Author: martynjohnson

The living room light was ordered from Sweden, but little did I know that Brexit would delay its arrival for nearly two months!

Here is the original light fitting

I just love this Molecular light

I think it goes so well!

I really fancied a stag head, but then found a lovely picture that went so well with the colour scheme in the room. I lost that argument and Mrs J insisted on a stag head.

We found this amazing custom hand painted stag head which I think does the trick. What do you think?

The trouble with this decorating lark is that I find I just want to get it finished. I’m not particularly impatient, in fact most people who know me would say I’m probably the most chilled out guy they know.

With the ground floor stripped I decided to head to the fourth floor for a change of scenery.

The day started out like this


Yes, this is me risking life and limb balancing a pair of steps over the landing to reach the highest point, about 20′ high.

We took a few days off over the Christmas period to carry on unpacking boxes and generally trying to get the house in some kind of order.

So the plan is to keep all of the original flooring, dado/picture rails and cornice, but give it a lovely F&B Railings makeover 🙂

This is what the hallway looked like New Years Day morning.

This is after a full day of scraping and swearing!

Enough for today!

Christmas was now only five days away, and the pressure was on to get the room finished.

We had already decided to use F&B Off Black for the walls. That was an easy choice. The ceiling was a bit more of a challenge. Off-White looked a bit yellow, All White was too much of a contrast, so we settled on Wevet, a delicate white with a hint of grey.

Ignore the furniture and lights for now, this was purely all about colour!

I’m in love with the colour scheme, and cant wait to relax in here Christmas Day!

We have been in No 38 for just over four weeks and one of the first jobs was to get the front room sorted in time for Christmas.

We have always been pretty safe with colours over the years, and not strayed far from clean whites, with the occasional feature wall for a splash of colour!

So, deciding to use Farrow & Ball Off Black was really outside of our comfort zone, but we bought No 38 to be adventurous and stamp our identity on this wonderful house.

First job was to get a dark undercoat over the light beige walls, remove the wallpaper from the chimney breast and sort out a couple of imperfections!

The room is South facing with a wonderful bay window providing plenty of natural light even in December.

Nearly ready for the F&B!

Ok, when we viewed No 38 it wasn’t exactly to our taste. Jill and Barry I apologise now for what I am about to do!

So it currently looks like this…

We could probably live with it for a while but I want it ready in time for Christmas!

So the top floor really looks out of character with the rest of the house, and is the forgotten floor.

As we have two bedrooms on this floor one of the first jobs was to freshen J’s bedroom while he temporarily slept in the other.

Here is the room. You cant tell from the photo but the wallpaper was like woodchip, and a nightmare to remove. We had to resort to hiring a steamer for the roof and walls.

I started on the walls while Mrs J worked her Nitromors magic on the painted beams.

A couple of weekends later and all done!