Redecorating take one

The best feature about the flat is the light. All of the four windows face south-east and the afternoon sun is simply glorious.

However, the internal doors were all dark wood and made the place feel dark and enclosed so one of the first things we did was take them all down. We replaced the kitchen and living room doors with glass paneled ones and the bathroom and bedroom ones with light pine.

We painted the kitchen yellow and found a lovely tile effect vinyl (which, by the way we loved so much we bought a newer version of for our current kitchen and bathroom!) cooking in there in the summer afternoons/evenings while everything was bathed in a golden light was just heavenly.

Now to the bathroom. I mentioned here that we kept the pink suite. We tried to balance it by painting the walls and tiles white and accessorising with silver. I have to say it worked quite well and after a while we stopped noticing that the suite was pink (or perhaps we just got used to it!)

 

The bedroom we painted green to tie in with the forest and fields that were just on our doorstep.

BUT to look at it now it all looks completely different. I'm so excited to show the progress photos.

Here a few things we learnt on the way:

1. Be careful when choosing cheap paint, you may initially save money however there's a chance that you'll have to redo the job later down the line. I have two examples of this and unfortunately they both came from B&Q (although their Colours emulsion is very good). The woodpaint we bought started to peel off the internal window sill and in the bathroom the white tile paint went yellow after a couple of months and started to bubble up in places, then holes appeared and started filling up with water. We bought a paint stripper but actually found it was easier to just peel the paint off. The second lot of paint we bought was from Ronseal and this was much better and was still in place when we finally ripped them off the walls.
2. Just because you paint it, doesn't mean the problem's 'solved'. The previous owners had painted strips of silver paint on the 'feature wall' in the bedroom. We just painted over them with emulsion but after a while we noticed that not only could you see the lines but the paint had crackled. We haven't done anything about it yet so that's something I've yet to tackle.
3. Always prep woodwork properly. I'm noticing now that I'm sanding the wood down that it was previously painted with emulsion. When we last did the wood we buffed it with sandpaper but now I really wish I'd sanded it with the palm sander. Actually, come to think of it, we didn't have a palm sander at the time so that might explain why we could only do a quick buff.
4. Finally - don't go for cheap knotty pine doors. SBB had a pig of a time trying to chop them to size, but after many hours of swearing and one electric planer from Argos that blew up in his face (quite literally!) they were finished and we swore - never again!