What I’ve learned as a reluctant DIYer

It’s no sur­prise to long time read­ers that I’m not the most enthu­si­as­tic of home remod­ellers.  When we bought our house almost 2 years ago I thought we’d be sit­ting in com­fort by now in our com­pletely remod­elled house. Unfor­tu­nately that is not the case. It takes three times as long to do any­thing. In our case it’s mainly because we don’t want to spend every moment of our free time work­ing on the house. I have 3 rooms almost done– just need car­pet­ing in two rooms and fin­ish­ing up the built in shelves in the third.

Right now I’m research­ing fire­places. We have 5 that we need to sort out. The most urgent one is in the liv­ing room. It had a hor­ri­ble pan­eled sur­round and shelv­ing unit that we removed. At the moment it needs the hearth, sur­round and man­tle sorted. I’ve just won an oak man­tle on ebay for £1! Score!  Now some peo­ple poo poo ebay and “reclaimed” things but when you have an entire house to remodel you need to pick your bat­tles. I’d rather use the £1000 (prices ranged from £550 t0 £1400) they quoted me for a com­plete fire­place and buy a top of the line range cooker. It’s all about pri­or­i­ties and compromises.

Another thing I’ve found while doing my research is that you don’t need to do what every­one else is doing. I know that sounds like basic infor­ma­tion that every­one should know but it’s easy to get caught up in what is in style. If you start look­ing at fire­places you’ll see black gran­ite hearths and sur­rounds w/ cast iron inserts and pine/oak man­tals. You  might vary that by going a bit vic­to­rian or min­i­mal­ist mod­ern but it’s all the same. Yes­ter­day while work­ing on the shelves I looked down at the hearth and thought what would hap­pen if we replaced the brown 1930’s tiles with some­thing else. I went down this path because while at a friends house over the week­end we noticed that they’d put wood in their hearth. The fire­place was blocked off and plas­tered over but the recess for the hearth had remained. What do you do? Put floor­boards and you can hardly tell the dif­fer­ence.  Off to the inter­net I went, it’s amaz­ing what you can find once you know what you’re look­ing for. In the end it looks like I’m going to tile the hearth and sur­round. I’m esti­mat­ing this can be done for under £50. Expected cost of the fire­place now is; £1 man­tal, £50 tiles/grout, and the cost of the fuel effi­cient gas fire (around £300.) Much more palat­able when you mul­ti­ply that by 5!

A few more of my finds, a light fix­ture for the kitchen and a chan­de­lier for the living-room. The living-room chan­de­lier was from Freecycle.