pour améliorer: Eyesores be Gone!

In this final push to get this house renovation complete, we're finally knocking off all of those niggling little issues that have been bugging me for way too long, but haven't been important enough to actually bump up to the top of the priority list.

But no longer! Eyesores be gone!

Can you spot the eyesore in this shot?

If you ignore the crazy upside-down lampshade acting as our light over our dining table (don't worry, it's on my hit-list too), there's that still-unfinished bathroom doorway staring you in the face. With the yukky old board covering up the window space above. It's got to go!

So before we play fix-it, let's take a quick little doorway journey down memory lane! This is what that wall used to look like. What doorway?

And then Tom attacked it with the circular saw...

And we installed some door posts on the inside...

And salvaged the old horizontal piece that was originally over the long-gone kitchen doorway. And stuck up that hideous old board so that people could do their business in the bathroom without everyone in the dining room listening in.

And so we were left with this. For a long time. The icky board above the bathroom door is one thing, the slats above the laundry door to the right aren't really my thing either.

But before we could change things above the doorways, we first had to actually finish off the trim around the bathroom doorway itself. We bought a plain trim piece to run up the inside of the doorway to cover over the sides of the VJs and make everything lovely and smooth...

And we finally bit the bullet and bought ourselves a little multifunction tool so that we could cut through the chair rail and skirting board neatly, in preparation for an architrave to go around the door frame.

It's taken us two years of renovating to come to the realisation that owning one of these tools would be really handy for those jobs that require a bit of care and precision.

And then we pulled out the pieces of architrave that we originally pulled off the kitchen doorway, and nailed them in around the bathroom doorway! As you can see, I couldn't wait to attack it with the wood putty before taking a photo.

And then, finally, it was time to give that awful board its marching orders!

We could have simply replaced the board with a better-fitting piece and painted it, but because the bathroom and laundry both have lovely windows that let in quite a bit of good light, we decided that fixed glass panels would still provide a sound barrier, but let the light flow through into the dining room. So, we took the measurements of the window sections above both the bathroom and laundry doors, and then Tom toddled off to a glass shop to get two pieces of clear glass cut to size.

It was looking great as Tom popped the first panel into place.

But unfortunately nothing in this house is straight or square, so the panel hit a bit of a bumpy bit in the middle that needed some sanding before it would slot in properly.