Spare Room Progress

It's been a dusty weekend at Sprout's House - we decided to demolish the spare room!

We chose to tackle the spare room (the room at the front on the top right) first as in our minds this is the room that needs the least doing to it in terms of electrics and heating!! During this phase of improvement, we're going to add a couple of extra sockets and some spot lights, but we are not going to upgrade the radiator until we get around to overhauling the entire heating and plumbing system.

So here's how the room looked before.....

The best - it stored loads - but ugliest and most inconveniently placed cupboard ever. The contents of which is now strewn across the landing.

Here's how it looks now.... (no laughing!! ;-))

Or watch on YouTube

A Dust Tan!

The reason we're knocking off all the plaster is that our house suffers from a lot of dampness mainly because it has been covered with modern materials. Modern day plaster on the inside and cement render on the outside mean that she literally can't breathe and so if there is a build up of moisture inside the house it can't escape hence our immense damp problems. We're going to use this room to test out some breathable products ~ lime plaster and wood fibre insulation. If successful, we'll then be able to use them throughout the rest of the house.

If anyone has any advice or tips leave a comment below!

Sprout’s House

 xox

House Progress ~ August 2014

Morning Everyone! As it's the beginning of the month, I thought I would spend a little time updating you on the progress we have made at Sprout's House. (If you're new reader, you can visit the Home Tour page to catch up on everything else we have done.)

Exterior

Most of our time over the last couple of months has been focused on the outside of the house. We have knocked down the porch at the front. 

This was one of the easiest tasks that we tackled taking all of about 15 mins. So we have gone from this......

 to this......

The front of the house looks a bit bare now, but we will put something else up instead at some point!

As you can see, we have also demolished the little stone wall that was at front of the house. The heavy snow in January 2013 meant that a lot of the concrete between the stones had blown so a few of the larger ones had started to work their way loose. Every so often we would come outside and find that one had fallen into the road so it had to go. There is still a little bit more to knock down on the right hand side, but we'll tackle that when we dig up the rest of the concrete.

Our biggest achievement so far has been excavating the driveway! 

No mean feat I tell you! We anticipated that we would probably need a couple of skips to take away the concrete and soil, and that we would also fit the porch and front wall in those too. 

In the end, it took 5 skips and three weekends of digger action to reduce the driveway to road level. 

Or watch on YouTube.

Once we had got rid of all the excess soil and concrete, we levelled the remaining earth and then used sleepers to create a wall on three sides. At the moment, the sleepers are performing two jobs - one hopefully it looks a bit nicer(!?) and two they are holding back the earth each side. The driveway is still quite narrow, but once we have got rid of the concrete path we'll be able to expand the driveway on the right side. We have also spread some Type One MOT (crushed stone) over the soil and whacker plated it down so it's nice and compact.

Eventually, we will cover the driveway with gravel, but for now we leaving it as it is as there are still many more skips full of concrete in our future!!

Oh.... and did I mention the asbestos? That was a joyous saga. Check out the outfit!! 

There used to be a garage on the driveway many moons ago and we think that when it was taken down they buried the roof and poured a layer of concrete over it instead of disposing of it.

Did you know that as a householder you can take asbestos to your local tip? Check with your nearest one to find out how it needs to be bagged and tagged!

Interior

There's not a whole lot of action going on inside the house at the moment. Whilst we were away on holiday the mixture of hot weather and storms did not suit our little house and we are battling a lot of damp at the moment. I even found mould all over the front of my lovely dresser!! So Sprout's Daddy ordered a whole load of Kontrol Moisture Traps to place in all the downstairs rooms. 

We have used one before just after we dug out the fireplace and found it really effective at absorbing excess moisture. 

The damp has also played havoc with the food in our kitchen cupboards - soggy oat cakes anyone? I was a bit loath to put anything with chemicals near our food so I have resorted to placing small jars of salt (GU dessert containers are excellent for this!!) in all the kitchen cupboards to try and absorb some of the moisture in the air. I let you know how I get on with this method!!

There are also a couple of new holes in the house. One in the downstairs bathroom ceiling - we want to knock through from the sitting room into the bathroom and small lobby to create a bigger room. 

Sprout's Daddy made a small hole to see which way the joists run and whether it is a load bearing wall. This will also help the structural engineer decide whether we need a 'steel'. 

The second hole is in Sprout's playroom and was definitely unplanned!! 

Once we uncovered the second fireplace, it allowed a lot of trapped moisture out. This appears to have travelled under the stairs and started to become trapped behind the plaster board on this wall. So we removed the plaster board and quite a lot of plaster came away too!! Ah well, this wall will eventually become a doorway anyway.

Apologies for the marathon post - I'll try to write updates more regularly! Anyone else tackling a DIY project or two?

Sprout’s House

  xox

Linking up at ~
Ladybug Blessings, Cornerstone Confessions, Kathe With An E, My Crafty Spot, Denise Designed, Flamingo Toes, Nifty Thrifty Things, The Foley Fam, 

How to achieve Night Time Dryness!

Are you tackling potty training with your little one, but haven’t quite conjured up the energy to conquer night time dryness?

Or are you fed up with changing your child’s sheets in the middle of the night?

This post contains affiliate links!

