to laying our laminate floor in the living and dining rooms so I thought I’d do a bigger post on it and some of the lessons we learnt. In fact hey wait a minute. Jus has been saying she wants to start writing a few posts and this was a big DIY eye opener for both of us. I wasn’t very well at the time so Jus had to take control of this one. It makes sense then for her to tell you all about it!!

So, when Erica told me she had found some laminate that she likes and that we were going to lay it ourselves to save some cash I thought “Great! How hard can it be!?”. Let us just say that actors get paid to smile and make it look easy in the adverts, a little cottage in Knutsford with the blind leading the blind is a whole other story. However, when you are starting from scratch and with a little bit of patience you can learn some handy tricks along the way, and by the end of the second room it was a doddle!

As always, Erica led the way and had already found the best deal for realistic looking wood effect laminate having seen it our friend Jenny’s shop House in Knutsford. The Homebase Richmond Oak Floorboard effect laminate was originally a midrange price choice, but Erica and Tom managed to hunt it out at 20% off, with a further 10% off, also saving money on the underlay, which was half price, in one swooping visit to Homebase. Steal! However buying it at this price did have it’s draw backs and it wasn’t until we first started laying it that we realised there were two slightly different versions of the same product with one type including a black rubber filament on the joins. All this amounted to was that we had to lie a certain line at a time, rubber, no rubber, rubber, no rubber, and so on. Lesson learnt here, be careful when buying sale items! Make sure they are the same batch/type/product before you open the packaging.

I came home one evening to find an eager Erica and very tired Tom making a start on the floor. In preparation for the big floor fitting, we had already stripped the old skirting board from the rooms. In that previous week we had the builders round to screed over the uneven and damaged, but beautifully original, quarry tiles to create a perfectly flat even surface for the laminate…with the odd dog print. After laying enough underlay (with 5mm gaps between each sheet to allow room for the foam to spread under the weight of the floor), they started fitting the slabs of laminate together. Starting in the right hand corner of the room, with the grain of the floor laying towards the daylight into the room, they gently knocked the planks together end to end, making sure that there was enough of a gap where the floor meets the wall so the laminate can expand if needed. One line down, however many too go…sound easy?

(Note from Erica – all health and safety and manual handling enthusiasts please ignore the above picture! I have since treated myself to a lovely workbench and my back is very happy!)

It is recommended that this is a two-man job and the advice could not be more applicable. Not only did we need to take turns sawing the laminate (although this was a job most suited for Tom), you also need the patience of two people. To continue with the rest of the floor each line needs to be slotted and knocked in a piece at a time. By slotting I mean connecting the laminate plank, to the previous line, along the length firstly going under, then up, then in…a manoeuvre that sounds easy enough but requires patience and a firm but tactile touch, hard when you are tired and frustrated! Once slotted, you then do the same with the next piece, leaving a centimetre gap between the two ends so you can knock them together to lock into place along the width.

Ever the organiser, Erica had picked up a specially designed laminate fitting kit from B&Q, a godsend and must have! This includes a specially designed block to slot on the end of the laminate so you can use a hammer without damaging the joins, and subsequently the whole plank. It also includes a piece of metal shaped like the letter ‘s’ that you hook onto the end of the laminate once you reach the wall, giving you enough space to knock the laminate into place with a hammer. However with all the huffing, banging, and broken ends, the laminate planks became more and more precious and the battered plastic block was starting to hinder the process. So, after gaining this tip off a friend, we ended up using laminate cut offs instead! As they slot so neatly onto the planks, you can thwack the cut-off has hard as you like without ruining the delicate fibres of the joins.

We had already finished one room and it was up to Erica and I to finish the living room off in one evening. We started using the usual process but our tired, flimsy arms were not getting us anywhere! For those of you that have had the pleasure of laying your own laminate, you are probably very well acquainted with the ‘knock one plank in, another pops up’ game…and as you can imagine, our patience was starting to wear thin. After some tea and a stare at the floor in despair, we decided to try and fit the planks together another way. Instead of knocking the planks in one by one we decided try and slot the planks in as one big line, after slotting them together width ways. Low and behold, it was a process that suited us girlies much better as it involved a lot less banging and popping!

(Another interruption from Erica  - to all photography enthusiasts apologies for this poor picture quality, it was on my phone, late at night and we had to put the table back in there soon after. Better quality pictures are on their way once the skirting is on.)

We now have a beautiful floor to show our hard work, and it was more then worth it. The only other tip we can give is for you to invest or hire in a circular saw or jigsaw that will enable you to cut the laminate easily in a straight line…especially if you don’t have the strength of a fireman to do the sawing for you! If you fancy saving yourself some money, and have a weekend spare for some hard graft with a friend or two, then we highly recommend you consider laying your own laminate in exchange for dusty hair and a huge sense of accomplishment.

