The flat

Thought I'd post something about the flat my girlfriend (actually fiancée now) and I bought seeing as it has been one of the reasons for the sparseness of my blogging. When we bought the flat we knew that it would require quite a bit of work - every room needed redecorating, a new bathroom and kitchen were required and the flooring in every room had to be replaced. All this might have been quite daunting, but my fiancées dad was keen to lend a hand. While we got on with the important jobs of painting and wallpapering, he was able to fit the bathroom, kitchen and flooring, so you can see it was a fair distribution of labour! The renovation is pretty much entirely done now (it took maybe slightly longer than we'd originally anticipated) - it's really only a few radiator pipe collars that are needed, but to show where we started from here are a few photo's of the flat before we got working on it (it may not look too bad in the pictures, but they don't do the true state it was in justice):

The living room - note the lovely carpet and fireplace! These have since been replaced.

Spare room 1 - this is now blue. This was our main bedroom whilst the room that was to become our bedroom was being used as storage space for all the renovation material.

Spare room 2 - again note the carpet, wallpaper and horrific fireplace. All these are gone. It is  the cats room now.

The kitchen - this had to be gutted. We (well mainly my fiancée) redesigned it ourselves!

The hall - this photo looks far less grotty than it was. More had to be done in this room than you might expect.

The main bedroom - this room actually had to have the least done to it. We repainted the walls and covered up some bizarre rag-rolling on the ceiling and cornicing. However, for the first few months of moving in you couldn't see the floor as it was covered in tools and other renovation paraphernalia. It also now contains a bed. 

The bathroom - obviously! This was also completely gutted and a new bathroom suite installed.

I might post some of the after photo's later, but as you might expect we spent a lot of time in the local B&Qs and travelling to and from the tip.