New kitchen 2

We scraped meals together for what felt like a long week. There was a little miscommunication with the plumber which resulted in me rushing home from work and then sitting waiting for 3 hours until the plumber who was allegedly “just round the corner” finally arrived. He then didn’t speak to me other than in grunts and complaints about the work he needed to do. Oh and he took away the sink which meant washing up in the bathroom. 
The electrician had a small heart attack when he saw the amount of work that we needed done. This was a team of people our joiner had put together and although we’d fully briefed him that hadn’t translated into telling the other tradesmen.


The weekend of the Royal Wedding. We jumped into the car and headed north for a wedding  with less hype but still an amazing day. We said a not too sad farewell to the sorry looking kitchen and wished the joiner well. Incredibly nervous about what might be waiting for us when we returned. We'd been seriously burned by bad tradesmen whilst getting our bathroom redone so we were over the moon relieved to come back to an almost complete and very soon finished kitchen.

It was then plastered and we painted, painted and painted some more.

I'd recommend getting your kitchen plastered before the brand new cupboards are put on the wall. We would have preferred to do it the correct way round but there wasn't a plasterer to be had for weeks and weeks. Thankfully our plasterers were uh-mazing. I think they left the kitchen tidier and cleaner after they'd finished than we did.

There has since been more paint applied to the walls, a floor laid and a splash back fitted. The boxes, crates and suitcase were all eventually unpacked. 

We love our new kitchen

New kitchen 1

When we got married all that time ago our guests were not only generous enough to give up their time, holidays and the expense of getting to our wedding and helping us celebrate they also gave us gifts. Our main request was a donation towards our new kitchen. It took us quite a while to finally get round to the kitchen, we still needed a little bit more savings. There were many, many weeks of angst over the design and how the layout was going to work. 

Eventually Easter weekend arrived as did my ever suffering parents, the kitchen was designed, the joiner was chosen - it was destruction time. We emptied the kitchen into an alarming number of boxes, crates and even a suitcase. Then we started stripping wallpaper layers upon layers upon layers of wallpaper. The previous owner of our flat was a heavy smoker and the steam from two wallpaper strippers meant that the tobacco and nicotine came dripping off the ceiling and walls – really truly disgusting. Under wall paper we discovered still live electrical sockets and other such dangerous mysteries. Over the weekend my parents and O and I got more and more weary. We were left with a sink and a cooker to keep us going for another week.

The living room was also emptied to allow room for the kitchen to be delivered and to give the joiners somewhere to work. 

Home decorating – don’t get too cocky you never know what is round the corner

O and I are good with our money (a whole other potential post topic), some might call us tight (I’m from Yorkshire it’s a term of endearment down there). We have a good amount of savings and we shop around and think through purchases before we buy. So early last year we got a bit cocky, we had quite a bit of money left over one month and it was our two months free from council tax (our council allow us to pay our council tax over 10 months so we get 2 months free every year – obviously not free free because we pay more for the 10 months but it feels like they are free months). So one Saturday we decided to go a bit crazy and buy a Nintendo WII, we’d played at friends' houses and really wanted one. We did very brief research and found the best deal at the shops near us. We excitedly walked to the shops, picked up our WII and took it home, unpacking it all and spending a pleasant evening playing.

The very next morning I was on my way to the loo minus glasses so the world was a bit blurry, I glanced into the living room and noticed a strange blurred patch on the wall that wasn’t usually there. I went and got my glasses and O and I went into the living room to discover black dirty patch on our wall. The rain had stopped, so the water wasn’t running at that moment but it clearly had been. O went into the loft to explore and found some very wet patches in our loft. So having been so smug in our cleverness with money we had to pay out roughly the cost of the Nintendo WII to a roofer to come and patch up the cracks in the chimney stack and replace the few loose slates that we’d lost in the wind. I believe this would be commonly referred to as sod’s law! Oh and to add insult to injury we don’t actually play the WII, we did for the first couple of weeks but we just aren’t computer console type people – we should have realised this as it is the first console either of us have owned.

Today's lesson - plan for emergencies and don't get smug because the world will kick you in the ass.

Home Decorating – Don’t let my Mum out the house

I love my Mum and her and my Dad have worked tirelessly to help us with our decorating. She does also have a penchant for embarrassing her daughters – I firmly believe that it is every mother’s right to embarrass their children and I intend to continue the family tradition to the fullest extent when/if our own children come along. So how do you combine decorating with my Mum’s skill at embarrassing me?