Sprout’s potty training journey began in August 2012 when I tried to potty train her over the summer holidays. It soon became clear from the numerous puddles around the house that she simply wasn’t ready for this step! Her second attempt took place towards the end of October just as we had moved house and were about to get married. Luckily, it turned out to be fairly painless.

We didn’t tackle nighttime dryness until mid-August 2013 and I think it took us about 3 or 4 weeks to crack, however compared to daytime potty training it proved to be fairly painful!!

So I have compiled 7 simple steps for you to follow in the hope that you have an easier time that we did!!

1.   Invest in a really good waterproof mattress protector!! The last thing you want to be doing is trying to dry out a urine soaked mattress in the middle of the night! We bought a cot bed mattress protector from Little Green Sheep.

   It is made from layers of super soft organic cotton between which there is a layer of food grade polyurethane. The sheet is flat rather than fitted to encourage breathability and help create a barrier against dust mites. This also means that you can position the protector wherever you need to! Sprout has used hers ever she started sleeping in her cot and now uses it on her full sized single bed. Neither her cot bed mattress nor her single bed mattress have any marks or stains on them!

2.  Buy a couple of packets of these Pampers Bed Mats.

  These are literally worth their weight in gold as they help cut down the amount of laundry you have to do. As a working Mummy, I found it hard to keep up with washing all the sheets especially ensuring that the mattress protector was dry and ready for the following night. We started off by laying one of these sheets across the top of Sprout’s bed sheet so that if she had an accident it would just be a case of changing her pjs and possibly the duvet cover. The only thing about the Pampers Bed Mats is that they are a bit ‘plasticky’ so as Sprout began to have more dry nights we moved the pampers sheet to underneath her bed sheet and since then have just removed it altogether!

3.   One of the most important things you can do is give your little one the chance to empty their bladder by hopping on the potty or loo just before you tuck them in and say goodnight.

4.  Even more important is to give them the opportunity to wee just before YOU go to bed! This will give them a great chance of remaining dry through the entire night! Sprout has been dry over night for about 8 months and we still pop her on the potty each night as we make our way to bed. Generally, she snoozes right through this night time wee and we usually have her potty right next to her bed so it doesn’t tend to disturb her too much.

5.  We also leave the potty in the same place in her room each night so that she can use it if she needs to.  

6. Leave out spare pyjamas, bed sheets, duvet covers and even towels just in case you need them for those middle of the night changes! The last thing you want to be doing is riffling through your cupboards at ‘silly’ o’clock in the morning.

7.   If you find that your child is continually wetting the bed in the night then it might be worth limiting the amount they drink after 4 or 5pm so that their bladder is not too full.

One of my friends has recently used these tips to help her daughter stay dry through the night and has reported back that it only took them a week achieve night time dryness!!

Have you got any night time dryness tips?

Pop your ideas in the comments section!

 Sprout’s House

      xox

Organise your Inbox in 4 Easy Steps

Are you a closet email hoarder? Is your inbox overflowing? Is your email account out of control?

Okay people….I have a confession….a deep dark secret if you will! 

Up until Saturday morning, I had 

unread emails in my inbox, and in total probably well over a thousand emails floating around my account. 

So here are 4 easy steps that will help you organise your emails once and for all.....

Delete, delete, delete!! Get rid of all those emails you haven’t read. If you haven’t read them by now you’re not going to! Only keep emails that are important and that you might need one day. For example – correspondence between you and your car insurance company; mobile phone bills; important work emails etc.

Lots of the emails, I hadn’t bothered to read were from a whole host of different companies whose mailing lists I had ended up on. To unsubscribe from a mailing list, simply scroll to the bottom of the email and click on the word unsubscribe.

Create folders so that emails can be easily filed away and then more importantly easily found when you need them. Categories I used included House, Work, Cars, Holiday, Internet and Sprout. I also used sub-categories for example under the Internet category there are two additional categories - Phone and Purchases.

Set up rules to automatically sort your incoming mail. This takes seconds and will mean that rather than having all your mail sitting in your inbox waiting to be filed or deleted it will go straight into the folder you have allocated it. Just remember to look out for unread mail in your folders other than your inbox!

As well as cleaning up my inbox, I also deleted a load of old email addresses that were cluttering up my inbox. So here it is, my sparkling and email free inbox......

Why not have a go at cleaning up your own inbox?

Have a great week! 

Sprout’s House

      xox

Pop over and join the party!!

Paperwork PaperHELL Part II

Finally, after more months than I care to remember I have managed to get all my paperwork under control. If you missed my first posts on this you can catch up here and here.

This is what my dining room looked like at earlier in the year....

....and since then the paperwork mountain has haunted my every move until finally over the last month I have managed to get on top of it.

Since a lot of our paperwork was now irrelevant, because it related to our last house, I decided that I was going to start from scratch. So out went the beaten up, mis-matched files and torn dividers. All out-dated paperwork was shredded and old manuals thrown out. Once I had pared it back to only the essential paperwork, in came these files. 

(They are by Staples and come in different sizes: A5 75mm and A4 25/75mm.)

I debated going down the ‘all black’ lever-arch file route again, but my eyes were drawn to this pin on pinterest, and I thought that if the files were different colours it might give me some chance of remembering what they contained!

So here’s how I organised our paperwork….

Hopefully, this has given you some ideas on how you could organise your paperwork!!?

In the mean time, I'll leave you on a more light-hearted note with this clip.

Enjoy!

Sprout’s House

      xox