In the meantime

There's nothing of any real worth to say about the kitchen at the moment, you may think there wasn't much to say in a few of the posts (you'd probably be right, if I'm honest) the tiles are still in their boxes, the paint is nowhere near being on the wall and the floor is still cluttering up the spare room. However, I do still have something I thought I'd share and that's the brilliant home wares I stumbled upon in Wilkinson's this lunch time... the Wilde range, slightly masculine, slightly old fashioned, it's just perfect for most of the rooms in my house

Faceted Vase £10.00 (source)

Marie Therese Ceiling Light £39.00 (source) 

We have two ceiling lights in the front room. would it be overkill to have these? Or perhaps the three armed version (£29.00) would be better?

Skull cushion £8.00 (source)

Chesterfield Wing Chair £350.00 (source)

What do you think? Pretty good stuff, hey? I have to admit, for the price of that arm chair I'd probably shop around and get something older, but that's just my taste for furniture which looks as if it's been loved.

I almost forgot! As a self confessed stationery obsessive with a penchant for a skull this also caught my beady little eye...

Skull Paperweight £4.00 (source)

Next on the to do list

The hall is, as with the kitchen, an awkward space. I honestly don't know what the Architects were thinking when they designed the layout because the hall is a ridiculous size/shape. As you walk in the front door you enter a small rectangular area with the bedroom to the left and the bathroom and the rest of the hall to the right. The hall runs across the middle of the flat, with the living room, spare bedroom and the kitchen coming off it at the opposite end. The ceiling has, inexplicably, been clad in yellow tongue and groove pine which gives a lovely (not at all) 80's sauna feel to the space. There is no wallpaper, not since that fateful night when the steamer proved too good at removing things from the wall. We've always said as soon as the whole flat is done we'd concentrate on the hall, so as not to ruin any finish on it while working elsewhere, which means this project is now looming in the not too distant future. In hindsight, this was probably a mistake as what faces any visitors when they arrive, before they've seen the other rooms, is something that looks not even a quarter finished.

Soon enough we will have no excuse but to pull our finger out and get the hall finished but that's not going to be an easy job, the ceiling has to go. It's a hideous relic from the original conversion yet it serves a purpose, it disguises the fact that there are three different ceiling heights, by the front door there's so little head room I actually broke the light bulb trying to put my coat on last week, just outside the bathroom there's a little more height and beyond that there's an extra 2 - 3 feet of space. We're faced with the dilemma of whether to embrace the different heights or to plasterboard where the tongue and groove is now and here's where the problem lies.... lighting. At the moment there are spotlights, they're ugly and giant but there is nothing else that can be put there, not when the ceiling is so low by the bathroom. So, do we keep them because whilst they're not our style they're at least functional, or do we do away with them and work out something else? This sort of decision requires consideration of the practicalities and that's something I'm not overly enamoured with, I don't want to have to think about that, I just want something there that looks pretty and requires little effort and money. I want the moon on a stick.

I'd quite like something interesting in the area where the ceiling is at the highest but that's where the hall is L-shaped and turns to the door for the living room so maybe that's not the best idea, it has the potential to become very dark there. Something like this would be great, but I just don't think it would go and I'm not sure it would give off enough light.

 £75.00 from Next (Source)

I think this is going to require a lot more deliberating. In the mean time, here's a hint of what is going to happen on the walls... (I'm not even joking)

£15.00/roll from Next (Source)

I'm off to Pinterest for some lighting inspiration.

The Kitchen Saga Continues

So, as of 9pm last Friday we have a partly functioning kitchen. We have base units and work top in place, Ian even managed to fit the gas hob, the electric oven and the sink without incident, no mean feat given that nothing ever goes quite to plan in our house. It was an absolute joy to finally be able to cook dinner using something other than the microwave and to no longer have to take the washing up bowl down to the bathroom.

Anyway, I digress... we have decided clearly there isn't enough disruption in the kitchen and so we're going to create some more, right here:

This is a false wall which has been turned into built in cupboards, about 2 foot deep and about 7 foot high. When we moved in the fire in the front room had a back boiler in the chimney which was connected to the water tank which was installed in a false ceiling above these cupboards. All of this was fine before we had a proper boiler fitted but now we're left with an empty tank in the wall and these ever so attractive louvre doors. Initially the plan was to fill in the hole which is just above the strange black patch on the left of the picture, paint the woodwork and doors white and paper over it. We couldn't afford to lose two massive storage areas. Well we couldn't until an off hand suggestion from one of our neighbours planted a seed and now we're going to take down the false wall. At first we dismissed his suggestion but then once the worktop was fitted we were left with nearly 2 metres of spare worktop and it seemed a shame to get rid of it. We ummed and ahhed for a whole weekend, the same neighbour came over, took one look at the wall and said "you've got to do it, the new kitchen will make this look awful" - he was right. The wall is coming down and in its place we're going to get a larder cupboard so that we have somewhere to keep the ironing board and the hoover, a worktop extending from it with a double cabinet underneath and the fridge freezer at the other end. 

