How to get an overcrowded house repainted and new floors without moving out

[GMH74]

As the title suggests, my small 3 bed is in dire need of repainting and new laminate and carpet. How do you do this when 4 people and a cat live here? How do you stop the cat getting covered in paint? The house only has one reception room, no spare bedrooms and the garage is full of things like bikes.

One room at a time! Cat (unless it is very young and boisterous/inquisitive) will stay away - they don’t like upheaval or the smell of paint so take themselves off, in my experience.

Floors are worse than painting but again, if you can only do one room at a time that’s what you do.

One room at a time! That's what we have been doing the past year. We moved in last January and have now tackled all rooms, bar the kitchen, hallway, stairs and landing. The kitchen will be next and then the hallway (when we have saved enough money!) Stairs and landing will be last as we may need a decorator in or to hire some ladders to allow us to do it.

Just take your time and also be ruthless at having a clear out of each room as you do it. We literally empty the room and then get it done in a week. Have the flooring booked for the end of the week and then move everything back in. Then have a few weeks rest before we do the next one.

For painting pile everything in the middle of the room and cover with dust sheets
For flooring you have to empty the whole room
I always book the new flooring before I start the decorating so I absolutely have to have it finished by then. Nothing like a deadline to motivate you to get things finished

I'm lurking on here for tips.
DH has stripped the walls in our bedroom, painted the surrounds and door and we have bought paper .
That's where it has fizzled to a halt as Christmas , Covid and basically Fed-Up-With-It took over .

There's a bed ( KS) 2 wardrobes , a chest of drawers and a bedside 2 drawer unit .
The carpet needs taken up , the furniture will all need shifted .
There is nowhere to put it .

You HAVE to declutter the garage. Or at least tidy it up - bikes hung from ceiling or on walls, stuff tidied away, so that you have a bit of floor space to play with.

3 of you go on holiday for a week. Or stay with family.

One person stays behind and blitzes it in a week. One room at a time, shut the cat in a different room

Same problem here, pushing all the furniture into the middle doesn't work as there's not enough room to work round the edges, However we have managed one room by putting it all to one end, decorating, moving it to the other end and doing the rest. Flooring and plastering are almost impossible though, we want a new bedroom carpet but have got a nearly ceiling height 2m wardrobe, a king sized bed and various chests of drawers in a room 12"x12" and so we don't think it will be any time soon. No spare room in the DCs rooms. No garage either, we have two sheds but they won't take anything bigger than an armchair.

One thing we have considered is putting our tent up in the garden and moving furniture out there.

3 bedrooms with a garage isn't overcrowded at all for 4 people!

@OneRingToRuleThemAll That's exactly what I was thinking. I live in a small 3 bed with my dp, 4 dc and 2 dogs and wouldn't class us as overcrowded.

@OneRingToRuleThemAll

3 bedrooms with a garage isn't overcrowded at all for 4 people!

Yeah, this.

I’ve done the living room myself with everyone in it. You just move everything to one side and cover everything left on the other and crack on.

Like everyone else does, one room at a time. Just done the bedroom. Everything bar the mattress moved out of the room on day 1 (bedframe dismantled and sitting on landing, tallboy in bathroom, bedside cabinets, other drawers roaming around the house in various locations), painting done day 2 & 3, carpet fitter booked for am on day 4, carpet fitted and everything moved back in same day.

Living room is next but that's easy - just shove everything in the middle of the floor and work round it. When it was getting plastered we did the same and just used our bedroom for the week as a living room.

Even worse if you’re having your floors sanded and varnished!

We’ve had the dining room, hall way and two landings done. All the other rooms will have to be done one at a time, and after one of our adult DC has moved out! Absolutely impossible otherwise.

I don't think the OP means overcrowded in terms of people (we are 4 plus two cats in a 3 bed house) but the room sizes and amount of furniture. My DCs have a bedroom each but they are about 12" x 8" with beds, wardrobes, desks, chests of drawers, our room is similarly full, the downstairs rooms are fairly full of furniture too. So there just isn't any space to empty a room into, especially if you still need to be able to get to beds, wardrobes etc. Whereas pre DC we had two spare rooms with only a bed and bedside table in them so it was easy.