Having lived with the floor for several weeks now, we can also point out how easy it is to keep the floor clean, even with two crazy mutts. No longer needing it’s help after moving into a carpeted house, our Mum gave us a fantastic cleaning tool, a micro fibre flat head mop! As you are advised to avoid spills on your floor (especially within the joins), this mop is the perfect partner as it enables you to swiftly mop the floor using what is a effectively a damp cloth on a stick. Genius. 

Thanks Jus! Your first ever blog post on twosisters! I hope it’s the start of many.

Here’s a little round up of things we learnt

1. If you are laying over tiles put a self levelling compound containing latex over them first to create a flat surface. If you are laying over floor boards make sure none of them are loose and that no nails are sticking up.

2. Make sure you are buying the same batch, or that they will at least fit together!

3. Get the best quality underlay you can afford as this should prolong the life of your laminate and make it quieter and warmer.

4. Remove the skirting boards first if you can (no matter how real it looks that beading is a laminate giveaway), and get the laminate out of it’s packaging 3 days beforehand (or whatever it says on the pack) to let it acclimatise. 

5. Lay the laminate in lines pointing towards the daylight coming into the room and/or along the longest straight wall. It made sense for us to do this anyway as our laminate runs from the front door in the living room through to the back of the house. When you stand at the front door it makes the house look so much bigger. It also meant the laminate lay across the floor boards in the living room giving the floor more strength and less flex.

5. If you can afford to buy or hire an electric saw, or at least get a work bench! Breeze blocks are not recommended! If you can’t hire a saw at least know you will finish the job with arms (sorry, one arm) like Jennifer Aniston, or at least a little more toned then you were! 

5. Be careful when knocking the boards together, even the fitting kits you can buy can damage the end of the boards. We found it better the use a cut off end piece to click onto the board you are fitting and hit that using the block in the fitting kit instead.

6. In smaller rooms, e.g. our living room, it might be easier to slide the pieces in one row together at their short ends first, and then click this long line of boards onto the previous row. This is fiddly and takes patience to get all the boards to click together properly, but we found you are less likely to damage the boards by knocking them together, and it is quieter enabling you to lay laminate well into the night without waking your neighbours up! We also found that sometimes no matter how hard you knocked them together some boards just wouldn’t click together properly end to end. 

So there you have it. A rather large post on laying laminate floor for girls! We hope you find it helpful and it made some sense. Let us know if it doesn’t!!

With regards to the Richmond Laminate, I am so pleased we picked it over some of the cheaper options, it really does look quite real. The finish is textured and not too shiny, and the planks are so convincing, some even have knots that look like they have wood filler in them like a genuine wooden floor. The edges are slightly darker too so it looks like the gaps you get between floorboards. If you want to see it in the flesh go to our friend Jenny’s gorgeous shop House in Knutsford and check out her floor! 

The breath of elephants…

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Wouldn’t want to smell it but I love elephants, and as you may already know, the colour grey. I am terrible for picking paints based on their names. Farrow and Ball do a paint called Elephants Breath, one of their best sellers, and I think the name perfectly describes the colour. When it came to choosing between shades of grey for the living room the name eventually swung it. In true feet first style we just went right on ahead and bought it without trying a tester. Every £3 counts, and we would have only spent even longer procrastinating over colours. So once the coving was up, and the ceiling had had a few coats of dulux supermatt white, our living room was transformed by the breath of elephants! It really is a beautiful colour and changes according to the type of light in the room. I wanted something light, as this is a really bright room all year, but also soft, warm and cosy, and of course grey. This ticks all those boxes and, after finding the farrow and ball eggshell slightly disappointing, I was really happy with their estate emulsion. In some lights it is a bit pinky, or lilac in colour and I did worry this made it a bit too bedroomy at first, but then the light changes and it’s a creamy darker grey again. The next job was to fit the laminate floor which I’ll cover in another post. There is still lots to do, like fitting and painting the skirting boards, fitting a wood burner, repointing the fireplace, stripping the front door and making curtains etc, but we stopped the big jobs in the run up to Christmas, so here the living room is half finished and all dressed up for new years eve. The rug was from Ikea and was only £49.99. I really like it but not as much as the dogs do, they think it is their new bed. So far it is holding up to their dusty paws well! And at that price I can handle having to buy another in the future when the dogs have wrecked this one. The lights are from Laura Ashley and were £17.50 each in their autumn sale. We don’t have an overhead light in this room, it had been removed by a previous owner, and we didn’t replace it because we like the ambience the 3 wall lights create, plus they don’t reflect off the TV! These ceramic shades are so pretty and they cast lovely patterns across the walls.

