Renovations!

The old part of our house was built in 1918 and now that we have a new extension (which we pretty much live in) we really notice how cold the old bit feels in comparison.  So now the new bit is more or less finished, we have started to turn our attention to the old bit.

The first thing we needed to do was take down a few walls and strip off all the old plasterboard and ceilings....

This was the hall after the first evening of demolishing.  The hall is going completely and becoming part of the living room, which is how it was originally.

Thankfully we have a handy helper who we can put to work doing all the tidying up!

We had to move all the contents of the old house into the new bit and now it looks like a very disorganised junk shop!

Once we removed the top layer of plasterboard we uncovered a treasure trove of wallpapers from throughout the 20th Century (a detailed post of the wallpaper time capsule to follow!)

There is a new roof to go on and lots of new insulation to keep the place nice and warm, it's a shame we have to cover up the lovely structure of the roof but it will be worth it for the extra heat!



Our stud walls were all originally tongue and groove so we have taken the wood off and hope to be able to reuse it as much as possible.






We decided to reinstate the wall between the front room and the old dining room at the back but rather than just re tongue and groove it all we thought a window would look nice.  We had a look on gumtree and managed to find this one which just happens to fit almost perfectly in the gap that used to be the hall!  It has a broken pane but I'm hoping it won't be too hard to fix.

Although we have been spending most evenings and weekends demolishing, pulling out nails and stripping wallpaper, a tasty hot chocolate and the promise of a much warmer house makes it all worthwhile!

recent silence and let's colour project

Hello, sorry for the lack of posting recently, been busy screenprinting away and have been a bit neglectful of the blog.

I am coming to the end of printing my first series of mixtape screen prints and have found myself struggling with what colours to pick.  I have 12 illustrations in the series and have chosen a different colour for each image.  This week I have been picking the last four colours for the last four prints and I must have stood staring at the tubes of paint for ages trying to decide what colour to go for!  As a default I nearly always go for blues and greens - something which I hadn’t really noticed until I put together a portfolio and realised that all the background colours were rather similar!

For colour inspiration I decided I would have a bit of a google to see if I could sway myself away from the blues and greens and I came across the Let’s Colour Project, it’s a project organised by Dulux and a few other paint companies thats aim is to banish some of the grey concrete in this world and replace it with a plethora of colour.  I’ve always been a great fan of exterior colour - I just recently repainted our PVC windows and door for the second time - they were green and are now blue and cream - despite the fact that most people pointed out to me that the idea of them being PVC is that you don’t have to paint them, they look much better now than the original dark brown they were before.  This project is incredibly inspiring - so often you see really neglected or boring grey buildings that could do with a brightening up.

These two images are from the project in Istanbul in Turkey, I particularly like that in the second image they have planted flowers in the empty paint containers!