For some reason, I find this absolutely adorable...

Here's a final post on the twins' room, aimed at those of you who aren't entirely sick of this whole project. I just wanted you to see it all now that the girls are moved in and living in the room. I took a few pics, panning around so that you can get a feel for the whole space.

As you can see, I glued panels of cork above Alexa's bed, so that she could get her posters, pictures and scraps of paper all on display again.

Here's Mallory's bed. Her guinea pig (chilling in the blue cage at right) seems pretty happy with his new, nicely decorated spot.
On the south wall, there's a window, but there was too much sun and the pic didn't turn out. Sry.

So, here we are again at Alexa's bed. You can see the balcony on the left. And also note the fluffy shag carpet on the floor, cleverly camouflaging the problematic cement bar in the floor.
Here's a closeup of Alexa's wall:
And finally, the view off their balcony. It's a bit desolate now, but will be really pretty in the spring.
The balcony is certainly big enough for a small table and a couple of chairs... I think the girls will really enjoy it.

The only thing I love more than a good list is a good batch of "before and after" photos.
Sadly, I don't have many pics, as I was too busy and disorganised to take as many as I should have...
But here's a couple of good ones for your perusal:
On the left, you can see the door to the balcony that is now part of the twins' New and Improved Bedroom.

And on the right, we can admire the awesome new ceiling that Paul put in for us (the man has mad plastering skillz, srsly!) and the gorgeous apple green paint on the walls around Alexa's bed....








Below, we see things are being put back into place. This is Mallory's bed:

The next step will be to glue cork board onto the wall above Alexa's bed and the finish the raw edges at the top of the wallpaper....
There also remains the small problem of the cement bar running through the wood flooring near Alexa's bed.
There was much debate about what to do about the yawning chasm left behind when the original wall came down. Paul said cement would do the trick nicely and I thought it would be fine...and it would have been if it had been well finished....
But the job was rather sloppy. By the time he was doing it, I think Paul was tired out and slowly losing the will to live.
At any rate, it's not beautiful and probably best covered up by an attractive area rug....

The New and Improved Romanian Handyman aka "Paul" (which is admittedly shorter to say, but way less fun to write!) has been working steadily since Sunday morning, putting in 10 hour days.
I think he's pretty tired out at this point, but at least now we can finally really see some progress!

Here's a preliminary before and after for you:






You can see in the left photo the green wall that separated the bedroom from the hallway. Below, you can see that the wall is gone and now the balcony that was in the hallway is part of the twins' room. And the room is about one meter wider than it was. FTW!






Here's the new wall out in what is no longer really a hallway, but more of a landing...
Paul finished plastering it this morning and is painting it right now.

The disgusting wasp megapolis in the ceiling has been replaced by insulation. (Nice, normal, bought-in-a-store, insect-free insulation.)
Plasterboard has been installed and it's all been nicely finished...



Sev had to help out quite a lot yesterday- which he loved because of the awesome outfit he had to wear. jk lol!!!!

The kids are on vacation from school right now...but holiday atmosphere is thin on the ground.

We're WORKING over here, people!
Srsly

After talking about it for years, we've finally taken on the project of enlarging the twins' bedroom. Their room is rather small and it always seemed to me that the hallway and balcony right next to their room would be much more useful as part it.
All it would involve would be ripping down a thin brick wall and building a short new wall closer to the door to their room.
(Please note that the word all in the above phrase should have been enclosed in quotation marks or some other ironic device. )
These things always turn out to be more complicated (and time consuming and expensive!) than they first seem, don't they ?

Here is the hallway and the door to the balcony. The door to the girls' room is to the left. The door on the right leads to Sev's room.

The wall came down pretty well...it was messy work, though.
Luckily, we have help- we've a new Romanian friend! As any regular reader of my blog knows, we can't get anything done around here without at least one Romanian in the house.
With a bit of help from Sev, the wall was history with a few hours.....

Then the next step could be taken... the horrible wooden ceiling had to come down.

Go Sev!

The plaster underneath was so damaged that Paul (our New and Improved Romanian Handyman) insisted that it ALL come down, so that he would put in an all-new ceiling.

And when the plaster and lathes came down, we found this:

And so it was that the Mystery of the Extremely Scary Hornet Invasion was finally solved.
They hadn't only been attacking from the kitchen chimney and the garage and the front wall of the house, they'd actually been in a gigantic nest located right over Alexa's bed.

But it's gone now and, with counseling, Alexa should eventually be fine....

So- finally, the demolition-type work was all done...
We are ready to start building something!