The DIY Tasks That We Did Ourselves

 

Back in September of 2019, my husband and I got married.  Then exactly one week later we got the keys to our home. At the time, we were only in our early twenties and we weren’t flush with cash. All of our money went either on our deposit or towards the wedding.

Because of this, once we were in the house, we had to get stuck into the renovations and decorating. Over the years, I have learnt skills that I never thought I would be capable of. Now as we look to buy a new house, we have spent some time looking back at all of the love that we poured into this home.  I thought that for this blog post, I would share some of the DIY tasks that we did ourselves. Plus, I will let you know how we found doing them!

 

 

 

Added panelling and dado rails throughout.

The first thing that I am going to mention on my DIY tasks post is panelling. I feel like this really divides people, but I adore it. My newbuild home was very basic when we moved in. Everything was very open and blank. I adore houses which are slightly older and have character to them. So, I painstakingly worked from the ground up and applied dado rails, panelling and coving to every single room. It took me months to do it in between other projects, however once it was done, it looked amazing. I now have friends buying houses that want me to go and do it for them!

 

Fit our new kitchen.

Our kitchen was inoffensive when we moved in, however I did want to make changes to the space. It was very shiny and pretty glitzy, which is not my vibe. So, I painstakingly and cheaply renovated the area. I attached batons to our doors to make them shaker style. I then added black matt handles. Next, I tore the tiles down and added new herringbone style tiles. The final thing that I did was fit a new porcelain sink. It gave the area a new lease of life and only cost us around £300.

 

Boarded up our garage for plastering.

On the ground floor of our house, we had a large double garage. In the early days, we used it as nothing but storage, but we quickly realised that it was pointless. Because we had the space, we were filling it with rubbish that we would normally not hold onto. So, instead of the space sitting there being wasted, we decided to convert it into a room. We boarded the whole room up ourselves which was quite possibly the hardest job of the house. Because it was such a big space and the walls were unfinished, we had to apply metal rods for the plaster board. Then once the room was finished, the old nobhead across the road crashed his car into the front of the house, going straight into our new room!

 

Fit new locks throughout.

Next on our list of DIY tasks is fitting new locks. To be honest, we didn’t really want to do this to begin with. We were fine leaving the current locks. I know the ‘right’ thing to do is get new ones fit, however we didn’t have the money. However, one day we caught the old owners trying to get into our house. Fortunately, the house was locked from the inside and the key was still in the door, so they were unable to gain access. When my husband quizzed them about what they were doing, they said that they wanted to get their post. The previous owner was our local GP and he had to reregister for his license (or something) and he hadn’t changed his address. So, instead of asking, he just tried to break in!

 

Set up our home security.

Something that was incredibly important to me when we moved in was security. Actually, in our first week in our home, our neighbour across the way was broken into. Further forcing us to invest in a home security. However, because it was so early on in our new home life, the budget wasn’t enormous. Because of this we bought the system and cameras. Then it was down to us to rig them up. Fortunately, my brother-in-law is an electrician, and he came to the rescue. If you do have to splurge in one area, make it this!

 

Fully decorated every room.

I have shared many times here on my blog that when we got the keys, our home was yellow. The walls were yellow. The doors were yellow. Skirting boards, as you guessed, were yellow. It was horrible. Honestly, the entire place was like big bird. It had to go. I began by whitewashing every single room. I couldn’t see any décor future plans while it was brighter than the sun. Once every room was white, I could begin to imagine how I wanted the space to look. In our next home I am going to employ a painter and never pick up a roller again!

 

Fit wooden flooring.

This project started with our third floor. The carpets were pretty old and I wanted wooden flooring throughout. So, I spent a weekend ripping up the carpets. I had all of the wood sat there, ready for me to use. However, it overwhelmed me. I had no idea where to start. Then when I thought about having to cut pieces to fit, I was clueless. I decided to start out in the smallest spare room that we had. Once I nailed it, I got more confident and moved onto the other rooms. Even though I can do this, I can only imagine that a professional could do it in a fraction of the time!

 

Built all furniture ourselves.

This may not seem like much, but if I ever see flatpack again, I may cry. When we moved into our house, we had nothing. We had previously lived with my mum, so we didn’t have any funiture of our own. Which means that we had to fully furnish a 5-bedroom house from scratch and it was one of our major DIY tasks. At one point I had built that much furniture that the skin on my hand began to peal because of how tight I was having to hold the screwdriver. Luckily, once we were pretty established, this quietened down. My husband does call me the queen of flatpack because it is now one of my core skills.

 

Hung doors.

Next on my list of DIY tasks is hanging doors. A while back, I mentioned to somebody at work that we were changing our internal doors. They asked if we were getting a joiner in to do the work and I scoffed in their face. Did they not know that I was a DIY extraordinaire? Anyway, I bloody wish that we had used a joiner. There is an art to hanging a door. You need to make sure that the hinges are well aligned and that they were perfectly level. So much can go wrong and to be honest, it took me days to do all of the doors through the house.

 

Fit bathroom appliances.

A couple of years ago, we had a bad leak in one of our bathrooms. The bathroom was pretty dilapidated, so we thought instead of just fixing, we would renovate. We have a professional plumber come in and fix the leak and from there, we took over. I did all of the tiling and even fit the appliances. To be honest, it wasn’t incredibly difficult. The toilet and sink especially were essentially one in and one out. The most difficult thing was getting all of the old tiles from the wall and cutting the new ones to shape. I would do this again though. It simply took a lot of time.

 

I hope that you guys enjoyed reading this blog post. As I mentioned, we are currently looking for a new home. Even though we adore our current house, we always knew it wasn’t our forever home. Generally, we have more than enough space, however because it has three-levels it isn’t exactly practical. For example, our main lounge is on the second floor. Which was ok for use for many years. Throw kids into the mix and that suddenly becomes much more difficult. It is for that reason why the previous owners chose to sell up and move. As always, I would love to hear from you guys on this. Are you a fan of DIY or do you call in the professionals? I think in our new home, we will be putting our money to good use and get more help with DIY tasks from the people that know what they’re doing!