Here's an intro about a couple of ploppers…

ACCORDING to one of the estate agents who showed us round the exciting Crystal Palace, there are three types of buyers: (1) those who buy the first place they view, (2) those who buy the seventh place they view and (3) those who buy the twenty-fifth place they view.

When he told us this, we'd viewed over twenty properties and I (Harrison) remember thinking that I didn't like being a number 3. There seemed something picky and indecisive about number 3s.

Pretty soon after, we decided to buy this cosy, solidly built, unassuming maisonette (we'll call her Maisy) on Hermitage Road, SE19. Maybe the agent's words helped us along in finding lots to like about Maisy but whether they did or not, we were both sold on her the moment we visited.

Okay, so from the exterior, she's more Crimewatch than Baywatch. Good from far but far from good. To be fair, this crappy photo (taken by our lovely building surveyor, Thiru) doesn't help either.

You have to imagine her on a balmy day with kids and dogs flitting around the place and the sounds of the wren and the chaffinch emanating from the plenty of trees that border the cul-de-sac.

And when there's no drug-meet taking place, there are loads of places to park for free!

Seriously though, SE19 is nothing if not desirable and the famous Crystal Palace triangle—with its trendy cafes, vintage design studios and anti-McDonald's activists—is just a saunter away.

That's us. Those two windows one on top of the other are the master bedroom and the lounge, respectively. Double glazing and being sandwiched between and below other maisonettes mean we're toasty in winter and cool on balmy days.

Must get those wires tidied up.

No, that's not our letterbox beside the window.

Our front door

We've always dreamed of living in a timber house bleached by the elements, of the sweet and sticky smell of pine wafting out to greet us as we push open the front door and step across the threshold. As you can see, Maisy is a step in the right direction.

This is where our central heating flu comes out. Thiru said we will need to fill those gaps 'to keep out rodents.' Yikes!

From our west-facing kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, we get gorgeous sunsets

The place is quite spacious when you're in there and we're going to maximise this effect by keeping stuff off the floors using shelving.

The lounge and kitchen are self-explanatory. There is enough space for a large dining table in the lounge and there is a way to double the kitchen counter space by doing some jiggery-pokery with that under-stairs cubbyhole.

Fitting a fridge-freezer in that tiny room in the kitchen's corner will be a challenge but we reckon we can find one that's skinny enough.

Upstairs, we're actually taking the smaller bedroom to sleep in and turning the master bedroom into something else (more later). We're especially excited about that.

From our place, Gipsy Hill Train Station (just off the map to the north) is half the distance of Crystal Palace Station and four bus lines pass the end of our road so we're all good for getting around. Gipsy Hill Station takes its name from the road of the same name, a spot where the largest congregation of Roma gypsies lived until the station was built. The queen of the gypsies herself, Margaret Finch, is said to have lived there.

Renovation begins

Of all the places we viewed, Maisy was one of the smartest from a decorative POV.

The whites were white and the walls were papered and we felt we wouldn't need to do much…

It took us (Corina) two days to remove the wallpaper from both bedrooms and the lounge. We found this recipe for homemade wallpaper remover.

Then, when we had a decorator over to price up painting the walls and ceilings, he told us we'd do well to paper those very walls if we wanted to prevent the paint from cracking.

Lesson 1:

Wallpaper gives an ideal painting surface that will never crack, even as the building shifts over time. Doh!

…then Corina found her scraper.

(Only vintage tools will do).

The existing wood floors look like s**t.

We already know, without having spoken about it, that we want to sand them back and then paint them with some kind of stain, varnish or sealant. It's a job we're both looking forward to among many others :)

How many staples does it take to lay a carpet?

As soon as you've got some spare cash, you should go straight to the London Stock Exchange to buy shares in the staple company. We never knew so many staples were needed to fasten carpet. Well, it was the underlay, to be precise. Corina pulled up no fewer than between 20 and 50 staples per step and that was just the staircase. Both bedrooms needed de-carpeting, too.

We were praying there were wooden floorboards beneath.

We quite like those white edges on the stairs, kind of like those posh houses where the carpets are only laid up the middle. We hope we can achieve a similar look by staining the wood and painting the edges a brilliant white.

Electrics

With the exception of the hob (it's induction, which we hate to cook with) and the green tiles (they're ugly and unhygienic), we feel okay sticking with this kitchen as it is.

But then we start digging deeper. The fridge stinks and doesn't appear to have been cleaned, ever. The oven is well-used. And the extractor hood is caked in years of grease.

Then there's the only light in the centre of the room - basically useless when huddled over the counter trying to chop veg in the dark.

