The last few days have been interesting to say the least. We've had torrential rain and floods that have given us a leaky roof all just before the first time we have decorators arrive to give a couple of rooms a lick of paint to wipe away the previous owners colour scheme and kind'a make it ours. The first big change... the room we spend the most time in, the Living Room.

We'd already agreed between us that we would leave the start of the full restoration, renovation or whatever you want to call it, to begin next year sometime. The plan is to fix a few immediate things  like a leaky garage roof, the draughty front door and some major re-pointing of some very dodgy brickwork on the exterior of the Kitchen outside the back of the house.

These repairs are to hopefully aid us through the winter. The draughty front door being the major one to hopefully stop the heat escaping out the front door, as you can literally see 'daylight' through a few cracks and around the door frame!

Before the full projects begin next year our short term plan is to literally throw some paint on the walls just to put our own stamp on a few rooms and make it our own rather than living with the previous owners taste.

The one place that we can't really do this with is the Reception Hall and bedroom landings as the height of the walls is balmy and as the long term plan is to strip these back to the brick and have them all re-plastered then we will probably just live with what's there for now as this will need scaffolding erected in the actual Reception Hall to reach the top!

The decorators promptly arrived at 8am on Monday morning and as we'd virtually stripped the backroom to an empty room they could literally start as soon as they walked through the door.

Have to say, I was pretty sceptical of what the out come of the next two days was going to bring as the decorators had told us it would only take two days. One for the Living Room and the second for the Kitchen! I just couldn't get my head around the fact that to paint this big room including wood work was only going to take them one day...

... Oh, how wrong could I be!

In one day working around the problem with the roof in the bay window (They'll pop back once the roof has been repaired to re-paper and paint the ceiling in the bay window) these pair have completely transformed our living room into what can only be described as a warm, inviting and atmospheric sitting room.

Yes... we know that there are a few parts where the paper is not completely stuck to the wall giving us  ripples on the walls but for now we're more than happy with the results and to live with this for the next twelve or so months. Before we completely strip the room back to the brick, repair some of the brickwork problems, repair some major cracks in the ceiling and have the whole room re-plastered giving us lovely smooth walls!

The next big change for this room is when our new sofas arrive next week... so up to that date we're in the temporary sitting room at the front of the house.

Check back for an update when the sofas arrive!