And the walls came tumbling down

The breeze blocks are where my old ensuite used to be. And the (fugly) doors are where my old wardrobe was.

This is the view from the hallway looking into our bedroom - one of the builders said 'You could even put your bathroom in the corner so you'd have natural light and have a long bedroom instead'. Apparently he wasn't serious but we still knocked up some drawings as it was a very good idea. Moving the waste pipe would have been very expensive and would have meant boxing some of it into the living room. Back to the original plan!

The stairs come out to no walls at all...

We're going for pocket doors in our bedroom and also the bathroom, so this means having to rebuild the walls to accommodate the internal sliding mechanism. 

Demolition underway

After one day with a sledgehammer this is what our old bathroom looks like.  We're onto the second skip already.

This shows the view from the bedroom looking at the ensuite and bathroom spaces. 

A parquet floor? Who knew!

And this is why the floor was so squeaky - they'd used different kinds of wood, which were nailed down instead of screwed, so the floor wasn't exactly flat.

There are two thick walls of polythene to protect us from the dust for the next few weeks.

Cloakroom: before photos

For FOUR YEARS I have endured our 2.5 ghastly bathrooms after writing this naive post back in February 2008. If I'd known I'd be putting up with the status quo for so long I wouldn't have believed it. Turns out you can smile through aesthetic compromises when your circumstances are wobbled (refer redundancy, recession, unemployment then eventually catching up on many, many holidays...) Anyway. Here we are. And this is the first of the three bathroom spaces to get an overhaul. (The other two will be knocked through into one space at a later date, probably another four years at this rate).

I mentioned the space was quite tiny in my last post, but here you can see it with your own eyes. And yes, I am still keen on black tiles.

Here is the garage, with the washing maching and dryer hidden under an avalanche of goodness knows what. Probably the best news about having the builders in is the skip, which means we can have a proper chuck out of misc items. Especially the items left by the previous owners.

This is the view with the door to the cloakroom on the left and the door to the garage on the right.

This is the same view once the builders got stuck in.

And here is our old cloakroom space - one day of demolition means there's no going back now!

Knocking out walls

Viola! One and a half days after the builders started work and look how much they've achieved: the entire ground floor has had all the internal walls demolished, the stairs have had a layer lifted off and the middle floor has had the old kitchen and flooring ripped out. The progress seems extraordinary as I thought a day and a half of work would mean that perhaps the water and electrics would've been switched off and that's about it. My experience with British builders has taught me not to expect a fast turnaround - in fact on our last renovation the builders would disappear for weeks at a time with no explanation. The crew on our current renovation consists of all New Zealanders. We met Teia with two of them at a local pub late on Saturday afternoon and they'd been in the UK for less than two weeks. I had to ask Teia if he was standing at Heathrow with a 'help wanted' sign, seems incredible that he's managed to find such hard working and competent tradespeople who are possibly still jetlagged. It might have taken six months to get this project underway but now that it's actually up and running I feel full of positivity… let's hope it lasts.

In other news, we went to Ikea on Friday night and bought the base units and doors of our new kitchen. Unfortunately the moulded acrylic counter top (Ikea's answer to Corian) was going to cost nearly £5,000 to manufacture and install. Our counter top budget is more like £1,500. The kitchen sales guy was a really helpful Australian chap but he said there was no such thing as a corner pull-out option so we begrudgingly purchased the wire shelving option. We have this in our current kitchen and it's not very sturdy - if the weight on one side is too much the whole thing sheers off the pole holding it upright. When we got home and inspected the brand new Ikea catalogue (which I'd gotten from work a few days before it hit the public) we noticed that a brand new kitchen feature is the... pull-out shelving option for corner units. So in what will be the first of many visits to Ikea we'll have to return the wire shelves and order up the replacements…