DIYing for a nice home (DIY in general)

Member Name: dibuzz

Product:	DIY in general
Date:	12/08/01 (398 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: cheaper than professionalss, can be fun, you appreciate it more than if a stranger did it

Disadvantages: hard work, can get in quite a mess, can be dangerous if you aren't careful

When we moved into our new (to us) house it needed a lot of work doing. The big stuff like rewiring and damp-proofing was beyond us but after paying for that money was limited.

As the house had been empty for a while and previously owned by an old woman there wasn't a room that didn't need decorating. We started off by just painting over the paper that was already on upstairs and learned our first lesson. Own brand paint is far inferior to the top brands and it takes more coats and therefore more work to cover a wall properly. We now stick to the good brands.

We couldn't decorate fully downstairs as we had had a damp course so we put up a dado rail all round and papered the top half. When the plaster was dry we emulsioned the bottom half. This isn't ideal but is better than having bare plaster.

Soon came the nightmare jobs. As we stripped under the stairs it all fell down exposing the underside of the stairs. After days spent trying to plaster we asked for advice at our local DIY shop and were told to knock it all off and use plasterboard instead. Why didn't we think of that? It looks great and was so easy to do.

The boys room was another nightmare. There was a built in cupboard which once housed the boiler and water tanks. These had been moved but there were two large wooden supports sticking out 2 feet from the wall. We decided to remove the cupboard and half the plaster came off the wall. Obviously we couldn't leave the supports so we started to try and loosen them and work them free. We assumed they would go about a bricks depth into the wall so when we had loosened the plaster we couldn't understand why they were still stuck fast. After a lot of effort we finally got them to move. They had been painted so as we pulled them out they turned black with years of dirt. They were longer than we thought and after about 10" they were again painted. Suddenly there was a huge crash next door and the sup
ports came free. It turned out that they went right through to next door and they still had the water tank on theirs (well until that day they had). As you can imagine the new neighbours were not popular!

The wall was such a mess that we just lined it with plasterboard on that side.

Another disaster we had was when my father in law decided to remove an archway and square it off. He started at the bottom brick on each side and ended up with a solid arch of 10 bricks on his head.

One room had a disused fireplace and we decided to line it with MDF and put shelves inside to store our stereo and CDs. This was one of our better projects and still looks good.

Our downstairs toilet was an eyesore with peeling yellow painted bricks and an old toilet with a high cistern. The kids were fascinated by the long chain. I decided to tile the walls which took weeks and I made a wooden frame to hide the cistern. This looked lovely when tiled over. Two weeks later the ballcock needed replacing and I realised I had boxed everything off, even tiling over the screws so we had to chip the tiles off to fix it. It never got finished after that.

As our floorboards are not good we used hardboard to make a good surface before carpeting or putting wooden floors down. This made a huge difference and was quite cheap to do.

There are several unfinished jobs on the go and a good proportion is not up to professional standard but there has been a lot of hard work and love gone into it and when you look aroung most jobs that have been done could tell you a story. The work on this house holds many a happy memory for us and I am glad we tried.
We did learn a few things and hopefully we are now better prepared to tackle our next project which is to turn a pantry and coal cellar into a study by knocking down the dividing wall. It looks easy enough.......

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