Moving and stuff

I haven’t been posting in a while… we moved in! that took all our time and energy, and then some.

Everything is still a mess… but some things also advanced since I last posted. I should have taken a picture of the attic before we filled it with stuff, but alas that did not happen. I think. Will check the camera. I think I could not catch it with daylight, which is often a concern in winter at this latitude.

This is the best I could find, when I was painting the front rooms' mouldings

So the attic got finished (paint on the walls and beams, floor placing and finishing, including baseboard), well, sorta, still have to install a wall lamp on the corner.

Living rooms #1 and #2* (AKA front rooms) got painted, the floor scrubbed (and scrubbed again). We have not installed the mouldings yet (see photo above), we bought them and I painted them a cream colour, and they’re back in the box. We will probably wait until things have settled a bit to put more cables along the edge, like speakers and such, which we are not sure where to put yet. Once the furniture is in place it’ll be easier to decide. We hope.

Moving big furniture in through the window

The “kitchen”, which will eventually be living room #3 (you could say it is just one long, narrow living room*) is sorta cleaned up and the ceiling is still opened up with all the cabling visible. Not finished up with this so it’ll stay like that for a bit. Now the entire surface is full of boxes, homeless kitchen stuff and the dining room table!

Big mess in... not so little kitchen

Now every single room is filled with partially mounted furniture and boxes upon boxes of stuff (SO MUCH stuff! I have way too many hobbies and... probably plan to add more).

* #1 is street-side and has a nice arched window. It still has a mantlepiece and we plan to install a gas fireplace in the future. Here comes nice art-deco furniture and probably my antique desk and the treadle sewing machine. And some seats. Right now it is stuffed with two huge-ass sofas, the TV, the art deco furniture and three coffee tables (two small ones under the TV). It will stay so until we make a new kitchen in the back building.

Mid-move, it is even more stuffed now

#2 is separated from #1 by an arch (formerly with double or triple glass doors, now partially disappeared, we found some remnants in the attic). It is narrower than #1 (the hall adjacent widens for the staircase). Here we will put lots of large cupboards and bookshelves. We toyed with calling it library but it is too pretentious. Not much more will fit. Now you can barely pass through.

Started to put up cupboards

#3, originally, and still now, a kitchen, is separated from #2 by double glass doors. Very damaged by a dog in the past. I half-heartedly fixed them a bit some time ago, still work to do and unfortunately due to the heavy damage they will have to be painted (on the #3 side). I will use black. The door that goes to the back building, future laundry and kitchen, will also need to be fixed and painted on the #3 side. The floor in all three livings is coloured terrazzo tiles with motifs, the motif in the kitchen is quite nice.

We still have to put up some kitchen cabinets we had temporarily taken down.
They were already here when we bought the house, and look like they have
been recycled from elsewhere at least once.

This temporary kitchen is still better than the “kitchen” we previously had in our apartment (one story another house from the 30’s, larger -our story was 100 square metres- but barely fixed, let’s not talk about the “bathroom”).

We have started putting stuff together, I will try to take some better pictures tomorrow (Saturday) with daylight. We also have to finish cleaning up our old apartment so we may not have much time left.

Inherited oil painting, I love it

Loki

Him Diamond

We're exhausted! Working a lot lately... :)

Mostly pictures:

Pim concentrated on the front rooms plaster finishing.
Lots of work here.

I am anxious to have a washbasin! started working on the vanity.
I give two layers of thick shellac to all the bathroom furniture,
inside and out.

Drilling holes for plumbing.

Old houses, uneven floors. I stacked popsicle sticks until the vanity was level.

Then I lengthened the legs with layers of them + PVA glue.
I did smooth them and paint them later, so the fix is nearly invisible.

The vanity marble was very scratched and stained.
There is a large, deep rust stain that I won't be able to remove,
we're just placing the washbasin on top!

After a lot of work with diamond polishing pads.

And more. I am using grit 60 through 400.I have finer grits, but I doubt if I am gonna go over 800,
the windowsill is just honed and I like it like that.

We also drilled the holes for the plumbing on the marble.
Diamond tools FTW.

We were unaware of templates for core drills, I just read about them yesterday.
Too late to order any, so we made our own with a piece of OSB, which worked
perfectly. You only need to use it until you have a groove (first pic).

Drilling, marking, drilling.

One 5 cm hole for the drain, two 1 cm holes for cold and warm water.

I also worked on the floorboards, bedroom and landing.
I wasn't happy with the finishing (dust sticks to the old finish like nobody's business, bad since the house is still super dusty).

