A productive month

I've been back in the UK for a month. Life in the US was business as usual--restaurants packed, most businesses open. Here in the UK, only grocery stores, chemists, and hardware stores are open. Without much to distract me, I've kept at the home improvement work. All of which takes longer, costs more, is more complicated than I would ever expect. But I'm happy with the results so far. For instance, below is a before photo of the kitchen. The green wall colour is on the olive side of green. A lot of the back garden would be a dark green colour and the kitchen just seems continuous with the outdoors.

So. I took a fresh approach. When I first started painting, I thought OMG, what have I done?  Yikes. The first coat looked awful. The colour is called Javan Dawn. LOL

But the second coat looked better. And then I had a white tile back splash added. And now it looks like this:

I plan to have shallow shelves put up on either side of the sink to hold clear containers of rice/couscous/lentils/granola. But that is for another day. Also need to repaint all the white trim (groan) and the ceiling (double groan).

In the living room, I had wallpaper added to a feature wall.

The wall arond the fireplace used to be dark blue like the rest of the room. The effect is to make the fireplace more visible and brighten the room.

The dining room colour changed from a cream that was a little on the mustard side to a pale green.

It's so pale, you can hardly tell it's green, but it has also brightened the room.

I'm not going to show before and after of the new upstairs lounge, which I have been working on since early July. After spending 2.5 months re-doing the ceiling, I thought I could pull the rest of the room together quickly. Ha ha ha. So funny. As of now, the walls are painted, the wallpaper is up on the feature wall, and the furniture is in the room and arranged. Which is a lot.

What is left: Decisions on window treatments. Decisions on what to hang on the walls. Decisions on what to do with the floor-to-ceiling wardrobe. I could write pages about just the decision on window treatments, which covers three windows in a bay window and a fourth nearby. The original idea was a short valance over the existing pulldown blinds, which match the old wall colour. Then I decided to go with Roman blinds--but how much fabric would I need? And how do I match the pattern across the three windows when the repeat is too wide? Then I ordered pre-made curtains on ebay to be cut up for roman blinds. But now I'm thinking of going with full length curtains, so I need more curtains. What kind of rail to use? How high does it sit? What kind of pleat to use? How does that choice affect the yardage I need?

In high school maths, I studied algebra, calculus, trignometry, mechanics, and geometry. None of that prepared me for hanging bloody curtains. I had Valerie the neighbourhood curtain consultant over today after my ebay curtains arrived. By the time she left my head was spinning with possibilities. Part of why I'm making a big thing out of this is it's been a cold winter and the windows, while double glazed, are not very efficient. Most of the houses on my street have bay windows and everyone has pull curtains to keep the heat in. So this is as much practical as aesthetic.

Late Jan/early Feb