October! I can’t believe it’s already been and gone.

This month, we really pushed on with the porch and the upstairs bathroom.

In the bathroom, we ‘tanked’ the shower ready for decoration and fitting and started tiling! In here, we’re doing a brick effect metro tile using 7.5 x 30cm tiles.

The shower tray is a good old size — 900mm wide by 1700mm long — so tiling just one side of the wall took a while!

We sanded, filled and added mist coats onto the walls which have been freshly plastered.

Meanwhile, in the porch, lots of tasks happened in quick succession.

I finally got around to undercoating the doorway which I did in a charcoal grey. This stuff took ages to dry so on the hallway side, I used the BIN primer instead. It’s expensive but it saves so much time.

We also took up the tiles in this room and measured out for the panelling.

Once we’d worked out our spacing we had some MDF cut at B&Q which we then recut ourselves as we’d measured wrong by two millimetres!!

We primed, filled and sanded the panelling then applied a good three layers of paint one evening before we called it a night!

When we started this room, we had no plans on installing a radiator.

Queue a few cold October days and we soon changed our mind!

So we added in a small column radiator.

We also: insulated under the floorboards; replaced the light fittings and plug sockets; filled, sanded, primed and painted every wall; fitted the flooring; added new skirting boards…

For a small space this room took an awful lot of time to do. However I’m reminded that this is the first room people see and the most used in the whole house so it pays to spend a bit of extra time in getting it right!

We have some tiny little things to do to this room and items to add in for decoration and then it’s another room FINISHED!