Hello again to anyone who actually reads this. I know I’ve been busy recently but I didn’t realise that the last time I wrote anything house related on here was 6 months ago! Oops. Well the last thing anyone saw was us trying to put double glazing in and preparing to plaster.
We had a bit of help at the beginning, but I think it’s fair to say that plastering is not a particularly easy skill. Sure you can slap it on and it looks ok but then when you put the cabinets up you realise that actually ‘level’ doesn’t really come into it.
So this was is the kitchen. Technically the cooker does still work put with no units, water or worktop we are on microwave based living. The washing machine however is entirely decorative.
We’ve come to realise that while renovating there is rarely a day that we don’t go to the DIY shop. Buying everything in advance is clearly something that people with experience do. Also, my car is small…
The plastering gets underway.
And here it’s basically done, just drying out still.
The previous owners made the joyous decision to coat their rather nice quarry tiles with bitumen and stick plastic laminate ’tiling’ on top. This is endless fun to remove and has proven that it can produce flaky bits, endlessly, for months.
We live in a horrible little area with a disproportionately large sofa that we cant get through the doorway.
The first unit goes in!! My, doesn’t it look clean.
Pretty much anything we do is worthy of a beer based reward.
Starting to get the worktop ready for the sink to go in, we currently use the bathroom to wash up in which doesn’t seem so bad until you see the bathroom.
Jewellery tools to the rescue again, I spent a stupid amount of time fixing and olive for a compression joint because I’m stubborn.
A bit awkward, but the plumbing starts to go in.
Things begin to actually look like a kitchen. The first wall cupboard is up (only needed to be moved twice in the future because it’s not the right height). LOOK A NEW CLEAN OVEN WITH THE LABELS STILL ON IT.
I spend about 4 hours trying to get the drawers in straight as they have no pre-marked holes and are soft close so you can’t see anything you’re doing. This makes me very angry.
The way the spacing in the kitchen works out we would have need a 1100cm cupboard with a 400cm door, Howdens don’t make these. It’s a small kitchen so I refuse to waste this much space. Instead we will take the end off our current unit and extend it. This is actually not easy, obviously the end that we want to stay on comes up quite easily but the other one is screwed/nailed/glued on. Hit it with a big hammer, I always win. If you call this winning which I do.
This fine piece of workmanship now means we have a slightly larger cupboard! Note the carefully placed bracket. To this day it is still standing!
We have a boiler related intermission. As you can see in previous photos we have a pipe running down the left hand corner of the kitchen, floor to ceiling. This is the gas pipe that supplies the oven and also the boiler in the bathroom upstairs. We plan to move the boiler downstairs so there wont’ be the need for the pipe. This means we can’t put in the wall cupboards till the boiler’s done as the pipe is in the way. For the boiler to go in we have to remove the window from the understairs cupboard, because that’s a good place for a window, and brick up the gap for the boiler to go on.
And then we get a sparkly new boiler and realise that the water pressure is so bad partly due to leaking radiators but mainly due to our 17 year old boiler which the local erm, ‘scrap dealer’ promptly removed from outside our house within about 15 minutes of it being outside.
And back to the kitchen… and we get the wiring in which is very exciting and nearly civilised. We’ve been living off and extension lead that runs basically the entire downstairs floor of a series of other attached extension leads. Apart from the kitchen light nearly catching fire when we moved around the sockets wiring for downstairs (!?!?) it hasn’t blown – I am surprised. 
Everything gets progressively messier but it’s nearly done…
And then it is done!! Apart from the floor and splashback tiling which is a whole other post right there. Painting doesn’t count either.
So much for ‘in by christmas’, but we got there in the end.
Up next, I get angry with liquid dpc and flooring in general, then butcher a sofa. Lee throws wet toilet roll at the outside of the house to try and stop the wind making a noise outside our bedroom window.
The Kombi Chronicles 