Inside the cupboards there's evidence of shoddy workmanship - cabinets have fixings missing or have been screwed together in ad-hoc places, shelves have not been hung level and the holes for hob and sink look to have been cut by someone using their teeth.

It's dawning on us that this is the one room we're going to need to do some real work on.

💡 Let there be light 💡

The kitchen is too important a room for us to put up with crap light conditions so we decide to lift the floorboards to wire some new spot lights. We need a circular saw.

Turns out few hire shops are operating during COVID-19 but we find one that is, just 20 mins drive south of here in Croydon.

In the floor-ceiling cavity there's a rainforest of tangled pipes and cables. John Wayne and his crew were here.

Look, there are our new spot lights, which we'll fit once the ceiling has been painted.

If you're wondering what it takes to drill large holes in a ceiling without hitting any joists (which are spaced roughly 30 cm apart), it takes mad tekkers.

We're going to cover that hole where the old light was with a smoke detector. Actually, we'll be installing a heat detector as smoke detectors aren't supposed to go in kitchens for obvious reasons.

We've kept a microwave so we can reheat lunches. Those are our camping chairs that have been with us to the farthest corners of the UK. Notice the handy beer-can-shaped drinks holders.

While some sit around, others have to work.

During our first two visits to Maisy, one of our neighbours above us played music so loud that it felt like we were sitting in nightclub toilets, the whole fabric of the building literally shaking.

Not wanting to jump to conclusions, we put it down to people justifiably clawing at the walls during lockdown and in need of some musical respite.

But when the Reggaeton vuvuzelas continued throughout our third day on site, we did what any principled yet polite new neighbour would do. We grassed them up to the council who responded to reassure us that the perpetrators had been dealt with by way of a strongly worded letter.

Lesson 2:

If you are intending to meet and greet your new neighbours, do it on day 1 so that you don't have to do it after you've snitched on them.

The floorboards are tongue-and-groove and a number of them have wide, splintered gaps caused by being torn up previously without a circular saw. And these gaps are filled with a burgundy-coloured putty. They're not cool, especially since we're going for exposed floors.

So we've decided to replace the ruined ones with new floorboards. They're a typical size. 190 wide by 18 deep so we find them easily on B&Q's website and we even manage to find them in 2.4m lengths, which means we can get away with only hiring a car to fit them in rather than forking out extra for a van.

Corina did some math magic to calculate the max. number of fixes we can get from the fewest lengths.

The new boards weigh less and feel brittler, cheaper. They don't match the colour of the existing ones.

But we hope that once we sand them all back, they'll blend in better. And the screws we choose for fixing them are black as we think we're going to stain the wood dark.

We fix them all with one length to spare and salvage the old ones for shelving.

Why is the thought of sanding wood floors so appealing?

We're going to find out.

We have ordered some industrial floor sanders.

Stay tuned…

Let's

talk

toilets

The toilet is the first room that we've started to design in our heads. It's small and manageable and we already like the linoleum floor design (above), so this gives us a springboard to start researching complimentary colours, shapes and surfaces.

There's an amazing restaurant on the King's Road called Chicama where I (Harrison) remember it was the first time I'd really ever noticed and appreciated the use of pink as an interior colour.

It was a soft pink that was like a background hue while everything else—the plates, the bar top and the brass metalwork—took centre stage. It was cosy and classy at the same time.

We'd like to try and achieve something similar in our W.C. using soft pink as a backdrop to simple whites, woods and brass taps. This should also let our lino floor sing.

We're a bit unsure about having a pink room but the W.C. is the ideal place to try it, right? It's not like people will be hanging out in their (ours is much too small for that, anyway).

We both have a steadfast desire to paint white grout grey. It's another one of those DIY jobs that seems like it would be enjoyable. Plus, we think grey grout will work just as good in our pink bathroom, maybe even better.

We live in wonderful times, times when one cursory Google search reveals a whole industry ready to serve the grout-painting market. After browsing a sweet shop of colours, watching a few Youtube how-tos and arming ourselves with our new favourite tool: the grout scraper, we're ready to turn our begrimed grout into grey Godliness.

Lesson 3:

Painting grout takes f*****g ages.

Ta-da!

Two things that do not go hand in hand: demolition and restraint.

Well, can you blame us? We heard that parents were offering to pay for a new one!

TBC…

Back to the kitchen and as mentioned, we're happy with our kitchen as it is.

But there is just one small thing we gotta do…

Sanding the floors

This big floor sander, weighing in at 80+kg, was delivered along with its little sister edge-sanding machine. The whole bundle cost less than £100 for a long weekend (we timed it on a bank holiday) and came with a full range of graded sand papers, which we slid on and off ourselves.

