Changing rooms

By popular demand I've decided to post some "after" photos of our new flat. I hope you enjoy our handiwork.

This is the "red room" and was the first room to be painted (see here for comparison) - the fireplace is gone and the hole it left was plastered over and covered by a bookcase. As can be seen it is supposed to be the cats room.

The "blue room" - this was our main bedroom for the first few months in the flat (see here for comparison).

The living room - there's a brand new fireplace and the fancy engineered wood floor that we laid (see here for comparison)

The bathroom - the first major job to be completed in the flat was toilet and sink going in (see here for comparison)

The kitchen (see here for comparison) - this was taken just before our flatwarming, which is why there's a food spread out. It's a Magnet kitchen (but bought from Andersons for far cheaper than the standard Magnet price, so we'd definitely recommend them). Note the range cooker - there's a story to that which probably warrants a whole blogpost to itself, but here I'll just say that it was interesting getting it into the flat on an icy day last December.

The hall - the same flooring from the living extends through to the hall. It's taken from the opposite angle to the comparison picture, but where the hall narrows on the left there used to be a blocked off ceiling cupboard/loft space that extended to level with the pantry cupboards. The far door goes into a cupboard that was originally only accessible from the kitchen, but which we knocked through.

Last, but not least, the main bedroom - we actually did least to this room (see here for comparison). We painted the whole thing, but didn't do anything to the floor (this is a potential future project). Note that the cats appear to have claimed the bed as their own!

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.