Home Improvement Central

It's funny how we seem to do things when they aren't planned.

For example, Mick's knee op was delayed a week, so we set up our office how we wanted it.

Now that we returned from our holidays early we made some more progress with our house.

There is a little sitting area beside our dining room which hasn't been set up properly as yet.  One wall has double doors into my sewing room with built in bookcases either side which we have ignored so far. On the other main wall we would like to add a gas heater, so we can just heat our main everyday living area rather than heat the whole house with the central heating and I still have a lot of my green depression glass that is in boxes.....oh.....and books.......We had a whole room full of boxes of books.  We had many bookcases at our old house and they were all full.  As the task of going through them all was to too hard at the time, they all came with us........and have been boxed up for three years.

Back in April we bought two display units at Ikea to put either side of our new heater, which will be built into a chimney breast......but that won't be happening until the lead up to next winter. We also bought a small sofa to add to the seating.

Here is the wall looking nice and bare, ready for the cupboards, but after our electrician friend moved some power points for us.

We seem to have quite a good routine worked out for assembling Ikea furniture.  I am the nurse reading the instructions and passing parts and fixings to Mick the surgeon.  It works well for us.

That looks a bit better.  Mick's Dad's desk fits nicely for the time being, until we install the heater.

The next job was to fill the cabinets.  There has been quite a bit of just "putting" at this stage, to get things out of boxes...... I think I failed to mention that we have another room full of boxes of "Stuff" as well.

We plan to replace one of the timber shelves in each of the display units with glass and install some ultra violet lights to highlight my uranium glass pieces.....but that is for another day.

We ventured into the "Book Room" and started opening boxes.  We have filled our two book cases quickly as well as the side of the desk.  It was quite a task going through all the books.  Some were easy to part with...as in you wonder why we even have them.....but some were really hard to let go of.  Books I've had since my teens, books that were my Grandmother's, beautiful old 1930s girls' annual and so many others.  I'm sure some have gone that shouldn't have, as we went through most, but not every single one, but that is just how it is.  (Fortunately, I had a second look through one box and our bible that was given to us at our wedding by the family rector and my Grandmother's bible are still here.) Anyway, Lifeline have received about thirty good sized boxes of books for their book fair in October and we have a manageable number of books.  There is still a bit of sorting to do with those that are left, but, once again, that is for another day.

It's starting to look a bit better and quite cosy.  We don't do minimalist very well.  We did look into having custom glass doors made for the bookcases, but the price was a bit too steep to warrant it.  We'll just have to dust.

So, once the boxes of books were all gone we had a clean slate in one of the bedrooms.  The following weekend we made progress there.  I think I've prattled long enough for one day, so I'll share that soon.