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Renovating our house in France
July 2009
Renovating and creating our new bedroom
The last month has been fun. Now that the main structures are in place, we have enjoyed deciding on colours and other finishing touches. But the bed head still had to be put into place, wired up and the bed painted. We finally moved across from our old bedroom the day after Perry's birthday and now wake up to a view of the Pic de Midi.
Here's the before and after virtual tour.
Click on the Bedroom-Before button to see the Bedroom-After tour
Many thanks to David Woolf for bringing my 360° virtual tours to life. He helps me on the technical side of sites and widgets.
Check out his latest offerings at WebMagicSouth
...and here's how we got the last part done
The bathroom door that we knocked through a couple of years ago is now ready for its shelving
Just like that! with leads from the hifi to the speakers in the bathroom and a headset socket in the bedhead.
Screwing the IKEA wardrobes into shape. Too high for the beams, we had to saw off 12 cms from the top of all of them.
Jorg then built wooden frames and doors for them. None of the the IKEA designs really
suited so designed a very simple, country feel.
Jorg did us proud. The storage space is now enough for all our clothes and keeps the bedroom free of clutter. Now to paint it.
Just a quick dust and we can move everything over from the other room.
The wardrobes, painted in a grey acrylic and rubbed back with wire wool and a light sanding on the areas of wear.
Very simple lock mechanism with some distressing to make it look like it's been there for a while.
Whitewashing the floor and doing push ups at the same time
Finally we were ready for the bedhead that Ernest had made for us. His son, Alain, brought his Manitou to get the piece of furniture through the bedroom window. Caroline and Damien rode shotgun.
The whole Fourquet family came to help and watch it go in.
It fitted in with one centimetre to spare, top and bottom.
Ernest made the unit in poplar wood. Very pretty knots and patterns that we tinted with a light oak wash. He came to add the top once the electricians had been to wire up the lights and switches which are fed up through the floating floor.
We didn't want modern lights showing, so we built in our reading lamps into the bedside cupboards. Here Ernest is fine tuning the frames so that the cupboard doors close perfectly.
Here's the virtual tour again of how it was and how it is now
So there you have it. Done and dusted. Well, not quite...
...on July 6th we start building scaffolding around the house and will begin chipping off the cement that the old owners sprayed on in the 1950's. Then we'll clean it up and put 'chaux' (chalk/kalk) on instead. This breathes and will allow the outside walls to lose their humidity instead of sweating out the salt peter inside the house.
A bientôt.
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