The hubby and I have been thinking about redecorating our lounge for months, but couldn’t decide quite how far to go. Should we just change the carpet and give the walls a lick of paint, or should we change our old but very comfy furniture?

 

Unable to make a decision we kept putting it on the back burner and got on with doing something more interesting instead.

But it kept popping back in our minds, when a spring broke in the base of one of the sofas, when it got a bit nippy & we needed to light the gas fire (which wasn’t the easiest of procedures), when we had to tuck the curtains behind the radiator to stop the heat from it flying out the window, and when the repair on the ceiling, where someone had put their foot through from the floor above, started cracking.

After our return from Berlin, we knew we had a clearish couple of months, so the time had come to make some decisions. 😬

Having always been a lover of a list, we made a hit list and a keep list to help us :-

Hit List

1. The old gas fire inherited when we bought the house. – Although it looked beautiful and made the room cozy when it was lit, it was cumbersome to light it and was a bit old fashioned.
2. The carpet – The hubby has always thought it was too light and I did spend a lot of time trying to get stains from spillages out of it.
3. The sofas – Comfy as they were, they were over 20 years old, had had three sets of new covers, and one was now broken.
4. The radiators – Both probably originals from when the house was built (40 years ago). One sat under the large window & behind a sofa, the other behind a chair. So pretty useless in terms of heating the room.
5. Lights – We’d had them a long time so maybe time for a change. 🤷‍♀️
6. Tables – Although solid wood we had refurbished them with a new paint job & they had served us a good few years
7. Curtains – We bought a very cheap pair when we first moved in just to get something up at the window. 10 years on they were still there 🤣

Keep List

There wasn’t an awful lot left to save.

1. TV – Its a good size and not very old and does everything we need and probably more that we don’t understand.
2. Sound System – Might be a few years old, but works perfectly well for us and the wires are buried in the walls so needed to stay put.
3. Cabinets – Our sideboard and cabinet are quite solid heavy wood. We do still love them and replacing them would add to the seemingly ever growing budget.

Mmm it was looking like a total refit 😬😬😬 Where to start?

Furniture seems to have such a loooong expected delivery time, so once we’d decided on a colour scheme new sofas were 1st on the agenda. That in itself is not easy, with no furniture showrooms very close by. We found lots online, but there’s nothing like plonking your bum on one to test its comfiness. The Besties had recently treated themselves to a beautiful new suite, which was also very comfy. Having worked for a sofa manufacturer for many a long year, he knows a thing or two about quality, so we cheekily asked them if they minded if we ordered the same style ………. Of course they didn’t ( love them 🥰 ).

With an 8 – 9 week delivery time it was quite a relief to have set the ball rolling. Now to crack on with the rest. The old square fire came out, leaving the wrong size hole in the wall for the thinner oblong one I was after. It’s a good job my hubby loves me as he now had to brick the hole up to fit the new fire. We also had a multitude of cables behind the sideboard, half of which we possibly didn’t need anymore, and he had the job of deciding which to keep and sinking them in the wall for me 😜.

We enlisted the help of Li Li to strip the remainder of the old wallpaper off and of our son in law to move the furniture ready for the plasterer to plaster over those sunken cables and skim the cracked artexed ceiling.

Then everything ground to a halt for almost a week waiting for the plaster to dry.

We were already two weeks into the project so whilst we were waiting we went in search of wallpaper, paint and lighting. Fortunately most of the time we have similar tastes (or he just agrees with me for a quiet life 🤷‍♀️). The wallpaper was easy, the paint we were keeping the same colour so even easier, but the lighting we just couldn’t agree so it had to be put on hold.

Both the old hidden radiators came out and our lovely, qualified plumber Godson came and fitted a new vertical, more efficient one for us. Gosh does it make a difference. For one it throws out more heat than the old two combined and it’s also now heating the room rather than flowing out the window or heating the back of a sofa. Perfect.

As we entered week three, the hubby painted the ceiling. The artex although disliked by the son in law had never really bothered us, but our new flat freshly painted one does actually look a lot nicer. Now to tackle our least favourite job ……… wallpapering. We do our best, but never seem to get it quite right. There’s usually a little bit that niggles at us for ages. BUT for this one we had to paste the wall rather than the paper and it went up remarkably well. We’ve amazingly matched the pattern perfectly and you can’t see any of the joins 👏👏👏👏. It was all done in a morning and looks even better up than it did in the shop 🥰

By week four we could start putting at least some of the room back together. The tv went back up on the wall and the new fire was in situ, looking a lot sleeker than the old one and with a remote control  inch easier to control. The necessary tv and broadband boxes now had their own floating cabinet and their wires hidden in the wall made everything a bit neater. The hubby may curse me when I make suggestions, but he always comes up trumps and in the end usually loves the results himself 😘.

The new coffee table and nest of smaller tables arrived and joined the contents of the cabinets in the spare room and whilst we were still debating lighting, we now had to also decide on carpet. We totally agreed on the density of the carpet, just couldn’t quite agree on the colour. He wanted something so much darker than we’d had before and with it being a large room, I was concerned it might be too dark, but as we were entering week five I succumbed to his choice and kept my fingers crossed.

With the order in we had a week to wait for delivery and fitting and we needed to turn our attention back to the lighting and on to curtains and curtain pole. Back we trotted around the local diy stores looking and re looking, debating and re debating. We were agreed we needed a ceiling light, a standard lamp and a table lamp. To find a style with all three did narrow down our choices 👍 and in the end we settled on the design I’d liked from the outset. But hey I’m not scoring points as he won the carpet colour debate 🤣🤣🤣

At the end of week five we had a surprise phone call to say the sofas were going to be delivered the following weekend 😄. Exciting but it meant a heavy week ahead. Tuesday evening we had to clear all the furniture out of our lounge and our daughters lounge as we were both having new carpets fitted 🥵🥵. Obviously Wednesday evening it all had to got back in again 🥵🥵. Thursday our old furniture was collected by the council and we were able to bring the coffee tables in and put the lights in place. Then the task of re filling our two cabinets, whilst trying to get rid of any junk, unnecessary paperwork and gadgets as we went. With another couple of days before the sofas arrived we were reduced to watching tv sitting on a couple of dining chairs. Comfy as they are for sitting at the table, they are not so great for snuggling in front of the tv. Oh well we were nearly there.

Two days later and with the rest of the family away on a camping weekend, we were finally snuggled on our new sofa, glass of celebration wine in hand 🥂.

It’s the first time we’ve redecorated the lounge in six years. It has been a total transformation and a bit of a long slog, but the end result has made it worth it.

A cozy space to retire to at the end of a busy day or when we need some quiet time away from the hustle and bustle of our busy household.