The Lounge Before
When we moved into this house our favourite room was the lounge. When our home was a pub, many years ago, this room would have been the main bar area. It is quite a large room with lots of windows, a set of patio doors and a huge fireplace. The decor wasn't to our taste and was quite outdated. It had heavily embossed wallpaper and brown patterned carpets. The ceiling looked like it had been skimmed with a sweeping brush and the plastering had more ripples than a river. There was also a huge, wheelchair size, mobility lift in the centre of the room that could take you from the lounge to an upstairs bedroom.
Removing a mobility lift
The first job we had to get done was to remove the lift, replace ceiling joists and plasterboard the large hole where the lift went through. Our DIY skills don't span to this so we had to get a professional in. Once the lift was removed and all the apertures made safe we were then able to get on with the project.Adding glass french doors to create light
We needed to find a way to connect the two lounges together and to give more light to the rear lounge. We believe that previously there would have been an archway opening to connect the two rooms but this had since been boarded over. We found the best solution would be to remove the boarding and replace with glass french doors which would join the two rooms together as well as create more light for the rear room.The carpenter needed to square off the archway and strengthen before he fitted the doors and frame.
Painting the brick fireplace
The main focal point of this room was the large brick built fireplace housing a log burner. We loved the log burner but the whole wall was too dark and would not match any of our decorating plans. We decided to paint all of the bricks in white apart from the log burner area. To do this I put two heavy coats of white undercoat and then followed with two thick coats of white matt emulsion. I had to use a brush to work the paint into all of the bricks and mortar which was a hard slog! But, it covered really well and I preferred the resulting matt finish as opposed to a high gloss finish which would have caused too much light reflection for my taste.Heating
When we moved into the house there were no radiators in the lounge. The only source of heating for this room was the log burner and although it is a large burner it just wasn't good enough to heat the whole room. We had to get our plumber to add two large radiators to heat this room. This resulted in unsightly pipework from the upstairs radiators, through the lounge ceiling to connect the new radiators below. We then had to get our carpenter to do some very tricky boxing in of all the pipework. The reason this was tricky was because the pipework came down through the coving and past the wood panelling. Our carpenter had to contour the mdf around all of this and thankfully he did a very good job of it!
Prepping the room
Firstly we stripped off all the embossed wallpaper from the walls. Underneath the walls were in a poor state and the ceiling was full of ripples in the plaster. It actually looked like it had previously been skimmed with a sweeping brush! The ceiling also had some hairline cracks in the plaster. We had to call in a professional plasterer to skim all the walls and ceiling so that we would have a smooth base to paint over.
The coving was in a poor state but we wanted to keep it so we had to do a lot of filling and sanding down over the many lumps and scratches. Previously someone had framed the coving with dark green beading which was nailed to the walls. We removed all of the wooden beading and filled all of the resulting pin holes.
As you can see in the first photo's the floor was carpeted with a heavily patterned dark carpet. As it is a large room we had to cut the carpet into manageable pieces so that we could remove it all. This carpet had been down for a long time and the smell was awful when we took it out! Underneath the flooring was an awful miss-match of very old tiles, concrete and old lino. We did try to break the tiles and lino away but it had been laid for many years and was too difficult to prise off the floor. It was also very uneven so we had to get a large area screed before any new flooring could be laid. This was a time consuming job as once the screed was poured it took 10 days to dry out!
Decorating the room
The fresh plaster was much easier to paint. We painted the ceilings in white matt finish and the upper part of the walls were all painted in a jade white. It all covered well with two good coats of paint.
We wanted to keep the wooden panelling around the lower half of the room so this was undercoated and finished off with white satinwood (two coats of undercoat and two coats of satinwood). This gave it a lovely white sheen.
All of the window sills were in a dark green gloss, which we sanded down and filled prior to adding two coats of undercoat and two coats of white satinwood to match the wood panelling.
Lighting
There are three lovely chandeliers in the room already. The problem was that they were filthy and a brass colour. I didn't want the expense of replacing them so decided to revamp. I removed all of the droplets and carefully cleaned them with soapy water. Firstly taking a photo of where they all were positioned. Then I just used a white spray paint on all of the brassy coloured areas. This covered in two coats and completely transformed the look of the lights. I rehung all of the droplets and the chandeliers looked like new and saved me a lot of money!Flooring
We wanted something fresh looking and easy maintenance so we chose laminate flooring. The colour is a pale grey wood effect. Our carpenter laid the flooring over the freshly screed floor and trimmed with white edging strips. We were very pleased with how fresh the room looked once the floor was down.
Finished room
We were over the moon with the results of the lounge make over. It had gone from a dark and drab, old fashioned room to a bright and airy, comfortable living space. At last we have a nice room where we can sit and close the doors to the rest of the messy house!
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