Our First Flat

The bathroom after the first 3 days...

As you can see from the photos below, the new bathroom is coming along nicely. The progress has started to be really visible, with the biggest difference (and most annoying for the builder!) being the blocking up of the old back door, which has now been done - from the inside at least. The bath is now set in place and plumbed in, the shower tray is also in place and all the plumbing is ready to go.

We also had (yet another) visit from a British Gas engineer - this time who who seemed to know what he was talking about - so we now have working hot water as well. What a bonus!

The bathroom cometh...

Finally, after having most of the suite sat in the garage for the past 6 months, the building work started on the new bathroom today, with an absolute shed load of work getting done by our fantastic new builder Tony Allwood. The first day's progress including ripping the entire suite out of the old bathroom, blocking up the passageway (to save the house getting covered in dust), taking the separating wall down and putting up some new plasterboard. Job's a good'un!

Tackling the ivy...

The ivy that climbs up the back of the house finally got too much for Simon and Sarah upstairs today, as it had started to creep in the window on their landing, so we decided to take action today. Having got permission from the guys in the bottom flat next door, we headed in to the wilderness that is their garden and hacked down all the ivy. We've sprayed weed killer all over it so hopefully it won't come back any time soon, but with that sort of plant you never know!

New carpet and the world BIGGEST wardrobe

Well the time has come at last for the new carpet to be fitted - after almost a year of having bare floorboards in both bedrooms (slippers a must!) we ordered a new carpet from the nice people at Carpet Right and had it fitted it this week. Since Henry is off on 2 weeks holiday from work, we had the time we needed to move all the furniture out (it got spread between the garden, garage and round the rest of the house). Thankfully the weather stayed nice for a short period of time, so the matress being in the garden didn't matter too much.

It took us 2 days to move the furniture in and out, and all of about 1 hour for the carpet fitters to weave their magic. Still, it was worth all the work in the end - the carpet looks great, particularly in the master bedroom, and there were enough off-cuts left over that we could (temporarily) lay some down in the hallway until we get that done.

One consequence of moving all the furniture round was that Sara's wardrobe finally needed replacing. The bottom legs broke off when we remove the carpet originally, and when we emptied it to move it we realised just how bad shape it was in. So a trip to Ikea was needed (including a tedious hour waiting at their new large-furniture collection centre) and we ended up with the bigger wardrobe you've ever seem - over 2.3 metres tall. Honestly, you can see how big it is in the photos below, but if we ever need anything off the top shelf I think we'll have to get a ladder in!

Absolutely A-door-able

Having had a lot of success with the new bathroom door, we decided to push our luck and see if we could repeat it with a new door in the lounge. We plan to eventually replace all the doors, but considering the bedroom doors and the kitchen one will all get replaced when their respective rooms get completed (i.e. new carpet) we thought that the lounge would be a good one to begin with.

It wasn't quite as easy as the bathroom door - as with everything in our house, the frame seemed to have been put on by a blind man - literally every side was wonky, so we had to plane it quite a bit. But after the effort Henry put in cutting the last door down to size, we decided to buy a better (plugged) Jigsaw for this one, which made the whole excersise a lot easier!

A look at the garden in Summer

Since it's been so wet this summer, the garden plants have done very well. The vegetables are another matter mind you - a couple of courgettes is all we managed to get grown this year - but the bamboo in particular is doing extremely well. Also below is a shot of the garden next door - what a jungle!

Small room, to(i)let

For a small room this is going to be a BIG update! At long last (especially in Sara's opinion!) we got round to starting the mammoth task of re-doing the bathroom this weekend, with the daunting yet satisfying task of replacing the crap ('scuse the pun) old toilet with a sparkling new B&Q loo. The photos below tell the majority of the story, though the highlights were:

• Once we got the old toilet off we realised we would have to put a floor down too, so we opted for a laminate floor (again from B&Q)
• The pipe Henry bought to connect the water pipe to the cistern inlet wasn't quite long enough, and because it was a Sunday we ran out of time and had to run the hose through the cat flap for the night (you flush the loo, you fill it up with the hose)
• Since the laminate would be a lot higher than the original floor, we would have had to plane the old door down, so we took this opportunity to rehang a brand new door, and we made it open outwards to boot (in order to fit in a new sink - eventually - in the toilet)

All in all it was a fairly successful weekend, and hopefully nothing will go wrong from here on in - if all this works out fine, the next stop is the new shower!!

 

Spring Cleaning

So we're a third of the way through 2007 and we've done very little in terms of DIY this year. But now having the spring air around has begun to inspire us a little more to complete those jobs we keep meaning to do. That and the fact we have new upstairs neighbours who have already fitted a new bathroom and we've been here 2 and a half years and we haven't gotten around to it yet!

As a result of a bank holiday weekend and remortgaging our flat finally coming through, we've spent time and a bit of money doing some small jobs and buying some of the bathroom bits as well.

It's Curtains for you

Sara's mum gave us a new bendy curtain pole for a Christmas present to put up in the bedroom. So a nice relaxing Sunday was ruined by putting the pole up and then hanging the heavy curtains. Eventually we managed to get the whole thing sorted, but only after Henry had drilled 8 holes into the wall to attach the tiebacks. Only 2 were actually needed, so he's now created another job of filling, sanding and painting the holes next weekend!

Vanity of the weather kind

Sara's gran gave us a lovely weather vane for Sara's birthday, which we have finally gotten around to putting up - now we can tell which way the wind is blowing, and since it frequently is at the moment, that's quite fun! Also included are some other shots of the garden - the Bamboo and Clematis obviously haven't realised it's not summer anymore, as they're still growing at a rate of knots!