I actually think we might be out of our minds even considering this but well, it'd be such a shame to waste some worktop for the sake of a couple of hundred pounds. No I'm right, we have actually gone a bit mad

Interest Waning

So, as I said, I am flighty, I can make a decision and then quickly change but I am also flighty in the sense that I will often rapidly lose interest almost as quickly as I had an idea. One thing I can vaguely become interested in is the design of the kitchen, or more specifically the décor  Now, most of our flat is decorated as if a pensioner has been in there, we have old furniture - a lot of it has actually come from dead relatives or second hand shops, not because we couldn't afford to buy it but because we like the look of it. Three of the rooms have Laura Ashley wallpaper and almost all of the wood is dark. I like the Victorian/Edwardian look pretty much everywhere. Everywhere that is, except for the kitchen. In the kitchen I like bright colours, colours that you may not necessarily have in your living room or your bedroom.

In our last flat the walls of our kitchen were painted a disgustingly bright yellow, I loved it. In this flat we have carried on the bright theme by painting the exposed brick (painted white by the last people) a super bright pink.

The exposed brick wall is being covered up with plasterboard, I've never liked the look of it and having a new kitchen gave us an excuse to cover up the monstrosity. Once we've fitted this kitchen I am going to repaint it pink, two shades of pink though, I don't want it to look silly.

So I've decided to go with Dulux Flamingo Fun in shade 5 for the wall that was formerly exposed brick and a more pale version of that for the other walls, particularly as the doors are a walnut colour and the worktop is black, we may have a wall of glass in there but there is also a giant pear tree outside that can sometimes cause a fair amount of shade. If I'd got my way we'd have had this on the walls but some spoil sport (ahem, I'm looking at you, Ian) vetoed that, I'll get it somewhere in my house one day though, I won't rest until I do.

(source)

Just look at it! How could you not want to paper your entire house with it? I think this is why I wanted the flamingo shade of pink on the walls.

After I've done the walls I've got another project to do. Our current dining table is one the tenants left behind, we didn't have one when we moved in so we kept their "gift" but it's seen better days like the rest of the room and so I managed to get a bargain on eBay which I have a grand plan for. It involves turquoise and gold spray paint and a bit of updating of our chairs with some leopard print. Yes it sounds horrible and no I don't care. Sometimes you need a bit of gaudiness in your life and just as soon as I get round to doing it, I'll be blogging about it.

Seeing the Light

As soon as we'd ordered the kitchen I swiftly lost interest, as I do every time I have an idea, it's really bad of me I know but I am flighty and changeable, I just can't help it, this is one reason I've never had a tattoo. Here follows some proof of my inability to make a decision and stick by it.

As I said in the last post we've removed the mid 90's office ceiling, what we've lost in quantity of lights, we've made up for in ceiling height, we've gained about a foot on the room and so this means we get to have a new light. When we got married last year we were given vouchers for all sorts of places, all of which we spent except some M&S ones, I decided I'd look to them for a new light, then it would technically be free... I ordered this but when it arrived it had some slight faults around the base, faults I thought I could ignore

(source)

At least I thought I could ignore them until we happened to call to Ikea on the way home from a trip to York when I saw this. Ian liked it more than the M&S one, which if I'm honest, I bought mainly because it was the only thing I liked enough to buy.

(source)

I think it's got more of kitchen look - not something which I would usually consider, you know since I have a bust of Queen Victoria in my bathroom - but also the metal will go well with the stainless steel oven and hob and the door handles we've bought are also stainless steel so it'll all tie in quite nicely.

It was all fine until I saw this in B&Q and wished I hadn't

(photograph my own)

Just look at it, yes it's ridiculous and a bit ugly but good god it's brilliant. It was cheaper than the Ikea light too. 

Sense took over, a trip all the way to Ikea to return light number two was a stupid idea, the cost in fuel would be more than the difference in cost in the light and besides, the one we've chosen has exposed wingnuts something which Ian was very much enamoured with so we've kept the Ikea light. 

Told you I was flighty

The Kitchen

The kitchen has always needed replacing, it was tired, the oven was temperamental but it was a massive expense we just couldn't afford and so we've made do for six years. We  were forced to bite the bullet this year when just before christmas the oven developed an interesting quirk whereby if a shelf was put in a specific place it would short the electrics in the whole flat. We spent the beginning of the new year staring at display kitchens in B&Q and Wickes, testing out soft close drawers (a personal hate of mine) to see if you could in fact get them to slam - you can if you try hard enough. I upset the kitchen designer in Wickes because I didn't like their drawer design and finally we settled on something from B&Q, it wasn't their cheapest but their man wasn't anywhere near as rude as the Wickes man and so we paid the deposit and awaited the delivery.

Here is the B&Q man's design



It's actually not as dark as it looks there and we will be having far more interesting colours on our walls...

