So, when we bought the house, we bought it off a company called Southwest Learning. They held conferences and seminars etc, and Barnados rented the offices in the top floor. When it was up for sale it looked, and was very much a business, but it was so easy to see past all that and just imagine how awesome it could be! We knew we wanted it as soon as we pulled up into the driveway and then walking in and seeing a house full of offices, meeting rooms, stationery cupboards, disabled toilets and urinals, meeting rooms, fire extinguishers, office lighting.....didn't put us off one bit!! haha
At the end of our tour of the house, we ended up in what was a Reception Room, we sat down in with the estate agent and put an offer in on this house - a low...low offer. An offer, we truly hoped would be accepted, it wasn't! But they came back with a counter offer we were very happy with!!
Anyway I digress....the pic below was the reception room............
Andy and the estate agent sat in the above 2 chairs....I sat across the room. We were excited because not only had we known we wanted it when we drove up - we both knew each other were thinking the same thing - this could be so perfect!!
AGES AND A TON OF STRESS LATER....
When we moved in - this room looked awful. The carpet was yuck - it had a bright patch where the reception desk had sat - showing how discoloured the carpet was in the rest of the room. There were - as with every other room - hundreds of cables, run in trunking across the top and coming down into the room for phone lines and internet, and there were about 20 plug sockets on the surface of the walls (not sunk in).
Initially we used this as a games room - and it worked sooo well....
These pictures are from Xmas 2017, but we have had MANY good nights in that room!
HOWEVER.....a couple of months ago - I decided to move the games room into the living room - move the living room into the bottom of the kitchen (where the dining table was) and move the dining table into the games room!!
The new games room looks like this:
So....happy with the new games room, I went to work changing the old one into a dining room. There were only a few weeks before Christmas, when family would descended and we would make use of the dining table!
The walls are pretty bad underneath the paper - and it is a definite candidate for a new plaster make-over. However, this room comes low on the list of priorities (in terms of needs doing v financial cost), so - it got painted over the existing wallpaper, which is just lining paper-like, one wall got papered (its been years since I have done it, and they are very high ceilings - so I'm quite pleased I managed it so well on my own!), all the wood work got a new paint-job, and it got a new floor - ply board first, then laminate - which I swore I'd never buy - but it does seem much better quality now!
So - not as perfect as I'd like it................ One day I'll get to properly concentrate on this room, have more time and hopefully more money!
So it took about 3 weeks to do this room, I must have spent a large proportion of that time filling soooo many holes in the wall.........
Actually really like the new laminate (not as cheap as I thought) floor!
Christmas dinner!
So in the last 18 months, this room has been a Reception (business), Games room and now a dining room!
