Carpet is down and looks great. Of course nothing is that easy and no sooner is carpet down than the door has to come off and have 4mm taken off the bottom... Uggg! Light fixture is also up to improve on the prison style lighting of previous Skype chats. Ready to receive the 26 boxes from Ikea tomorrow and start putting it all together! Double Uggg! Should have the nerve centre back up and running soon.
All is going to plan. Carpet coming tomorrow. IKEA stuff delivered on Friday. Did a mammoth shop in our favourite Swedish shop today a good 4 hours worth! These are the times when you wish you had a spare hand to take a picture of Mum pushing a regular trolley stacked full to overflowing and me following behind with a stacked up flatbed trolley. Priceless! You can imagine it I'm sure. Actually it was very smooth operation as this is the third time that we have done such a skilled operation, we have it down to a fine art now. Obviously they didn't have everything in stock so I will have to make a return journey to pick up the last few bits. Pictures will follow shortly as we near to the final reveal... watch this space!
Seems like this little room took longer than the last but thats just my mind playing tricks on me now... i will be having nightmares about wallpaper paste for the next few months i think... yuk! Ready for the regulation order paint job and then its almost done. The Ikea job on this room is easy peasy, no building just brackets on the wall and slot it on... fingers crossed. Floor is getting delivered and installed a week on Thursday. All plans are coming together.
The new blinds are being delivered tomorrow to replace the transit-damaged previous ones... they dont want the old ones back so looks like it will be "Two slightly damaged perforated venetian blinds" for Ebay! 
Couple of days since posting but I have pictures that actually show progress now rather than all the stuff you cant see. Nearly there now...
To address current blog comments, the office is waiting for carpet and a trip for Ikea before any more interesting photos will appear on this site. Sorry but you will just have to wait!
There has been lots of painting and sanding and repainting of the windowsill, siliconing the window back up, all the boring stuff that needs doing. Carpet was ordered today and will be down on Thursday!
The laundry room is getting the tried and tested paint and paper routine that has worked so well in all the other rooms followed by a lovely Ikea installation that was built exactly for our room dimensions. For those of you playing at home with an Ikea catalogue turn to page 315 (2007 ed.) to see the general gist of it. Lots more storage, nice work top and bags more hanging space. Perfecto, for less than £100!
I have finished getting the wallpaper off today. Lots of sanding and preparing of surfaces to do tomorrow, the worst and most boring yet completely critically important bit!
Project one (the Office) is now up to speed with only the last coat of gloss on the windowsill drying, waiting for the carpet and then IKEA installation.
Day one of the old laundry room renovation can therefore begin. Say bye bye to blue tac covered old wallpaper. Hello beautiful new storage filled contemporary utility workspace!
This paper is coming off a lot easier than the last lot... just glide the steamer from top to bottom and the whole sheet comes off in one go. Hardly have to scrape at all! Unfortunately have to work around the equipment in this room that is too big to house anywhere else...
Sorry, darn internet is so distracting I didnt post my picture yesterday... Wallpapering all finished and last bit of gloss got finished on the newly resurfaced windowsill. Ceiling and wall painting tomorrow ! Then its nearly time for IKEA! Hurray! Our floor is proving to be the spanner in the works... what the management have decided might take a couple of weeks to arrive! 
Starting to slap on the wallpaper today... I quite like these new found "skills" and the fact that wallpapering no longer fills me with dread... just getting on with it... no stresses. For some unknown reason I had thrown away the empty tub from the old wallpaper paste which I was going to mix the new stuff up in... I especially saved it for that purpose... why would I throw it away? Anyway I did (tisk) and also it seems, the pasting brush which was probably inside it (tisk) so I had to improvise...
Here we see... wallpapering preparation...
First piece on the wall...
First wall completed... By the end of the day I had done 80% of the job and will finish the rest off tomorrow morning, paint the windowsill and I bet you the day will have gone already! I also have to squeeze in my other pass time which is packaging up stuff from Ebay and Amazon sales and dashing down the post office to catch the post. It only took me an hour this afternoon to do 1o items but most of that was trying to locate one of the books! I need to implement a cataloging system if this thing is going to work... Hmmmm....
I know you are just aching for tomorrows installment, I can tell... well decorating pictures just can't compete with cute baby pictures... you have all been terribly spoiled is all I can say! Ha!