So now the work has started, at some point a suspended ceiling was fitted, it looked like something you'd find in an office in the mid 90's, it also had 6 (I think) light fittings and so when we took that down and had just the one light I started to wonder if we'd made the right decision at all, it seemed so dark but only in comparison to the Blackpool Illuminations lighting we'd had previously. Over the weekend I made a start stripping wallpaper while Ian emptied out the cupboards and we got ourselves ready for the upheaval of having no kitchen.

On Monday when I left the house the kitchen looked like this



Lovely hey? What you can't tell from this picture is that the worktop you see there is pretty much all the worktop we have. It's still all the worktop we have as to the left of this is a wall of glass doors that lead to the garden and to the right a wall of built in cupboard, in a lovely 80's style, louvre doors and all. There's not much we could do without the major work of replacing the big doors so we have had to make do.

Last night when we went to bed the kitchen looked like this



Having removed the wall units on Monday afternoon, Ian spent the day pulling out the base units, hacking off the tiles (and true to form for our flat, some of the plaster), and taking out the oven, hob and sink. Quite a feat for one man to manage over the course of a day. He's also put together two of the base units. We have no sink yet and are eating meals that have been reheated in the microwave but we'll get there, hopefully in the not too distant future.

The Bathroom Part 3 - the final part, honest

(Sorry, this is going to be painfully long)

The last bathroom post ended with us having discovered a leak from upstairs had ruined our walls. Here is the tale of how we repaired it...

Underneath the ceiling - chicken wire and assorted debris, if you look closely enough you'll see the the mosaic tiles that covered the wall next to the bath, there was no way we could remove sections of them to fix the plaster behind so the entire wall of  them came down

The wall once the tiles and plaster had been hacked off, in hindsight I quite like this look but I'm not sure I could cope in reality, far too hard to clean, the slate floor is bad enough

Interesting make shift lighting system before the plasterboard was fitted

And here is my contribution, other than the painting, my first ever attempt at tiling. There was a hairy moment when I was on tip toes on that board at the bottom of the picture over the bath trying to tile the very top of the wall. It wouldn't take Ian's weight so as the lightest member of the household I was assigned the job of tiler

The finished product

Above Left - the floor to ceiling towel shelves, built by Ian and my tiling around the bath

Above Right - the rest of the bathroom, featuring a bust of Queen Victoria which is somewhat disconcerting when you're showering, or if you're a man, when you're having a pee...

What you can't see here is my excellent leopard print shower curtain which really adds something to the bathroom, much as Ian probably disagrees.

So there you have it, the final bathroom instalment, it may not be a big bathroom but Ian's done a bloody good job on it

The Bathroom Part 2

As you could see in the last post the bathroom was somewhat dated and in dire need of replacing, unfortunately we don't seem to have any pictures of the finished product for reasons which will become apparent, but here's what we did

Everything was removed, the toilet, the bath, the sink, the vanity unit, the radiator, the shower, even the tiles came off the wall - good excuse for Ian to get a sledge hammer out. Here he is doing something with the bath...

The tiny and ever so inefficient radiator, this plaster would later fall off the wall in what seems to be a regular occurrence at 22a

Where the mirror once was and a non-beardy Ian putting up the new cabinet

A couple of years after this our upstairs neighbour had a leak in his bathroom which we didn't know about till it had blown the plaster behind the mosaic tiles around the bath and had saturated our ceiling. To say it was gutting would be an understatement, we couldn't claim from his house insurance for reasons too boring and baffling to go into and so much to our annoyance we claimed from our own and Ian set about replacing the tiles, the ceiling and the wall paper, for a second time... 

The First of Many Disasters

We got the keys on a Friday afternoon, top of the list was the bathroom (in the next post), next on the list was decorating. The hall was revolting, a long narrow corridor, hideously busy paper, weird pine panelled ceiling like a sauna, to be honest it's partly still like this, the reason will become apparent in just a moment. Next up was a front door, the half glazed door had to go, it was ugly, burglar friendly and old. We took a trip to Wickes with Ian's parents and bought a solid wood door the first Sunday we owned the flat. It was December, it was peeing down, the wind was horrendous, so naturally we decided that that evening was the perfect time to do some DIY. 

I sat on the floor at one end of the hall stripping paper from the walls, while Ian was at the other ending planing the door. Just as the steamer loosened a chunk of plaster beneath the paper there was a gust of wind followed by a crash and a cry of "oh shit!". You see, Ian had leant the original front door against the opening and as he turned around the door fell backwards, the glass meeting the plane he'd been using, shattering everywhere. The new door wasn't ready to be fitted and wouldn't be ready until there was better light, the original door was creating something of a draught, a solution had to be found. Luckily we weren't overly enamoured with the built in wardrobes in the bedroom and so Ian set about sawing the doors up to board over the hole where the glass once was.

In the meantime, I sat on the floor knocking plaster off the walls and wondering what the hell I'd done. Here is the aftermath...

The glass from the front door

The hall before stripping

And the hall after the steamer incident