Out with the old

Our living room was always going to be a big decorating project for us. Every surface needed attention, changing from the before - patterned, papered walls which we hated, a faded painted ceiling and a hideous, ancient, patterned carpet on the floor - to the after, which is our own taste in plain coloured walls, a freshly painted ceiling, the mural across one wall and our own choice of floor, which is not carpet. Having finished work on our lovely new kitchen and with our energies recharged, we always knew that decorating the living room would follow.

Stripping the wallpaper from the walls revealed a host of patchwork repairs that needed covering up but logic dictates that we start at the top, the ceiling, so white paint is rolled on, splashing everything beneath with fine droplets, which we knew would happen and was why we started at the top. Skirting boards around the room are given a fresh coat of paint after peeling back the carpet, the folded over edges of which have been nailed firmly down to the floor, a strange way to fasten a carpet. This reveals some gaps through which cold draughts come whistling up from under the house when it is blowing hard outside, not what we need, so thick beads of sealant are applied to seal the gaps and make the room more airtight. This will likely need more attention when our floor covering goes down, the finishing touch.

Walls are next, the mural (which has already been revealed here) is followed by fresh but plain coloured wallpaper around the rest of the room. There are, as ever, some awkward bits - around the edges of the windows where odd shapes require tricky trimming - but generally the work progresses smoothly over several days. Whilst working on the job the focus tends to be on the next piece, or the next cut, and it is only when the last piece goes up that we suddenly stand back and admire what we have created. So long as one's eyes are blind to the still carpeted floor we have a room that reflects our tastes, simple and bold.

Christmas intervenes with our son Ben and his wife Naomi coming to stay but without their cat, Toby, who is not a good traveller.

Although left home alone we can keep watch on him via a live video link and he seems perfectly relaxed as he wanders about the house and garden.

After Christmas we collect our laminate flooring from the shop then have to carry the ten heavy boxes up the steps to our front door, a task that leaves us gasping for breath and trembly at the knees, so we sit down and do some planning. The strategy for laying the floor involves shuffling large items of furniture across from one side of the room to the other then back again as we lay the flooring in rows across the room. The (horrible) carpet must first be lifted to reveal what we have never seen, the wooden floor boards below, but this can be done in sections with the furniture then being lifted back onto each completed section of the new floor. A small crane might help with this but in its absence muscle power will have to do. Just like with the kitchen rebuild once we start the job we must cope with disruption to our normal pattern of day to day behaviour so the sooner we can finish the better. 

The end of the second day of laying the new laminate flooring sees a sizeable chunk finished. We now have a sequence of moves worked out for each line of planks running across the room from end to end so in theory the rest of the job should go smoothly. As each section of carpet is sliced from end to end, rolled up and taken away it reveals a horrible mix of underlay, some of which has perished into black crumbs and then in another area there's a thick woolly material that looks older than the house itself. The only element that is consistent across the room is that each piece of underlay is nailed to the floor with long carpet tacks or staples all of which must be prized free before work can begin. As one might expect, laying a new floor is pretty tough on the knees too. Nothing is ever simple.

On the positive side the history of the house hidden under the old carpet that is revealed to us is like being on an archeological dig.

Strange scribblings on the floor boards like these must have had some meaning to someone years ago, just as a cave painting would have done to a neolithic hunter. We can only guess at what the writer was trying to tell us. But finally the last plank is laid, the rolled up slices of the hated carpet are carried off to the tip and the history beneath our feet is once again hidden from view. All that remains is to fix an edging trim around the room to cover the expansion gap needed on all laminate floors but visually the job is done. Every last piece of that hated carpet has become landfill.

Looking over the transformation we have brought about it suddenly hits us. Unexpectedly we now have an almost perfect carbon copy of the living room we created in our Carradale home. Some things in life are just not worth changing.

Seagulls & mice

We are well aware that we don't always follow convention when it comes to home decor. Nobody has actually told us this to our faces but we have noticed the expressions of horror, quickly hidden away, on the faces of those visiting.

When we started looking online for wallpaper to put up in our living room we were drawn to something we had tried in our previous house, a mural. For a time we considered painting the wall, something exciting, a work of art that might be visible from the street, but in the end we settled for this sunrise and its five seagulls, made to measure from strips of wallpaper. It is both unusual and quite dramatic, something more usually associated with a public space and therefore unexpected in a home setting. We do not follow convention. For the rest of the living room we have gone for plain colours and finally, at 1205 on Wednesday 13th December, we finished fixing the last strip of wallpaper. A big tick, job done.

Winter is now upon us and a recent cold spell made us grateful for the extra insulation we have had placed around and beneath the house during the last year. This even includes the new central heating pipes running under the floor which have foam tubes around them to keep the heat in. But the question is, for how much longer? The first thing we noticed were the tiny granules of insulation material scattered about in the undercroft (or basement, as some would call it), a clear indication that we have some small visitors. Rodents like field mice will try to find somewhere warmer to hang out in winter, something we would not object to but for their nest building habits. Having gone to such lengths to insulate our rather leaky house it sort of rubs us up the wrong way to think that it is being chewed up to keep a few mice cosy, so eventually we decided to resort to setting traps for them. We chose a humane solution, one that merely captures the creatures inside a metal cage, but sadly the first tiny rodent we found had passed away by morning after eating all the bait inside the cage. (We like to think he was rather elderly and suffered a heart failure.) But on a positive note it did save us the job of carrying him somewhere far away to release him. He was not, however, the field mouse we had expected. This little fellow was a vole, a creature that does not normally make a habit of moving into a house, or so we are told.

The following morning vole No.2 was shuffling around inside one of the traps and this brought into play our release strategy. A ten minute walk away from us we have a wild area, a bit of rainforest woodland, where we like to think a vole will be able to live a long and fruitful life. Here, the cage door is opened and, after a few seconds deep thought, No.2 scuttled off into the wood, disappearing from sight as he dived under the fallen leaves.

The next day this little fellow was tempted into the trap, a field mouse. Again we took him for a walk and opened up the cage on the ground, the doorway to his new world.  Just how many of these tiny creatures will be lured into our baited traps only time will tell. It turns out that they don't like peanut butter - who'd have thought it! - but each one caught means that our underfloor pipe insulation survives a little longer. If we had a dog, which we don't, we'd be taking it for a walk every morning, like most owners do. Rehoming the rodents by walking them to somewhere wild is our own version of this. These tiny creatures may prefer to be inside someone's house in cold weather and the woodland may present something of a challenge to them. For this I apologise profusely but I'm sure they would do the same in my position.