Bathroom Renovation

Hi everyone! You have no idea how relieved and happy I am to be posting this entry on our newly COMPLETED bathroom renovation (completed must be emphasised as I doubted at various points that we'd ever get it completed!) Just for the record, I am NEVER renovating a bathroom like we just have when I'm having to live in the house!

So, here is what the bathroom looked like prior to us completed redesigning and ripping it out. It was really tiny in comparison to the size of the house, there was an ugly big soil stack behind the toilet which basically meant the toilet was almost in the middle of the bathroom....

The room to the right of the bathroom was originally an en suite to the master bedroom when the house was built however the previous owners of the house turned it into a small nursery. We decided when we moved in, to create a big family bathroom with a separate bath and shower encompassing the nursery next door. My very handy OH knocked through the nursery into the bathroom and did the necessary building work to create the shell.

Here he is looking extra pleased with himself as he cut the first hole in the wall!

When designing our bathroom we headed to our local B&Q and booked an appointment with a bathroom designer. We were both really happy with the quality of the designs and we created our perfect bathroom after two design meetings. All of our bathroom suite including tiles were purchased from B&Q (I'll add links further down).

Here are some progress pictures of the bathroom renovation

We had to knock out those lovely (I’m being sarcastic) windows above the doors that we have! 3 down 2 more to go!

My OH's handy work putting up his new stud wall (this part is the extension to the bathroom)!

When we knocked out the boxing around the soil stack, this is how much room was around the toilet!

The new pipe work went into the wall for our fountain taps where the bath now is.

Pipe work was installed in the wall and the shower tray fitted for the walk in shower.

Soil stack was shortened and altered so we didn't need a tall box up to the ceiling around it anymore!

The waterfall tap was installed.

The bathroom was then completely reskimmed

Tiles from B&Q were used throughout the bathroom. We opted for a dark grey stripe to run down the centre of the shower and bath wall.

Click here for the dark grey tiles we used to create the stripe!

Click here for the light grey tiles we used on the walls and the floor

Bath is the Helena bath from B&Q You can find it here

Shower head and valves are Meranti from B&Q You can find it here

The shower screen is fold able and is the Beloya from B&Q You can find it here

The shower tray is the Limski by Cooke & Lewis Find it here

Waterfall bath taps are the Havasu taps by Cooke & Lewis You can find them here

Waterfall basin tap (with LED light) can be found here

Floating sink unit is the Imandra and can be found here

Vanity unit is the Ardenno and can be found here

I hope you like our renovation as much as we do!

Thanks for reading

D x

We're engaged!

Ok so we've now been engaged almost 2 months but I'm still on cloud nine!

Wedding plans are well underway, in fact we don't actually have much else to do in regards planning except we need to buy what we'll both be wearing on the big day... plenty of time to do that.

Our engagement was just perfect for us, we were on our first ever trip to NYC where on Valentine's Day, he got down on one knee and popped the question. It makes me laugh thinking back as after he'd asked me the question, he spent the next 10 minutes blabbering away about how he'd put lots of effort into finding me the perfect ring and how pleased he was with it, all while I'd not even managed to get a word out and he was still on one knee. Of course I said yes but I was quite shell shocked!

We were in this little bubble of bliss afterwards and neither one of us wanted to come back to reality. New York was amazing and we both desperately want to return, we loved every single minute of it and I'm sure at some point we will. 

Our wedding date is set for 17th August 2019, we've got our local church booked and a beautiful reception venue, we just can't wait! I am loving every single minute of the wedding planning and touch wood, it's all ran smoothly so far!

Here's some ring pics... I LOVE it!

4th bedroom into a home office!

Hey everyone!


So far... we've gone from 5 bedrooms down to 4 and to be honest, right now, we don't 4. Whilst we don't 'need' 4 bedrooms we decided to make the most of having the extra room and create a home office in our smallest 4th bedroom.

When we purchased the house the bedroom was used for a young child and with a single bed, it was the perfect size. Here's how it looked (estate agent picture).

Again, one of the issues we discovered with this bedroom was the lack of sockets (1 single I believe was all that was in this room!) The floor wasn't great either, it seemed to dip quite badly in the middle of the room meaning that heavy items we had pushed up against the walls leaned towards the centre of the room!

I had a vision for this room and was willing to 'experiment' with colour... dark ones at that (something I normally wouldn't  do anywhere else in the house)!

We started by stripping the walls which had textured white wallpaper on and as it seems, this was once possibly a girls bedroom!






Once the room was stripped (carpets and all removed) my OH started work on the flooring. He plans on replacing all the floor boards in the house as they're so creaky and the heating pipes have moved with the age of the house so its's extremely noisy especially upstairs!

He had to secure all the pipes down underneath the floorboards and then shave some wood off the joists to get the flooring completely level. I can now say though that it's creak free and level!

Once the floor boards had all been replaced, we chose to lay laminate. We opted for B&Q Geelong Grey Oak laminate flooring. It was incredibly easy to lay and we love the look of it!

Here's how it looks

We made sure we laid the laminate first and then added new skirting boards so that we didn't have to use the laminate trim, that's just our preference!

For the walls, we decided not to re-plaster the room as it's only a home office and the walls weren't too bad so we decided to use lining paper on the walls. The lining paper seemed a lot harder to work with than normal wallpaper especially when then painting over it! We did have a few bubbles appear but once the paint was dry they seamed to disappear.

For the paint, we used Dulux Chic Shadow on 3 walls and then created a beautiful feature wall using Dulux Sapphire Salute.

The Sapphire Salute was a bit daring for me as I'm not usually one for colour and I was concerned that it would make a small room look even smaller. It's safe to say though that I absolutely love it and it's left me wanting more of these dark colours around the house... we'll see!

Another thing my OH did to the room was install 7 LED spot lights. All of our doors upstairs have windows above them and we're slowly taking them out therefore we know it's going to make the landing darker therefore we're adding spot lights wherever we can to ensure extra light on the landing and LED spot lights seem to be working well!

Here is how the office looked once the walls were painted and the flooring had been laid (prior to glossing the skirting boards)

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We needed to purchase an office desk as we didn't have one so we headed to IKEA and created our own using 2 ALEX furniture storage drawers which were £50 each (here's the link http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/storage-furniture/drawer-units-storage-cabinets/alex-drawer-unit-white-art-10192824/) and a table top again from IKEA for £25.

The office desk was one of the most expensive things that we purchased for this room!

We're yet to purchase an office chair so we're currently using my dressing room chair (again from IKEA)!

 We added two white floating shelves onto our feature wall and my OH proudly presents his 'man cave' sign! This room is far from finished but the bulk of it has been done and we're both extremely happy with how it's turned out! It now means we have space to work/chill out at home away from it all. Oh yeah and our office also houses our resident snakes! That's the humongous tank you can begin to see on the left of these pictures... they're not the nicest things to photograph but nonetheless they're a part of the room.

I hope you've enjoyed seeing yet another of our room renovations!

Next on the list is the family bathroom which is being refitted March 2018!

Thank you for reading

Doll xoxo