Week 27 – finishing first floor

The vouchers have arrived from IKEA, so we had to go back to spend the money! Actually, I needed some blinds and the utensil rails and other cabinet accessories. So off we went.

Going to IKEA is a whole day’s outing. You can’t just go there for a couple of hours – by the time you get through the checkout, half (if not most) of your day’s gone. Also, you end up buying hundreds of things that you don’t really need, but they’re such a good value – then at the checkout you wonder why the total amount is so high..

Anyway, I got what I wanted – blinds for the balcony doors & windows, utensil rails, shelves & hooks, lights and so on. Then I got the lights for the living room – some from Habitat, some from John Lewis. I had to take back one of them because it just did not work properly with the dimmer we’d already installed. Such a shame, it looked really cool.

Having installed the lights, it was time to tackle the radiator covers. I designed a wooden frame made of iroko, which surrounds the radiator. To cover the front of the radiator another frame, covered with hessian or linen, is pushed into the iroko frame. The good thing about this design is that it looks good and the heat can easily come through the material. Also, the iroko frame provides a shelf and a solid frame-work into which to push the front cover – and of course the radiator can’t be seen. We actually used two pieces of iroko (some leftovers from the bathroom project) which we attached to eachother with pieces of dowel. We left a small gap between the two pieces of wood to allow for air circulation. I’d say that this is a very cheap and effective way of covering radiators – we are very pleased with the result.

The sitting room is almost finished – I’ll need to make some sliding curtain panels and a picture drawn of lights above the sofa – then we’ll be done. I’ll get some materials this weekend both for the curtain panels and for the picture. I’ll explain this later.

In the meantime I’ve started to decorate the hallway. Again, I’ll need to do at least three coats of paint – such a pain. Then the staircase needs to be painted so that the carpet can be laid (at last!). We’ll also need to do something with the hallway on the ground floor. It’s quite long and a bit narrow – but it has potential space for plenty of storage, I think. I’ll need to design it and get on with it asap.