It was loud like a jumbo jet engine but it made such light work of it that we’d done the whole of the upstairs in a day and a half including several passes and emptying the dust bag in between. The powdery wood residue in the bag can even be combined with a resin and used to fill cracks and grooves. So neat! It was so much fun!

When you try using specialist equipment for the first time, you tend to expect something to be amiss or to not work as well as you’d hoped for if you can’t figure it out. But we were surprised how simple and effective it was. Everyone warned us that we’d better wear masks and cover everything from the dust that would inevitably be kicked up in to the air but there wasn’t even any dust, seriously, not a speck. The vacuum attachment was so good.

The thing that did take time was sanding the stairs using the edge-sander. It had to be suspended in mid-air in order to sand each step and it was heavy! It shouldn’t really have been used for this task but our only alternative was to use the drawer blade, which would have taken donkey’s years. The blade was useful for those hard-to-reach corners, though.

We love the results and apart from revealing gorgeous young wood, the sanding also filled the flat with the sweet scent of pine. Freshly ground coffee and freshly sanded pine: two of life’s finest perfumes.

They came in handy getting rid of that green front door colour, too

We talked about sealing, varnishing, painting or oiling the new wood floors. They all have their pros and cons. We decided on oil because, dunno, it just sounds more exciting. And we’re not gonna eat or drink upstairs so the ‘red wine’ argument stops being so important.

First we use coffee to stain the newly fitted boards so they look as similar to the existing ones as possible.

Then we apply Osmo Oil (Honey). It takes a day to dry, a week to fully cure and looks bangin'.

👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼

The Studio

When we were planning to buy a flat, we talked a lot about what kind of lifestyle we want to have in it. It was important that we were intentional about creating an environment where it will be easy to end up doing certain activities like painting, writing and building stuff and not so easy to end up doing other things.

We knew it had to be a 2-bed for when people stay but we went further and decided that the second bedroom wouldn’t actually function like a bedroom at all. Instead it would be an artist’s studio (with a pull-out bed as a footnote). We think this will create a better today and a better tomorrow. To commit ourselves more, we agreed to make it the largest room in the flat. And we think it’s probably not enough just to plant new flowers; we need to prune weeds, too, so with clenched teeth we agreed that the TV must go.

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The studio has loads going for it. Apart from being spacious, it’s east-facing and brightest in the mornings, which suits us because we’re both most productive then. With the bedroom facing west, this means we’ll enjoy sunsets from our bed. This is way preferable because if it was the other way round, we’d never see the sun.

We wanted some comfy seats in the studio where we could lounge, read, nap and debate about work. For once, we were actually grateful that our phones listen to us and use this to target us with ads. We’d been talking about getting some William Morris wallpaper somewhere in the flat—maybe on the walls of the stairs—but it was too expensive so we’d resolved ourselves to making the most of the free, A4-sized samples John Lewis sent us by putting them in frames and hanging them on the walls as artworks. Next best thing, we thought. But when we were looking on eBay for chairs, it showed us a William Morris-designed sofa less than 30 minutes’ drive. We picked it up. It’s in great condition, folds out into a bed and the best bit is: it only cost us 24 quid. Who said it was wrong that our phones evesdrop?

Here’s our plan for the studio. The table in the corner is for computers. The two tables together are for writing and drawing. The corner adjacent to the entrance will be storage for large and small canvases. The other small door gives access to Harrison’s wardrobe. And we've put up industrial lighting for maximum visibility on paintings being painted, which will hang on the wall between the wardrobe and the window. It's time to get to work.

The lounge

Finally got to buy our own chop saw. It was cheaper to buy and resell than it was to rent. We knew we wanted to use shelving to keep things off the floor and create more space, and Harrison had always wanted to build floor-to-ceiling shelving, so this was our chance.

Our theme for the lounge was the northern Danish coast using a palette of sand, pale blues, greens and greys with accents of purple to capture the beautiful heather that grows over the dunes.

Revarnishing an old table after sanding it back. Sooooooooo satisfying…

Buried cables for two lamps.

Corina using a ladder and a curtain to look tall.

From this point onwards, we didn't continue to diarise regularly because the work became all-consuming. We did continue to take pictures.

…

It is now 18 months later. We've been through leaky ceilings, a bedroom switcharoo, and Croydon Council going bankrupt. We've had delicious dinner parties, hosted family and friends, and relapsed on our TV detox. We've learned that rooms come together when you have a unifying theme, and that a home is never finished.

So here it is: our first home 👇