Officially the lounge is finished!

The Patio door view

Bertie: are we DONE yet ..?

I wonder if anything more exciting is happening out there?

oh well best settle down and accept she wants a decent pic of me looking interested

Bertie having a silly moment over his new toy

IN THERE? no. sorry. but NO. I'm NOT going inside

UP there? you want ME to get UP THERE?

Lilly: can  get DOWN now PLEASE?

come near me and I'll bite you! its mine! grrr

you have been warned! I will bite! x

is she done yet, taking pics?

TRY and look "excited"? please?

Another angle of the cats corner

Well I'm PLEASED (and relieved) to be able to announce that officially the lounge is now DONE. FINISHED. hurrah! (and thank goodness!)
It has taken a full year to complete but when you consider the obstacles in the way - I had two ablations, our son had surgery and dh retired and returned to work plus there was a tremendous amount of work needed to be done as we literally stripped the room bare, ripping out a walls worth of brick, replastered and redid the ceiling and put in new sockets and inserted ceiling lights (I say "we" did this - cough - naturally I mean dh did this, but I supervised aka bossed him about) and THEN faffed about for ages choosing paper, carpet and furnishings.

The last thing to be placed was the furniture.  We opted for smaller 2 and 3x seater sofas and so far we're pleased with our choice, they are more comfortable and flexible enough in their capacity that we can fall out with someone and move to sit with someone else - the good news is that no matter where I sit I still annoy them with my KNITTING no! wait! I mean there is ROOM for me to knit without being too annoying!

To keep the cats OFF the furniture, and away from the wallpaper and stop from climbing the curtains, we bought them a cat scratching post play centre.  Its slightly more popular than I thought it would be but that may be down to the very liberal rubbing of "cosmic catnip" ..
somewhat nervously and with a cat-like lack of excitement we presented their "cats corner" to Lilly and Bertie and after several mins of locking them IN the room and chasing them to corner and capture by the scruffs of their necks we managed to persuade them to at least LOOK at what we'd got for them .. of course had we left them to explore by themselves, no doubt they'd have done so already but you know what its like in the excitement of buying something NEW and MARVELLOUS you want the recipient to jump about and exclaim a bit? ..
to be fair, the cats DO use it and do seem to LIKE it.
but I'm not convinced they don't wait for us to leave the room and then jump onto the new sofas .. there are telltale signs of white hairs in the morning and both lads have whispered they'd come down in middle of night for water and found the cats asleep.  (but we're not going to tell dh, we're going to wait and see if he finds out for himself!)

The room has been changed about.  We now sit and face out toward the garden which means that next year we have to do something about the garden I mean jungle ..

the last thing we need to do is find furniture to complete the room - in the corner we plan some sort of bookcase thingie and are undecided about whether to get a coffee table or a nest of tables, in the meantime the old cheapie table is in situ and we are going to "live"  a bit before deciding whether to commit the scary amount of money required for the set that dh has he eye on!!
Its not cheap - but we splashed out on this room as its our main one, and we intend this lasting and seeing us "out" ..