Newbie renovating a room

[AmateurEddie]

Hello. I have just bought a Victorian house in Kent and my wife and I doing some renovations. There will be afair bit going on downstairs and we have an architect etc. moving that along. As we are going to be moving out during the work, we had a thought to decorate the bedroom which we can also use to store stuff in when we hand it over to the builders who will do the bulk of the work.

So, I have some questions about how to tackle the bedroom decoration and the order in which we do the individual jobs.

At the moment I have removed all the woodchip wallpaper and the carpets to expose the floorboards. The plaster behind the wallpaper is the horse hair sort and seems to be slapped on against horizontal wooden beams.

There are some sizeable gaps between most floorboards - about 0.5cm at most. Some floorboards also need replacing. A friend of mine said it may be worth taking them all up and then shuffling them down to fill the gaps. The end goal for the flooring is to have the floorboards with a change of skirting and then paint the walls some colour.

The electrics have the wiring on the outside of the wall and so these will need to be changed to meet regs.

The ceiling looks like it has wallpaper on it which I havent attempted to move.

There is a fireplace and chimney breast. We would like to expose the brick and open up the fireplace too.

There is a small 'walk in' wardrobe behind a door in the room which also has the little peep hole for the loft. We would like to build a bit more of a wardrobe in here (at the moment it is one shelf and one rail).

The exposed plaster has a good amount of chips and scuffs and in one area of the room the whole wall seems to have a wobble. This is by the external wall and is just the whole block of plaster moving and not the wall itself.

So, it would be good ot understand in which order we should start tackling these things. Were needed we will get professional help but it would also be good to tackle as much of this as i can. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Roundtuit]

Hi, and welcome.  This is a bit of a 'how long is a piece of string' question, but I can give you a few thoughts as a starter from experience restoring a listed Georgian house:

- rule #1.  Start at the top and chase the dust down and out.  It sounds like the work in the bedroom is significant, so I'd get it done before you get any nice stuff done downstairs.

-  Walls & ceiling.  Sounds like lath and lime plaster. If it's in decent condition, still bonded to the lath, it's going to be easiest to keep it as is, assuming you're happy with what is probably a rough-ar$ed finish after you've got the woodchip off.  If you want better (i.e smoother), then it has probably got to come off and be replaced with plasterboard and skimmed. If it's not subject to any conservation constraints, that might be the best bet, as you can re-wire, insulate and add vapour barrier as necessary. It needs to be done with caution though; the lath stops the studs from twisting and bowing, so get advice before ripping it all off.

- wobbly wall.  Sounds like a partition wall that's no longer tied in properly.  Needs further investigation.

- Floor. If you want exposed floorboards, you really need to lift and shuffle up to fill the gaps. We did one room this way; the job was a pig, but the finished floor was great.  Expect to loose some boards through damage, but you really need to try a few to find out how easy they come up; we robbed some spares from another room that was due to be carpeted. If you want to sand it, don't under estimate the amount of dust!

- fireplace.  The chimney breast brickwork was never meant to be exposed, so it might not be as pretty as you hope. Again, opening up a fire place is potentially a very dirty job, depending on the condition.  Take it gently; we opened up two fire places ok, but our neighbours had a lintel collapse/massive soot-fall/big insurance claim.

 

I guess your approach really needs to reflect what balance you want to achieve between retaining historical fabric, restoring or maintaining period features, improving building performance, getting 'the look' you're after, and, of course, budget.

 

I don't suppose that helps much, but perhaps a few things to consider!