Amateur DIY on a budget
Summer’s nearly here (woohoo!) and with that, there are so many more reasons to hang out in the garden. If you don’t have an outdoor tap, it can be a real pain to clean in the garden, water plants, even fill pets’ water bowls. I fitted a garden tap yesterday. Before that I needed to attach a hose to the kitchen tap and run it out the window – not ideal! The outdoor tap took just half an hour to fit and is going to get so much use. Read on to follow the steps.
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Those of you who’ve been here before may know that I first posted Ted’s fireplace dog bed last year. But having made a few alterations and adding some lighting, I’ve now updated the blog post. Read on to find out how you can turn a crappy old fireplace into a dog bed fit for a furry king (or queen)!
WARNING: This post contains a lot of pictures of my dog because he looked way too cute to take any of them out!
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Until recently, my bathroom left a lot to be desired. It had really poorly-fitted vinyl flooring, two different types of mis-matched tiles on the walls, a leaking bath, a cold tap that was poured hot water… basically more wrong with it than right. Over the space of two weekends and on a tight budget, I completely revamped the bathroom from top to bottom. Read on to see how.
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I recently fitted vinyl flooring in my bathroom to give the room a new lease of life. When I’ve thought of vinyl flooring in the past, I’ve thought of 70s dated lino. However nowadays there’s such a huge range of vinyl, from wood effect to tile effect, that it’s difficult to tell some apart from the real thing. Vinyl is also a great choice for a bathroom because of the moisture in the room. I went for a white wood floor effect and personally think it’s a much better choice for a bathroom than real wood, which can cause issues when it comes into contact with water.
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You may have seen that I recently did a post on creating a feature wall with paste-the-wall wallpaper. Well this time I’m going to show you how you can do the same but with the other type of wallpaper: paste-the-paper wallpaper (what a mouthful!)
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The doors in my house are crap. I mean, they’re perfectly fine structurally, mostly solid wood, but they’re all different shades of wood, each with a different cheap handle than the next.
I’ve recently started making my way around the house painting each and every one so I like to think of myself as a bit of an expert at this stage. I’ve picked up a few hints and tips along the way that should save you a lot of time and effort should you need to give some old doors a new lease of life.
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I recently got the ultimate bargain on eBay: someone who was doing a house clearance sold 6 pairs of old brass doorknobs. I bought them for £30. Pretty great considering you can normally expect to pay about £20 for a pair. The only slight problem was they were old, stained and had paint on them. Luckily, I found an easy way of cleaning them up to make them look shiny and new again. Read on to find out how easy it is to clean dirty brass using things you probably already have at home.
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One of my favourite things about doing up the house is giving an old unloved piece of furniture a bit of TLC and rendering it unrecognisable. My dressing table came from a local seller on eBay. I bought it for £10. It was good and sturdy but nothing special to look at: just plain pine with pine knobs. Over the course of an afternoon I upcycled it to make it bright and pretty. Here’s how…
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Your front door is pretty much the first impression somebody has of your house. When I first moved in, my front door wasn’t exactly making the impression I wanted. It was ugly wood, had random dirt and paint splatters and mismatching attachments. I decided that I needed a new door and asked a well known company around to quote me up. After getting a quote of almost £2,500, I quickly decided that I didn’t really need a new front door!
I then decided that all my front door needed was a facelift. I bought outdoor wood paint and attachments and set to work. Read the steps I took below.
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I think when doing up a house, or indeed taking on any big project, it’s easy to assume you can’t do something just because you haven’t done it before or have no experience in doing it. These jobs are normally the ones that you pay over the odds for somebody else to do for you, meanwhile getting no satisfaction from doing it yourself and remaining completely unaware that you could have done it.
I’ve always been overly stubborn and convinced that I can do anything I set my mind to. This is how I ended up fitting a laminate floor for the first time all by myself a few weeks ago. It’s turned out to be one of my favourite jobs I’ve taken on in the house so far.
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