A sofa full of crisp wrappers

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It was time to say good bye to the ikea sofa, it had done us well but we couldn’t keep squeezing onto it, and I couldn’t keep looking at the brown covers, see that post here, or motivate myself to make more. So guess what, I managed to sell it on ebay for £20, not bad for a free sofa! The £20 went towards the purchase of 2 more sofas. An ebay purchase of, oh yeah that’s right, £25 each. They are cute, boxy, brown, antique looking leather two seaters, and they match, hooray. Although they could do with being slightly bigger, so we can laze about more, they look good in our small living room and make it seem larger. They were described as in need of refurbishment and the seller didn’t lie, although most importantly the leather was not ripped anywhere and, apart from being very dirty when we collected them, was in good condition. They apparently came from a pub or club so when Tom and I got them home we removed about 100 crisp wrappers and other rubbish that had been stuffed down the sides. I can handle the crisp wrappers but don’t know if I’ll ever be able to relax on them properly after finding the toenail! Yuck! And no, it seems people only stuff rubbish and not money down the sides of sofas, so we weren’t quids up. We got Mum round for some all hands on deck cleaning and hoovering. Firstly just with some diluted detergent and then some proper leather cleaner. Tom then buffed them up beautifully for me. Years of practice shining his shoes at work came in handy. With a bit of love and some cushions I think they look lovely and hope you agree. They are comfy too which is a bonus! The leather is a bit scratched and stained here and there but I think that just adds to their well loved look. Some people pay a fortune for well aged leather you know!

the living room fireplace

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Our living room had an ugly but admittedly useful gas fire, which we had disconnected by the plumber and then removed ourselves last year. I put it in the front garden to take to the scrap metal yard, but someone nicked it overnight! People are going crazy for a bit of metal these days! I can understand why though as we weighed in some of the copper pipes we removed from the dining room fireplace and some old copper pans and got about £50 for them, result. However I wouldn’t steal something metal out of someones front garden! I stupidly forgot to take any photos of it before we removed it but you see it in the background of this picture of the dogs.The fire had a wooden surround that had been painted in cream emulsion, yikes, and was very shabby but not so chic. Then it had all been plastered into position, leaving the brick chimney breast visible, thank goodness. The exposed brick was one of the first things we fell in love with in the house. The Cheshire brick is pinky in colour and really nice quality. One of the benefits of living in a terraced house is you can see all the different options you have for renovation in your neighbours houses! One of our neighbours has no surround and just an open fireplace so before ripping this fire out we knew there would a brick arch for a lintel. We did not want a repeat of the lost lintel in the dining room, you can see that post here. So Jus and I got rid of some pent up stress and took a hammer and chisel to the plaster and wooden surround and were left with this.So we carried on hammering away and later, both covered in brick dust and soot, we ended up with this.Next job was to get it properly swept for £65. The chimney sweep smoke tested it and confirmed that it was sealed and had good draw, but that the gap between the hearth and the arch was too tall and the depth of the hole too short for a real fire. It would just let smoke into the room. Damn! It’s never straightforward! Plus the mortar needed changing so it contained lime to help it expand and shrink without cracking in the heat. The plan for both fireplaces was to have wood burners as they are more efficient and less dusty but we were going to have a real fire in it over the winter until we could afford a wood burner. So now we had a big empty hole and it was getting really draughty. Maybe the ugly gas fire wasn’t so bad after all. We decided to temporarily build up the bottom with bricks to raise the fire and see if that worked but cheshire brick is expensive so we waited until the builders were moving a doorway in the dining room and saved some of the bricks from that. Right now we have a grate perched precariously on some bricks and although the smoke goes straight up the chimney, the fire is so small it hardly heats the room. Although I guess it does stop the cold air coming down the chimney when it’s lit. I had envisioned relaxing whilst watching the flames crackle but I am constantly fretting about the fire spitting on the new rug, the dogs stealing burning logs out of it, and the grate falling off my brick tower, so we have hardly lit it at all. Need to start saving hard for a wood burner! 