Yay... my favourite bit! The wallpaper is all off and blank canvas awaits. Not that I have free choice of what to paint on this blank canvas but it is at least a lot less messy. As you can see I have chosen the "throw-all-your-crap-on-the-floor" technique of wallpaper stripping which was a happy coincidence with the fact that I was not in a very tidy mood today... Luckily the carpet is on its way out too, so ...
Roll it all up in a big sausage and chuck it all away....
Leaving pristine room behind... PRESTO! I highly recommend this technique after all major parties and/or after changing motorbike oil events.
Interesting finds are always behind the wallpaper... time capsules of a distant era. I love finding Dads wallpaper hanging marks, which are still perfectly usable, and I also found these little art attacks... is this a little drawing of a man? You might have to squint a bit...
But this is definitely the markings left by little children... anyone owning up? I have no idea if it was me but I cant remember last week let alone 20 years ago...
Sanding of walls and woodwork is tomorrows agenda, which does not make for interesting photos, but I will do my best. Wallpaper up on Monday hopefully and I will have to make the IKEA run very soon... they better have everything I need!!!!!
OK well time to get on with the real decorating stuff now. After a quick conversation with my Norwegian decorating guru I made the decision to go ahead and strip off the old wallpaper so as to make a proper job of it. No cutting corners! My trip to Homebase was good and I bagged myself a steam stripper for £10 off normal price down to £20 so it was meant to be. I wish I had had that piece of kit when I was doing my room (Phase I) which was considerably larger job! OK well take a good last look at this wallpaper (and lovely border) cos its going...
...going....
...going...
GONE!
Found this guys Flickr slide show on my aimless wanderings of the net... He appears to travel around the world collecting tacky souvenirs and photographing them infront of the real thing. Whether this is real or photoshopped im not really sure, but some of them are pretty good.
Michael Hughes's Souvenir Slideshow
Well Christmas is fast approaching and the Management have decided that this week is going to be the commencement of Phase II of the redecoration plan. Scale drawings were done and little bitty paper furniture arranged until the master plan was finalised. Now the hard graft starts with the lugging, scraping, sanding, sloshing, papering and all the other -ings needed to get these rooms up to scratch! The choice of flooring is going to be the next decision. Mum is leaning towards Marmoleum as the preferred material. I would have been happy with a bit of laminate but we will have to see what the difference in price is. Phase II also includes the laundry room which will receive the standard wall and ceiling treatment and then have a nice functional finish (the one that we saw from Ikea Sarah).
Made sure I did some before shots this time.
Before again.
Starting to clear... its better already!
The guest room is like a bomb site again but the in-house technician managed to have only minimal downtime on the internet connection. 11:46 to 12:01 the internet was officially unavailable at No. 3, but normal service was soon restored. The broadband is currently being beamed wirelessley from my router to a £10 USB access point. Its cheaper than a cable long enough to do the same job! You can all breathe easily though, the nerve centre of No. 3 is still in full operation despite being spread over a large area of the room next door.
More updates as and when.
Had the pleasure of going to see the new James Bond film today. The best bond film... possibly ever?... Highly recommended at least! The opening sequence is a beautiful iPod-advert-esque silhouetted computer animated masterpiece by itself although the music track that accompanies it is not the most memorable of all its predecessors. Northern lad come good Daniel Craig is a perfect cheese-free 'Double-0-Seven' who is more than easy on the eye. The numerous chase sequences are brilliant and must have been incomprehensibly difficult to shoot. Thankfully it all ties up neatly at the end, ready for the next installment due for release 2008! Can't wait!
Hoorah!
Skype for Mac has taken its time, but has now been upgraded to include video calls. Will have to set my camera up and give it a go. My username back in the UK is going to be timconibear
Have you seen the current dispersal of Conibears on Skype? I took a screen grab below to show those who have not....
Double Ugg today. Here I was thinking I was getting ahead with all my (long) list of jobs to do here and someone has to go and throw a spanner in the works. I ordered blinds online by order of the management for the upgradement of both guest room and Mums room. They arrived as promised within their 3-5 day timeframe. They did not mention that someone was going to practice their pole vaulting skills in the parcel warehouse with them too though! The package was noticeably bent and unfortunately so were the blinds inside. Crushed and bent! Ugg.
I called the place and he said he would phone back in 5 minutes. Yeah right. Now I will have to phone back tomorrow and try and conceal the obvious annoyance that him not phoning back has caused... not good.
