Guest room kick off

Finally, summer vacation! What could be better to set one's mind off of work projects, than little renovation? There are two goals for the next few weeks: to conquer the Final Frontier, i.e. the downstairs guest room and to build a 45 m2 terrace on the backyard. Easy, right?

The first thing to do was to empty the room. It was a junk yard, but as a silver lining Pekka made some interesting finds while digging deeper and deeper into the unknown. He found things we thought we had lost for good. And he found things we didn't even remember we had.

Before and after

The Final Frontier ready for a face lift 

The plan is simple. We want to paint the walls and install a slate floor. Earlier, Pekka had covered one of the walls with a self adhesive Buzziskin felt when the room served as the first Man Cave. As the plans had now changed, the felt needed to be removed. The removal part was easy, but cleaning the remainings of the self adhesive glue off the wall was quite the opposite. Let's put it this way - we spent a bit more time and effort cleaning the wall than originally planned.

"Almost" ready to be painted!

After trashing the old plastic carpet we were happy to find out that a few ugly looking stains were not an indication of water damage, and we could go on with priming the floor. By the way, one of the benefits of constantly being on the renovation mode is that there is a surprisingly large selection of renovation equipment and materials readily available. No need to go shopping for primer, for example!

Being primed

For more than two years we have had two big piles of slate just sitting and waiting something to happen. Finally, the day has arrived: some of those slates are now spread around on our backyard for Pekka to select the best ones for the floor. Once again, we are eternally thankful for having extremely understanding neighbours!

Pick and choose your favorites!

Few of the chosen ones

So we are hoping to have the slate floor ready and the backyard all cleared by the coming Monday, when the excavator arrives to do the groundwork for the terrace. It will be one laborious weekend ahead so everyone interested in some serious physical exercise around the theme of construction is more than welcome to join - the beer has already been chilled!