The bedrooms are tiny. Especially the third bedroom. You have to have the bed against the radiator and under the window as it's the only configuration which will fit. Even the "main" bedroom has barely any room to walk around the bed and its not king size or anything. What people were saying about difficulties of moving furniture to the middle of the room rings true here too.

We had a similar horror recently - All new windows going in and the mess/replastering/ redecorating needed.

Hideous - too much crap, no space, no outdoor spaces to put anything.

One room at a time.
Shove everything in the centre of the room.
Cover everything with plastic sheets.
Bottle of wine.

Think Tetris.

Another suggestion - wait until spring and put stuff outside.

One room at a time. I understand about the no room even if you shove everything to the middle, so push everything you can toward one wall or side of the room, decorate the wall/walls you can then move everything toward the decorated wall after 2 coats.

I only use water based paints so start crack of dawn and you can make a lot of progress even in one day.

Flooring is more complicated and we did 3 bedrooms upstairs plus the landing and stairs, however we paid for it as one job lot but the carpet company only came when we arranged it for each individual room. We worked out moving furniture into other rooms ie the children's bedroom stuff into our room, carpet laid in child's bedroom, move everything back. We have those interlocking foam mats which we put under wardrobes etc so they wouldn't leave dents in the new carpets in the children's bedrooms when we came to do our room. Then the fitters came back and did the landing and stairs.

Depending on the ages of the children bunk them in together or move a mattress into the lounge and see it as an indoor camping adventure with an adult staying downstairs if they are too little want to sleep downstairs.

We house sat when friends went on holiday so we could decorate more easily!

I stood on the bed (on plastic covers obvs) for painting most of my bedroom ceiling! Generally just work around the furniture for painting. You can even paint two walls first, move stuff, paint the other two etc.

Shut cat into a different room. Paint is touch dry after a few hours so won't be a problem for long.

@KittenKong

Think Tetris.

So there just isn't any space to empty a room into, especially if you still need to be able to get to beds, wardrobes etc.
The thing is, almost no-one has enough spare rooms or spare space to ‘empty a room into’. So you pack carefully (all clothes you need for 5 days), sleep in the lounge, shove stuff up against other stuff, if need be work around it in weird spaces like bathrooms & utilities or other DC’s bedrooms/your bedroom and just… make do .

It’s shit. But it’s Tetris, as a PP says.

No utility, one tiny bathroom, no garage, no spare room. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it is a lot harder without these.

@GMH74

As the title suggests, my small 3 bed is in dire need of repainting and new laminate and carpet. How do you do this when 4 people and a cat live here? How do you stop the cat getting covered in paint? The house only has one reception room, no spare bedrooms and the garage is full of things like bikes.

We found the easiest way was hire a storage company and take the hit for a month rental ( it wasn't particularly expensive) a removal company for 2 hours work to clear all the bulky stuff into storage.

Once done we piled anything left to one side, did the painting and flooring after, switched sides and did the same- repeated the process for each room.

We found renting a storage room what they advised as for the contents of a 1 bed flat- was enough to clear enough crap stuff out of a 3 bed to make decoration easier, and the month rental gave us a hard deadline to get things done ( although we ended up going over by a couple of weeks) Make sure your rental terms are a weeks notice , most of the big storage chains offer that. We paid over 200 quid, in total 4 hours of removal men at nearly 300 quid, but it was worth it to once we got our stuff back and the house was all sorted. We could have hired a van and done the moving ourselves, but we were doing the flooring and painting ourselves so had no other outlay other than the flooring and paint. We were getting quotes of 900+ to do the flooring, and it was hard work, but glad we did it all ourselves. It was a tough 6 weeks though, but the effect is amazing considering the total cost, we shopped around online and got good deals on paint and flooring, it feels like a new house.