Home Office... Covering Up The Ugly Bits

The home office is coming along, but we're in that annoying stage that involves a lot of small time-consuming tasks that don't look particularly pretty until we get to the next stage (i.e. paint). But if we don't do them properly the paint won't look any good. We've learned that the hard way, but it doesn't make me any less impatient to get this part over!!!

So let me just wizz through it and we can pretend it happened like magic, not over the course of many painful weekends.

Here's where we left off after getting through the messy first few stages (see here)...

The most obvious ugly bits are all the gaps between the ceiling boards. So I pulled out a picture of the original ceiling and attempted to lie out the timber battens we had pulled off the original ceiling. It's surprisingly difficult! Don't judge me.

But we got there eventually.

We paint scraped all of the boards, and then laid them out...

Ready for an undercoat.

 
Meanwhile, onto another ugly bit! The window frame!

We didn't bother salvaging the extremely boring architrave that we'd pulled off the window originally, so bought some new stuff, cut it to size, and voila, the window instantly looks more finished.

Next, cornices. This is where having an angled ceiling adds a serious layer of complexity. Most pre-made cornices are designed for ceilings that are at right-angles to the walls. I'm sure the pros have a much more sophisticated (and simple) way of dealing with this problem, but we had to wing it. So we started by tracing the top and bottom of where our cornice needed to sit on both walls and ceilings, which gave us the point at which they needed to intersect.

We cut off two little pieces of timber cornice to experiment with, and trialed-and-errored it until they fit together nicely in the corner. We could then use them as our templates for the real pieces.

Magic! Cornice and architrave over the doorway installed, puttied and no-more-gaps-ed!

Window architrave puttied and no-more-gaps-ed...

Skirting boards installed...

All of the putty etc sanded...

The VJ wall opposite the door corniced, puttied and sanded...

The window frame painted (I know, I cheated and skipped to the painting stage a little bit). What a difference paint makes...
 

And continuing with the cheating (I know, the earmark of a super exciting life is that painting before installing ceiling battens constitutes cheating), we undercoated the ceiling...

Before finally installing the undercoated timber battens! Again, as if I just clicked my fingers and they appeared!

Next stage... can you guess what it is?

Painting!!! Am I the only one DYING to see it painted?