Floor is down, walls are a mess...

Well, the floor went down on Saturday; despite this room being much, much smaller than the dining room and us having lots more experience than last time we tackled this job, it didn't take much less time. It does look great, though. No 'during' photographs were taken, so you can only imagine the yuckiness that ensued when we had to remove not one but two layers of lino tiles, which had apparently been stuck down with tar. I mean, I know the last occupants of this place were heavy smokers, but really... ;) The only serious comedy moment was in B&Q, when we went to buy the rest of the laminate we needed. We needed two packs - and there were two packs (both opened!) left. In the whole store. I don't like to think what I would have done if anyone else had been after them.

Having sacrificed a whole Saturday to laying laminate in a house belonging to someone else, the always superb Alex and Martyn showed up again on Sunday (with Jez, here visiting from windy NZ!) to help us get started on prepping the walls. They are lovely. (Alex and Martyn; not the walls!)

Aaaaargh!! The walls!! Quite apart from the aforementioned tile disaster, several walls feature a heavily-textured wallpaper that has formed some sort of perfect bond with the underlying plasterboard. Now, you can't steam wallpaper off the walls in this place, because the plasterboard just disintegrates. This isn't usually a problem, because all you have to do is remove the top layer of the paper, dampen the underneath and it just washes off. Not this stuff. I think water makes it stick better to the wall. So we were reduced to scraping and sanding the darn stuff off (or at least flat). Yeesh.

On the up side, we've decided that the kitchen fitter chap is not responsible for the removing-the-tiles mess. We think that it was due to a previous f*ckw!t inhabitant who removed tiles in the manner previously described, and who then stuck up new tiles over the old yuckiness.