At long last.....!!

Have you all been waiting with baited breath?  No, I don't suppose you have!  But given that we started refurbishing the lounge back in February, it has been a long wait!  In a way, you need to go back even further as the first thing we did was to have a fireplace installed and change the wood burner.  We did that in June 2013!  Then the next step was to open up the staircase which we did in December 2014!

So let me remind you of what was......

The photo above shows the old wood burner which stood in front of the wall, behind which must have been the original fireplace that had obviously been removed some years before.

And the next photo shows the blocked in staircase and panelled wall (taken minutes before Les began dismantling it!)

And just to remind you of the rest of the lounge as it was, here is this panoramic photo taken in February 2013.  (Don't forget you can click on the photos to enlarge them)

And here is a panoramic photo taken this afternoon!

Needless to say, Danny and I are very pleased with our handiwork and it was well worth the wait.  In particular, I am so pleased with how the curtains look, so much so that I followed them up with a sewing spree of making four scatter cushion covers and a table runner, which can be seen more closely in the photos below...

And just a couple of other close-ups; the "decal" on the wall with John Lennon's wonderful sentiments from the song Imagine and the new wall lights on the walls adjacent to the fireplace.

There are still things to do but we will do them in good time.  For example, we want to find proper throws for the sofas that will stop them from being covered in dog hair that I have to vacuum up pretty much on a daily basis!  And we want curtains to cover the doors leading to the study and to the hallway.  (My curtain-making days are not over yet!) And not forgetting, there are loads of photos and pictures that still need to be put up on the walls!

I am going to leave you with one final picture.  It is of a corner of the lounge taken in the evening, with the lights subdued and the curtains drawn.  We love the cosiness of it!

So there you have it!  After all these months, we finally have a lounge that is "ours".

Until next time, à bientôt!

A brief - explanatory - update!

When I last posted, back on 17 August, I genuinely believed another week - okay, maybe two at the outside - would see the lounge finished and this blog full of photos to prove it!  How wrong can you be?  To be fair, I didn't realise quite how much there was still for Danny to do, not just in terms of the wall painting, which was a big enough job in itself, but there was a door that needed going over plus lots of bits and pieces of "tidying up".  Anyway, the long and short of it is that the room is now painted!

I finally got the last pair of curtains finished and was pleased to have done so!  Although I am left with a good sense of achievement and I have learnt a lot about curtain making that I didn't know before, it was a job I could have done without!  You can imagine how excited I was when Danny announced that we were now ready for the curtains to be hung!  I'm sure you can imagine equally how deflated I was when the first pair that Danny hung didn't pull properly across the pole.  And as I investigated, I realised I had made a schoolgirl error!  Now, I did think I'd measured the diameter of the poles way back at the outset of this project but obviously I hadn't because our poles measure 34mm in diameter and the eyelet rings I'd used are for poles of up to 28mm!  Oops!  Thankfully it's not the end of the world and I have managed to order some new and thinner poles which are due to be delivered next week.  So I'm afraid I'm going to make you wait another week to see the finished lounge!

In the meantime though, to whet your appetite, here's a couple of photos.  The first is Danny embarking on the hole cutting of the first curtain...note that I can't be trusted with this job as the likelihood is that I'd cut off the tips of my fingers in the process!

We have had a couple of large wooden cat ornaments for many years and they find themselves in various places.  Now we have them positioned on a couple of stair rungs but they were recently joined by our very real kittens.....

........at least those don't need dusting!

Well, that's it for this brief update.  I sincerely hope that next time I update the blog I'll be able to reveal our new refurbished lounge - I just hope it's not a big let down by then!!!

I'm going to leave you with this photo which Danny calls "Listen with Mother".  He was getting the dogs' dinners ready in their bowls and I was in my "umpire" position, ready to ensure that they all stick to their own food (feeding time is generally pandemonium!).  The dogs were gathered around me and Danny thought it looked like they were getting ready to listen to a story!

On that note, I shall love and leave you and I hope to be back soon!

À bientôt!