The floors...

I know I keep banging on about the flooring but let me show you why it's so exciting!
We moved here 4 years ago and inherited this:

 This is a good bit which lived under a heavy cabinet so I cut round it when I removed the rest. 

It's vintage! But not my thing.

Okay, you get the idea. I'll stop it now...

It had a huge bald spot in front of the sofa.We lived with this carpet for a few years! It smelt. We had it hygienically cleansed! The smell came back.

So one day when my husband was away I cut it into pieces and binned it. My motto is 'it's sometimes better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission.'

He didn't mind. We are still baffled over how I managed to move the sofa on my own when it's the heaviest model known to man and takes three burly guys to shift it. It was one of those moments you read about like when a child is pinned under a car and a woman can lift it up and free the child. That's how much I wanted the carpet out!

But things sadly were not much better. Over the concrete floors we had the original brittle linoleum (?) tiles and they were not pretty...

Apart from all around the edges of course where they had shattered with the carpet grippers going through them.

And they smelt too! I steamed them. I bleached them. I cillit banged them! They still smelt.

So I figured I'd pull them all up. Again, waiting for my husband to be away...

Mmm, pockmarked concrete with bitumen stains. Nice. Everyone was getting on my case about how I should keep them as they were level and possibly damp proof so I gave up.

There was a huge pothole in the doorway where a pipe under the floor had caused some issues...

I had to fill it with the grey deep gap filler as people kept falling in. And it was slightly embarrassing. ''Come on into the living room, mind the pot hole''

And here's another one forming in the hall...

                                                                     Just lovely.

The picture above shows the broken edges.

So we saved up and did some wiring that needed to be tackled first and we are finally doing the floors. FOUR YEARS! Do you now understand what this means to me?
We shall be like normal people in a normal home!

The man is coming in the morning to do a latex screed which will level all the nasty bits and seal all the smells in.
The day after that we'll have stunning pale oak engineered wood. And nice tall skirting boards! And maybe even a Christmas tree!

Bring it on! X