The decorating machine had moved on to thinking about the bathroom – O and I both love bubble baths and were desperate to have a bath in the tiny bathroom that we have. We knew it was possible as we were told when we bought the property that they had removed the bath and put in a shower cubicle to make it safer and easier for the little old lady that lived there. We had a vague idea of how it might all fit in but the maths wasn’t really stacking up. How do you fit a bath, toilet and sink into a room that is the length of a bath and the width of two baths? We had tried a couple of bathroom designers to see if they could come up with any creative ideas of how to fit all these things in – they all asked if we really wanted a bath, seriously why do they do that? We are the customer we are telling you what we want why are you questioning our sanity when we want to reduce the floor space of our bathroom to about a foot?

(we joked about trying to find something like this to maximise space

- I didn't realise it actually existed! From here)

My Mum then came up with the great idea that we should go and look at the neighbours’ bathrooms to see how they had fitted everything in. At this point we’d lived in the flat for over a year and we knew the neighbours to wave to, we’d say Hi but we’d never been in their homes, and I didn’t know the names of most of them. O at this point refused point blank to go anywhere with my mother (she has to become mother now to illustrate how mortified I was). Take note that we’d been decorating in another room for most of the day so were in old filthy clothes and looked like we’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. Seriously if some mad looking woman turned up at your door and asked to see your bathroom what would you do? Slam the door in her face would probably be my reaction! But no our neighbours are amazing and they all said yes, please come in (there were some very strange looks and quite a bit of hesitation), as I trailed red-faced after her.

There is unfortunately no denying that there has been huge benefit from this ordeal. We have completed the bathroom renovations (although it didn’t go smoothly) and are starting to look at the kitchen (probably after the wedding) but I now know what my neighbours’ kitchens look like (once she was in their houses there was no stopping my mother) which is helpful when planning our layout. I know all the neighbours’ names and although I’ve never been invited back into their homes (strange that) we are much friendlier in our waves.

So today’s lesson – my mother has no shame but she gets the job done.

Home Decorating – Don’t get comfortable

First of all some background for you, we live in a 1920’s four in a block ex-local authority 2 bedroom upstairs flat. Ex-local authority = big rooms (except the bathroom).

There was nothing “wrong” with our flat when we moved in, the walls were all structurally sound, the heating had been replaced 2-3 years previously and a new kitchen and bathroom had been installed around the same time. It just wasn’t to our taste. Which is apparently my taste, it is amazing what you learn when you start living with someone, we’d already lived together for a while before we bought our own place but it was a furnished flat that we couldn’t make changes to. So what I discovered when we moved into a place that was ours, where we could add our own stamp, was that O doesn’t understand decorating. He didn’t see much wrong with the nicotine stained wood-chip wallpaper and 4 different colour carpets we have over a relatively small square footage (can you tell I over-reacted in total dismay). He is not lazy at all he just didn’t understand why it needed changing, so I just told him what needed changing, how to change it and he got on with it. I’ve had to explain to him a few times the difference between living in a place and enjoying living in a place and making a place lovely to live in.

But still, we have been very slow with the decorating, partially because it was our first home and DIY was new and scary. My Mum and Dad have been the biggest instigators of the decorating activity and without their constant offers of help – and them actually just turning up at the door with dust sheets and a wallpaper stripper I don’t think we’d be as far along as we are. You see we just seem to make do. We have two huge rugs, one of which has covered the horrendous carpet in the kitchen since we moved in the other is a recent addition and covers the carpet in the living room. We have an extra dresser type cupboard (I’m trying to make this sound nicer than it is) in the kitchen to make up for the lack of storage space. And we have a map on the wall in the kitchen to cover the boiler shaped hole that was created when we moved the boiler – it wasn’t making a great feature in the middle of one wall.

Decorating is very expensive especially for the big things like carpets or kitchens and I would not recommend getting into debt to renovate a house that is perfectly liveable. I have a friend who is still paying off the cost of her decorating 4 years after it was completed – she is likely to have moved to a new house before she manages to pay off the work on the previous one. However don’t get comfortable and don’t make do. Or perhaps just be more motivated than O and I.


(Not our house, I wish our map made the room look as good as this - from here)