Renovations...Paint prep and cornices

Another boring step before we could start painting was to fill all the dents and scratches and holes in the existing horse hair plaster walls and ceilings. Horse hair plaster is really annoying by the way.

To make life easier for when we sanded the floors, we removed all the skirting boards from the existing rooms and then we also pulled off all the existing architrave. We had to put new skirting and architrave in the new rooms anyway, and in replacing the trim we sized up (previously 42mm architraves and 66mm skirting, now 66mm architraves and 92mm skirting). The added advantage of going a size up in the existing rooms was that we didn't have to patch areas where the plaster ripped a little. I also taped all the edges where we had exposed plaster which stopped it from continuously crumbling while we were painting and sealing the floor, we then nailed the new trim right over the top.

Renovations...Plastering

Plastering was easily the worst phase of the house renovations, it's dusty, it makes an incredible mess that you can never quite get clean and you just feel so gross through the whole thing. It's the phase that most people will warn you about when you say you're renovating and doing it all yourself, everyone I know seems to have a plastering story whether they did it themselves or would never even consider it.

We're glad we did it ourselves (I say we, but SJ really did most of it) even though there are some visible flaws, particularly in the ceilings. We've learnt from experience and have noticed worse flaws in other homes so it was worth the savings.