Time to catch up

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I have a laptop of my own and I have finally uploaded all the photos I wanted to. Hooray! So now there is no excuse to not update on the significant progress we made on the house in the autumn. I had a week off in October so got to work on the living room. Tom and I had removed the delightful false beams, and Jus and Mum had removed the wallpaper on the ceiling and sugar soaped it all. I had fitted coving and now it was my turn to get on the ladder and fill the holes left by the beams and smooth the whole lot over. I find the filling quite satisfying a job to do, and after trying a few different products and on the advice of my mum I gave Polyfilla One Fill a go, and I love it. It does cost a bit more, but it does last, and makes your life so much easier that it was a luxury worth spending out for. (Yes that’s right a luxury to me these days is filler you don’t have to mix yourself, long gone are the days when I considered a luxury a posh face cream or designer handbag.) It’s really light and fluffy and just smooths right on. If you do a good job you don’t really need to sand it, although I found it sands so smoothly it saved time to just spread it on as best I could and then, once it was dry, sanding it quickly with the hand held sander to make the surface smooth and ready for painting. Talking of posh face creams Clarins do a similar product for your face called Instant Smooth Perfecting Touch!  Warning this is a dusty job, so the dogs were kept in the front garden to sniff the people walking past, the windows were wide open (fortunately we had unusually nice weather), and I was kitted up with my dust mask and Tom’s swimming goggles. Well we had spent out on the polyfilla so couldn’t justify DIY goggles too. Not my best look I admit.

A week of annual leave and a lot of sandpaper later…

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I have had a week off and with the help of mother goose for 2 days and Jus over the weekend we have made huge but not very exciting progress on both the dining and living rooms. As I had stripped the wallpaper off the dining room ceiling alone (with images of the injuries I could sustain falling off the dining room table with steamer in hand flashing through my mind) this weekend Jus and Mum returned the favour and stripped the living room ceiling. But not before Tom and I removed the false, yes that’s right false, beams suspended from the ceiling. How did we know they were false? Well the inch wide gaps at either end kind of gave it away. I had been worried about how difficult this might be. I wish I had some better before photos. I had just never felt the need for a photo of them for some reason!It turns out each beam had only a couple of screws holding it into the ceiling. You would think it would make sense to screw these into the actual beams but no they were simply screwed straight into the plaster. Turns out all this time we have merrily sat watching TV we could have been removed from this earth by a fake tasteless beam. What a way to go! All they needed was a little wiggle and nudge and they simply fell out. Taking some of the plaster with it. Apologies as always for the appalling photo quality. Resident photographer Jus and her lovely camera were busy that day so it was up to the iphone to capture the action. She did get some shots post beam removal though.The ceiling is in surprisingly good condition considering the holes from the beams. We have washed it and filled the holes. I put some coving up too to finish it off. Back to work now but Jus off next weeks so she is going to paint it. The dining room ceiling is painted now and the walls have been filled, and sanded, and filled again. I said it had been boring work. Everything has had a lick of Dulux Supermatt White paint and it’s looking pretty fresh in there now and so much lighter. We are still undecided on the colour to go for. It is a dark room and we both love that fresh all white and natural look but I don’t want it looking too harsh or cold. We have decided to keep it white for now until we have done the building work moving one of the doorways in there. Then we are going to pay our local paint shop and spend a fortune on testers no doubt. All in all a productive week of preparation. 

What goes around comes around!

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When we moved into our house lots of friends and family really helped us out with furniture and bits and bobs for the house. One friend gave us a futon and another an old sofa from Ikea. This has been our living room seating for the past 18 months. There is always something more pressing to pay for, and there’s no point buying a nicer sofa when we have walls to plaster and false beams to remove etc (yes that’s right horrible, suspended, skinny, dark false beams). The Ikea sofa was once brown, but had faded to a patchy mixture of brown and orangey brown. I’m not a huge fan of brown. As a child of the 80s I have had my fair share of brown soft furnishings. It isn’t the comfiest of sofas but actually folds down into a good little sofa bed. Handy for when sister number 3 comes to stay. It also has a little table attached, which at first we scorned for it’s sheer ugliness but now we love as it is such a good laptop table. So the sofa had earnt the right to stay for now but needed to sort it’s fashion sense out first. Fortunately the covers are removable. Enter Dylon Fabric Dye. I had envisaged a nice grey colour, what a surprise. Well it had to be darker to cover the brown and I didn’t fancy black, so grey it was. I did a bit of research and it’s recommended the covers are lightened first. Ok so then I had rusty brick coloured covers, even worse then the grey, and fashionable in the 90s! Meantime I had been growing used the stripped sofa, it was so lovely and light and really opened up the room.Now time for the Antique Grey Dylon Dye. Exciting times. I couldn’t wait. So how did they end up?That’s right it turned out dark brown. I couldn’t believe it. But it did make me laugh. After removing the covers I realised how simple their design is and so mother goose has agreed to help me make a new set of covers in a lighter colour. For now we remain stuck in the 80s.