The moving files: the work continues...

Hi!

As I am writing this, I am catching some rays of sun on my very own lawn. whooooh!
Looking to my left, the neighbour's chickens -who are not to be stopped by fences- are happily destroying my newly planted border, and looking to my left, 3 extremely grumpy cats are staring at me through the window, annoyed with the fact that those chickens are outside, whilst they are not. So far my attempt to make you jealous ( did I succeed? )

But back to business, because there is a lot of home improvement to be done!!

Last post I told you about painting the hall, and as you might have guessed; I wasn't entirely pleased with the result..  Wait; let me refreshen your mind: this is what it looked like...

it's okay, but not terribly exciting..

The problem was not that it looked bad, it was just a bit... boring. further, the paneled walls just felt a bit like a weird choice for such an old farmhouse. But then I thought of something: wainscoting.

While many of you may associate this with frumpiness, wainscoting ( or well, the Dutch type of it) was actually the regular type of cladding for farmhouses like ours. The main reason for it was practicality: if your 1900-husband would enter the house with his wooden shoes covered in mud, spraying lumps of it all though your hall,  it helps to have a wall you can easily clean; hence the wainscoting.

like this! ( this is a house we actually considered to buy)

I figured that transforming the panels into wainscoting shouldn't be too hard, so I called my dad and asked if he would lend me his circular saw ("please don't cut your own fingers of, girl"), cued the music and set to work!

Feeling very professional, I began by screwing a long slat to the wall, to use as a guide for the circular saw. 

then I gathered every dust mask and ear plug I could find, set the saw in such a way that it would only cut through the panels, and not through the wall behind it, and started sawing.

BRRRRRRRR!!!!

after finsihing all walls, this is what it looked like: 

Eeck! that's what you get for covering your walls, peeps. 

It was... quite gross. Also, over the last 50 years, the humidity had crumbled some of the concrete of the walls, which left us with a lot of cleaning and filling the gaps from screws and crumbling. 

working that wall!

luckily, I had an unexpected talent for plastering walls.. ;)
ps: yeah of course we're gonna paint that door!

and... added a first layer of paint, as well as painting the ceiling. 

And that's where we are now!

much better already!

of course there is still a lot to be done here: fixing the top of the wainscoting with recycled wood,  painting the upper piece of the wall light grey, and fixing lights and things such as coat hangers. But we're getting there, I'm sure!

oh, and for those of you wondering how we manage to live in this chaos: we simply choose one of the bedrooms, and turned it into a small, temporary living room, where we can close the door and forget about the chaos.

it's pretty swell!

So, hopefully the next project i can show you will be an actual finished one, but hey.. home improvement takes some time!