Building our home => Weekend by weekend (:

Weekend experienceee. Why am I posting this here instead of in some do-it-yourself community? Well, we do this job ourselves - true, but mostly on weekends and occasionally on weekdays when my fiancé isn't at work. Usually, we get the most done over the weekend, starting from Friday afternoon since that's when it officially begins. Anyway, now that I've explained why my blog is here, and hopefully it fits, let me get into the main story.

This is the upper floor of his huge family house that my fiancé and I have been fixing up for ourselves for quite some time now. And when I say quite some time, I mean definitely more than 3 years. :D Of course, we weren't actively working on it the whole time. There were months and months when we wouldn't touch a thing, when all the work was just waiting there, tiles on pallets, unopened bags of adhesive, grout... We bought everything on time, sometimes even starting a new part before finishing the previous one. And thaaat's usually where some little problem appears, we mess something up and then have to start over.

Let me tell you about the layout of the first floor level.

You reach a larger, almost square-shaped hallway by the stairs. The first room on the left, the one that currently has old retro pastel green doors from the old house, has access to a small terrace, a little balcony, and it's also quite large. The water supply and drainage for a small bathroom were left there, which we might build sometime in the future; such an interesting ideaaa.

The second door on the left leads to the biggest room in the house, which was originally designed to be a kitchen and dining area combined with the living room. But honestly, I'm really not a fan of that kind of layout. Maybe because when I'm in the kitchen, I often like to be alone with my thoughts or loud music. Maybe I'd make a mess I can't clean up right away, so to me a kitchen is nicest when it's a separate room from the living room. Plus, the smells, which are of course wonderful and welcome in every real home kitchen, but not exactly when you're sitting and watching a movie with freshly washed hair, for example, while onions are slowly cooking on the stove, big no no. 😁

Now Im jumping around a bit, but across from the kitchen door there's a door leading to this room, which currently looks like this. This is where we started laying first tiles three years ago, like I said, aaaand we're the proudest of this room, even though not everything went perfectly at the beginning.

I have to admit, we messed up something in every single one. xD If you ask other people, they'll say it's not even noticeable and that we're stressing over silly things. I guess that's what happens when you do something yourself and remember exactly where you skipped something, made a mistake, where the grout line ended up 5 mm thick when it should've been 2 at most and sooo on. In some places we even chipped the tiles while installing them and only noticed later, but those are all little things.

In that room, there's a big tile cutter standing on the table, even though we've finished laying the tiles. Now we have to move everything up to the attic to wait until we start working on the terraces. That room, along with the smallest room next to it, the one shaped like an L, both open onto a huge terrace as long as the entire width of the house, while that smallest L-shaped room also has access to a tiny little balcony. Kind of unnecessary, buuut okay, maybe the idea was for the house to look more balanced from the outside.

That little room would actually be perfect for some kind of office space with a library, that's how we picture it. It gets a lot of light, which is important, it just needs a desk, shelves, a comfy armchair and a mini sofa, an interesting lamp, a nice runner rug, aaaand it would be wonderful. 😍

This is part of the big "kitchen" room, which is currently our command center while the renovations are going on, or better said, the chaos room. :D

We do clean it all up so everything is nicely organized side by side, tools on one side, aerated concrete blocks on the other, bags of adhesive stacked with the other bags of adhesive, everything perfectly sorted, at least until we start working on something. The moment we begin, we instantly create chaos again, so today I'm showing you the real live situation. xD Here's also the bathroom mirror. ~ What's it doing there? I have no idea, don't ask me. xD

See those other pastel green doors? That's another room, a bit bigger than the smallest one, just the right size. It's directly across from the bathroom, and right next to the room we finished first. That one will be our bedroom. It has enough space, access to a little balcony, and it's on the side of the house that doesn't get as hot as the southern side, so I think it'll be perfect as a bedroom.

In front of it there's currently a half-assembled drawer cabinet that will be screwed in under the sink, and some bucket full of tile levelers left over from laying the tiles. So now comes the part where we clear out all the mess. Ah yes, that biggest room I mentioned first and the kitchen still haven't been grouted, so that's next on the list.

Next to that L-shaped room, between it and the staircase leading to the attic, there's the bathroom. We only recently finished it, well, finished covering everything with tiles, bought some of the sanitary fixtures, did the grouting (although we messed up a bit with the white grout, so we removed it yesterday and are now redoing it). And then comes the part where we fit all the sanitary elements. We chose this block toilet with a built-in cistern that will go all the way against the wall, and it doesn’t have unnecessary curves, so it looks kind of minimalist. Then there's the sink with a cabinet in a wood-look finish, and a mirror with a similar frame. Along with that, there'll also be a narrow but tall vertical cabinet.

We still need to buy a towel radiator that will go to the left of the door, then a washing machine, probably a smaller one that will fit nicely into that corner, faucets for the sink and shower cabin, shower doors too. We agreed to put up a curtain until we fully finish everything off properly, which is why that white rod is up there. (:

I kind of told you everything in a scattered way, I just wanted you to get an impression of the area that the two of us have done on our own, even though neither of us is a tiler, hehe. Yes, there are quite a few little mistakes and we made a lot of mess while working. We often left the job halfway because we were so tired, so in some places the gaps between tiles were left to first be cleaned from hardened adhesive and only then filled with grout. But all of that is really fine for someone doing this for the first time. And the people around us are genuinely impressed.

Yes, it did take a long time, and yes, now comes the part of decorating and choosing furniture, which can also take a while, but it's sweet. That feeling of a job finished is better than if we had paid professionals to do it. So the moral of this blog is that a weekend experience doesn't have to be a one-time, separate thing for each weekend, that it can only refer to different things. No, it can be something that builds up over weekends and weekends, for more than 3 years. And it will never be perfect, and we will always learn something new, maybe improve something, or maybe leave it as it is, learning above all to be satisfied first.

This photo is a clear example of both our experience and inexperience, the desire to finish things as quickly as possible, and the mistakes that come from that. It is also an example of my impatience to start decorating the interior, which is why I placed two flower pots in a still not grouted floor, without skirting boards, unpainted and all dirty.

So now we have a lot of clearing out the mess ahead of us, wiping everything down, painting all the dirty areas. We also wait for doors that should arrive from the carpenter soon. And then we'll slowly start arranging the interior, which is definitely the sweeter part of the job. 😁