Boring post I know but not much else happening. Got job (yay) but not heard any more about that and probably wont for a while as the HR department at the uni are a bit rubbish by all accounts. Also waiting to hear back from Sydney about my thesis but Im not expecting any news there for another few weeks at least.
I had to go down to the Tate Modern and have a quick squizz at the new Carsten Höller installation. The slides are amazing just to look at as you walk into the Turbine Hall. It is a massive space and really they don't occupy as much room as i thought they would as they are just down one side really. I'm not sure I (nor many other people there at the time) appreciate them as "art". Basically they have just turned the Tate into a giant funfair for a few months. If it boosts their visits to the other exhibits then thats good but I doubt it would. The place was crammed full of dregs at 10am on a Sunday morning queuing to get on the rides like Alton Towers.
There are four big slides and one baby one. The one I saw most injury and swearing on was the one leaving the fourth floor. The initial drop is very steep and has a couple of sharp turns. If you are not positioned correctly or have a bit of a floppy neck then your head is likely to crack the side with a loud and resonating result. Swearing and generally all noise is amplified a lot through these tubes and people screaming and generally making idiots of themselves can be heard throughout! The one in the pictures below is the biggest one from the 5th floor. Its pretty tame as there are no steep drops or reversing curves, just one long bumpy ride to the bottom. Unfortunately as I was on a limited timeframe I did not have time to get a ticket for any of the slides so I will have to save that pleasure for the next trip to London. That left me plenty of time to go around all the other free bits before I headed back to pick up my bags and jump back on the train to Manchesterford.
Apologies in advance for the picture quality but my camera battery went dead whilst I was out and about round our nations capital city taking in the sights so I was forced to use my 6230 camera phone which is like VGA or something else as crap as that... not even a megapixel! I really have to sort that out!
Same old same old... just filling up space on my blog.
Ah, this is not filler, this is Suzannah being a goose with her boyfriend Chris. They are very well suited and I wish them all the best. Suzannah has gone full tilt into politics after not becoming the international opera diva that she had aspired to be. She is in Tonys back pocket at all the conferences... lah de dah!
More same old same old...
My cool hotel reception... every so often it changes colour too... green and then red and back to blue i think... its pretty nifty.
Hello
Well there are no two ways about it, my brother and sister are both going say through gritted teeth that I am a "jammy B*stard" and always have been... and probably always will. I don't know if I completely agree but I can certainly see their point sometimes...
First item in evidence this weekend is sitting in my hotel in Southampton about two hours before im due for my big interview... i get an email telling me that I had won two tickets to go the opera at the Lowry Cen
tre next week... Mum had seen the competition in the local paper and said we should give it a go and if we dont hear anything we should book anyway... Like many of the colouring competitions I have won before the local paper came good and we will be enjoying Rigoletto next Tuesday at 7:15!
Secondly my interview was in my opinion, a great success, although the truth will out next Tuesday when I get a phone call regarding the outcome.
Finally, and this is pretty bad, I was looking for a cheap, convenient yet nice place to stay in central london on a Saturday night that meant i didnt have to kip on someones floor and get in the way and have a bit of independence. So I plugged my details into my new favourite hotel finding website priceline.co.uk.
This site lets you select the area and star rating of the hotel you want and then choose the price that youre willing to pay. The only downside is that you dont know the name until its booked, and there is no going back once its confirmed. So, you have to start searching for a low price and high star rating... its just common sense. So how about a room in Mayfair/Soho, 4* minimum for 50 quid.... IMPOSSIBLE I hear you cry... but here are the pictures to prove it! HAHA! From my further investigations, the Cumberland Guoman hotel is upwards of 150 quid a night for a double on a Saturday night so I wouldnt have been surprised if at check in they had told me of their terrible mistake... but no, and i ran into the lift as fast as I could before they could catch me!
Flat screen TV and a lovely bed
Fancy sandblasted glass bathroom and Molton Brown stuff!
With a funky green safety light so you dont kill yourself in the dark maybe?
Considering that we I stayed in London last it was in a pretty grotty "3*" for the same price... with two single beds end to end in a tiny room with a broom cupboard bathroom, this is, well... Pretty jammy!
Off to meet with my opera diva friend Suzannah this afternoon, meet her fancy man and go for a walk and a coffee... then I might try and pop into the Tate Modern for a slide down those new slides and then ill be trying to find myself another jammy deal on a theatre ticket... I love London!
TTFN
Tim x
