Refurbishment on a budget

Here are just some of the bargains that I have picked up for the refurb I mentioned a while back.

The front door is tiny, so the only way to get sofas in is through a window or build them in the house. We took the second option so turned to second hand Nabru sofas. Nabru is a cool brand of sofas that can fit into any space. The sofas new would have cost me close to £700 and we even managed to pick the green one up in our car! You can pick up sofas much, much cheaper especially on Facebook, but size and getting into the space is a problem for me. These sofas can be disassembled easily, you can reassemble them super quickly and you can buy new covers for them from £70.

The cost of the sofas includes delivery by Shiply. Shiply is a courier service that is much cheaper than the standard services. It cost us £53 to get the red sofa up from London to Warwickshire. I just put in my job and in came the quotes. Only thing is that the sofa didn’t get here till 12.20 am, so let’s just say you get what you pay for. I picked up the mirror for £27, four dining chairs with seat covers for £26.01 and an IKEA TV stand for £5.50.

Instead of buying expensive new units or even replacing the doors for new ones, we used kitchen cupboard paint – Ronseal One Coat in ivory – to spruce up the kitchen. And with new handles, it looks like a new kitchen!

I got a steel splash back put in behind the cooker to give the kitchen a more modern feel and matched the cooker (new) to the old fridge freezer. The cooker is a Currys essentials one and Flubit came up with the best price around for it!

I also needed some new bar stools and got these beauties from eBay. The lady paid £50 each for them and I got them for £5.50 for the pair. The seams were coming apart slightly, but Sugru came to the rescue. The plasticine like substance sets hard and it covered the damaged seams to make my bargain bar stools look even better.

You just warm it up in your hands, apply and let it set. It takes 24 hours and covered up the stool damage no problems – see my before and after shots here.

I picked up some new lights to replace the slighly old fashioned overfussy ones. They cost me £30 for two chandelliers and three side lights. Unfortunately, some lights broke on the way, so I got a refund from eBay. Here is the transformation! I got the energy saving bulbs from a market, and got the guy to try each one out before I took it home, but ALDI sell the lights cheaply if you are lucky and they have them in.

The bathroom was a horrid dark blue mess, so we removed all the tiles, got a plasterer to replaster and then only tiled the bathroom around the bath and sink and painted the rest with bathroom paint. I got the green edged cabinet for £10 on eBay and the radiator for £15.99 on eBay. The loo brush was 60p from Wilkinsons! The downstairs loo was dirty, but I cleaned it up, got a new mirror from Asda for £8, a soap dish that sticks to the wall from TKMaxx for £5 and fixed the toilet lid with Sugru.

Finally, I got some more bedroom furniture bargains, including a chair and two headboards from the British Heart Foundation charity shop for £20.