Niall the Interior Decorator

Niall has been very patient with the whole home renovation.  I mean, he's on board and all, but I've always been the one a little more gung ho on a fixer-upper.

We talk about the house a lot.  It turns out Niall has some strong opinions about how he wants the house to look.  And I'm worn out with all the structural and less 'fun' things that we've had to go through to get to this point, so he's kind of driving the finished look.

One thing Niall wanted is for the house to be a place where our kids feel like they belong.  He wants the colors to be more vibrant than they were in Cardiff house.  We're using Polly Dunbar's palette that she uses in some of her books and in the TV show "Tilly and Friends".

Images courtesy Blaine

We have a lot of the various blues in the house.  Niall (with good reason) feels like it's too much and has really been pushing for a yellow hallway.  I'm not crazy about the idea, but he's asking me to trust him.  So, yesterday we went to Johnstone's and managed to find a yellow that's kind of like the background in the picture with the elephant.

We lucked out, because yesterday was a slow day at Johnstone's.  The paint guy let me look through their mis-tints.  Nothing suited, but there was a light cream color in wipeable matt.  We couldn't be picky about the outcome, but the paint guy agreed to add some more yellow to the paint.  (They won't usually adjust the mis-tint color, but luck was on our side.)  The end result was fine with us, and cost £12 instead of £100.

The second thing that Niall has been fairly vocal about is keeping the kitchen cabinets unpainted.  The second-hand kitchen we purchased was advertised as oak, but I'm not sure what the wood is.  (I've been told it's oak, pine and beech.)  The wood was pretty orange and beat up.  After sanding it and putting on a clear varnish, it looks fairly close to Howden's Tewsbury Oak.  (Pictured below.)

My ideal kitchen would be a painted blue wood in shaker style.  But we've done the work to clean up the cabinets and will leave them as wood for a while.

This next week I'm planning to focus on the kitchen and then move on to the stairs.  We've had finials added to the newel posts, and will paint the banisters white.  The painters are still working on the paint work and should finish on Friday.

And the actual stairs?  Well, we'll see.  I'm going to try to sand the treads and then we'll decide if we'll paint the risers and treads or just the treads.  Here's how it looks now.

The wardrobe doors are in.  (They're MDF and need to be painted.  The joiner had them routered.)

And the loft is getting plastered.