The more I use shellac the more I like it (looks and performance).
So I vacuumed, cleaned the dust with warm water only (I wrung the microfibre cloth as much as possible - it dried fast) then applied a thick layer of shellac.

I worked on a continuous length of floorboard from end to end. Started with one at a time, ended up daring to tackle 4 at a time. Working fast, it works great, and looks very good so far.

No pictures yet.

Paint and ceilings

Since Pim finally decided that all the cables are already in place (the last one he thought of is a special cable for future solar panels), work closing up the ceiling on the front rooms has started:

Preserving the medallion

The amount of cables, and pipes, is mind-boggling
The house had only barely-updated, minimal 30's wiring

This part has advanced fast

Meanwhile, upstairs, just more tedious painting:

The attic is nearly finished
I will take more pictures in daylight

Paint

Since we need to start painting behind radiators before we place them, even though generally speaking it is too early to start painting the walls, we have chosen and bought some more paint. We chose two shades of green (dark and light, dark for the ceiling, I'm having some sort of little obsession here) for the knitting and library rooms. Once we got home and I marked the pots of paint, I was happy to see I got quite a match with the younger and older leaves of the nasturtium growing between the concrete cracks:

Dulux Indian Ivy 5

Dulux Indian Ivy 2

A medallion for the bedroom primed white (will stay white)

Wide moulding for the bedroom primed white (will stay white)

Aïda priming the bathroom ceiling (some green mixed with the primer)

Bathroom

Bathroom. The ceiling is a lichen/sage green, but I figured a
primer in  the general direction of green would be good enough,
especially since we only got a litre of paint.

We thinned the paint with a little water,
and we had just a little left over that will
come in handy for retouches.
The green primer certainly helped.

Priming the bedroom ceiling with primer mixed with some dark taupe paint.

Priming the entryway ceiling with the same mix.
 I actually like this shade so will probably give
another layer of this mix for the last layer.

Laying central heating pipes and isolation in the knitting room.

Plasterboard attached to polyurethane (Eurothane  G)
for thermal isolation and finishing, plus a layer of
 rockwool (partywall) behind it for sound insulation.

Windowsill

Brackets for the radiator

New furniture - mostly a rant of a post, it happens now and then

I am ready to inflict dreadfullest pictures upon the world, once again! (You can as well skip all this and wait for some better shots I plan to take this weekend).

  

How beautiful is that? some bits brought to the house today

Excuse the quality of most of the pictures I have posted so far, taken with my phone. Most of the time I am around the house I don't bring the big guns. It will happen, eventually, promise. What is posted so far, and still will for a long while I guess, is mostly progress pictures of rubbly rooms that wouldn't benefit all that much from a quality camera, I'm afraid.

Anyway...

This last weekend I went flea-shop-hunting with my flatmate Aïda, looking for a simple chandelier for a DIY project. I did not find a suitable one, but, of course, you guess it? I found something else. Some amazingly beautiful oak, marble, mirror and glass furniture, of a relatively sober Art Déco influenced style that was very popular in this region. 20's to 30's. And for a good price (an apparent lack of interest in Belgium makes for cheaper prices than I'm used to). I snapped a few dreadful pictures (first two pics) with my phone (it performs in a  particularly dismal way in a dark environment), talked Pim into buying it (no small feat, to convince Pim in favour of yet more old furniture that we don't strictly need), and today he and Aïda (I work far away and would never get there in time) went to buy it and bring some pieces to the house (the rest will be coming in further installments).

Exquisite fluted details

Carving, the glass doors are beveled 

In the shop there's a whole dining room: chairs, table, console and vitrine. I know it is sad to separate furniture siblings, but it is sold separately, and we are not getting the table and chairs. They are rather uneventful compared to the rest, I honestly prefer the table and chairs we currently have, and I would place one and the other bit on opposite sides of the house anyway. So only console and vitrine it is. We will place them in the street side, ground floor room. Which needs to be named. Parlor? Sitting room? Living room 1? Living room 3? Front living? Really Cool Green Room? I don't know.

From day 1 this room will have Nice Furniture, except for an Ikea bookshelf which will be eventually replaced, and some day it will have a gas fire stove built into the Déco-ish marble mantlepiece. I think it will be my favourite room. I shall keep my knitting basket and many ferns there. Knitting room? I like that ;)

Hi! that's me

The bathroom (a bedroom originally) furniture we got a while ago is of the same style, if slightly less refined in my opinion. I have posted some (bad) pics before, but I am always ready for more, I hope you are as well. This is the closet for the bathroom: