kitchen mania!

So the kitchen is finally finished!! whoop whoop!! thanks to ikea, dressed up with posh tap and door handles, fired earth tiles and beautifully sanded wooden floors! oh and jarek and silent mario for actually putting it in!

farrow and ball

How sad is it that my best bit of the weekend was a trip to farrow and ball to buy the floor paint for the bedroom?!?! We decided on white - well not actually white but 1 of 20 shades they do! Looks pretty smart though - so now the floor's done only the woodwork, polyfiller, sanding, lining paper and painting to go -easy!!

back boiler buldoze

The chimney breast in the living room has a hollow section to the right hand side which was built to house the old back boiler - now with a lovely new combi this panel is no longer needed so time to take it down and reclaim half of the alcove! Thanks to James and his dad it came down in no time....well not too much time but a fair amount of effort - they used 5" long nails!!

ikeatastic

With the floors nicely varnished and the kitchen all arrived and checked off from ikea we're ready to start putting in the kitchen! Well I say 'we' I really mean our amazing polish joiner Jarek and his silent friend Mario. Should be finished in a week.....except that when it comes to unpacking the boxes from Ikea we begin to realise some of the panels are the wrong colour - lots of different shades of white! uh-oh!! After 4 trips to ikea within the space of 3 days and one too many 45p hotdog dinners we've managed to get all the rights bits - now to get it all in! Eek! Oh and Sunday night spent doing polyfilla, hanging lining paper and painting the wall behind the cooker hood! And of course the units aren't really blue....

sandy floors

So the first Bank holiday weekend of the year would obviously be a great time to really crack on with the house so we might actually move in sometime in the near future! Oh except that it's one of James's best friends' stag weekend in Madrid - leaving me the pretty mammoth task of sanding and varnishing the kitchen floors before the kitchen gets installed next week! doh! With some kindly help from 'my mate dave' we got it done in a day - although was pretty backbreaking! However, as some of the floorboards had been replaced in the last few years we uncovered an odd mix of pine and original oak which didn't look great. So I mixed up a pretty special wood stain to dye them all the same colour, along with a coat of very old and yellowing clear varnish the colour is actually pretty spot on! Not too shabby!