Drop the Lime

I have this afflication now where I can't handle having my nails au naturale - it's been 2.5 years of regular mani/pedis and a lot of experimentation with new products to get the maximum wear for minimum stress/committment. The latest discovery was a gel nail product called Gellac - unfortunately it didn't last beyond a week so I'll be back to Bio-Gels (which last for up to 3 weeks and take 75 minutes to apply) - but the thing that was interesting was my 'random' choice of colour. Yup, it turns out I have a prediliction for this exact shade of citrus green. And it was a totally unconscious decision - when I chose it at the nail bar I was just thinking about getting away from my normal hot pink.

Oh and yeah, another music reference in the headline (look up Drop the Lime if you're into rockabilly dubstep)...

Well lit

Another photo of the finished kitchen. This shot was taken at night - about 20 minutes ago actually - and I noticed that all the lightbulbs under the cupboards were working. This is possibly the first time in over a year that there hasn't been one or two blown. Yup, another productive day from Rob who's been fiddling with teeny tiny bulbs.

In other house related news, the tenants at our flat are moving out after two years. I've got a friend who's a painter/decorator popping round to give us a quote. Rob wasn't keen, arguing that new tenants would just ruin the new paint job within a few months, but with a combination of London pollution and Blu-tack the walls have definitely seen better days. It was last painted seven years ago. (Actually, the walls at our current house could do with a tart up and we've lived only here for two years, but that's what happens when you have kids...)

Splashback is in!

Who knew a piece of 6mm toughened glass would be such a cause for celebration? Nearly two years (!) after finishing the kitchen, we finally had the splashback installed yesterday. It cost just under £1,200 including installation and VAT, and was sorted efficiently by Robert Timmins Furniture who came round and did the measurements with a laser.



I'm so glad we paid the money - our original quote from a local glass supplier was half what we ended up paying, but would've meant the glass had seams/joins around the hob. A continuous piece of glass looks impactful, and the sockets were cut out perfectly thanks to the accuracy of the laser measuring system.



I can't believe we took so long to get this sorted. It makes the kitchen look SO MUCH better. And now I can continue having espresso machine explosions and blender accidents and not worry so much about the mess. Yippee!

Measuring up

Be still my beating heart: the measurements have been taken for the splashback! Unfortunately, the kitchen fella forgot one of the "important" measurements and is coming back tonight, but we're on the road to getting a 6mm thick bit of toughened glass installed this side of Christmas.

The concrete counter top isn't completely flat, in fact, it's quite wavy. The edge of the glass is going to be completely straight. We're going to get around this little hitch by running a metal edge along the splashback where it meets the concrete. Hopefully this will remedy the visual hiccup that having a matte lime green wall peek through in places would create.

Another issue was that the switch for the waste disposal was only two centimetres away from a socket - the gap between the two is too narrow, the glass can't be cut with a thin pillar between two holes as it might crack. This is easily remedied - we'll move the switch closer to the socket. Well, Rob will if he can figure out how to drill into the wall.

Splashback update....

Photo taken by: Victoria Birkenshaw (available for editorial and commercial work in the UK)

My main hobby right now is getting the lime green wall in the kitchen covered with toughened glass. I had a cocktail accident recently which involved two litres of fruit, vodka and soda water blasting out of the blender and things got messy (Yes, that was a deliberate double entendre).

The splashback quote we originally had was in the region of £550, but if you're a reader of this blog you'll remember that the company who quoted refused to show up to take the measurements. Despite 2-3 weeks of quite regular pleading phone calls.

The latest quote is more than double but at least they return emails and phone calls (eventually). However, it's been nearly two weeks since the quote was confirmed and despite me trying to sort out a time for them to come and measure up I've yet to hear back from them.

Is there really a recession on? It seems to me that there's plenty of work out there for glass manufacturers at least.

(This snap was taken a few months ago. I'm using it here mainly because it shows the kitchen and partly because it shows my neighbour looking like something from a Martin Parr retrospective.)

Great minds think alike

Img courtesy of Flickr

As soon as I have a weekend at home I will photograph all the things in the house that we've yet to sort out. The last three weekends have been spent in various parts of the English countryside - kicking autumnal leaves and drinking litres of delicious wine. Hopefully I can make some time this coming weekend.

Until then here's a lovely white kitchen which features a dash of high gloss on the counter top, and chartreuse green as an injection of colour. Oh and they've got moulded white retro chairs and wooden floors too. I used to cringe at my parents bold orange 1970s colour palette once the 1980s were underway, and I guess my kids will have the same reaction to our aesthetic choices before too long. "Eeoow, this house is so, 2008, urgh!"

The plumber came back with a quote - £2,500 to fit a new boiler and replace the water storage tank. Apparently all the necessary parts can be bought for around £1,000 which means the labour (ie one days work) is being costed at £1,500. No wonder so many people are re-training as plumbers! Rob's offered to buy the parts directly to see if we can negotiate a reduced day rate. Watch this space.

Kitchen drama

Happy days - Teia's been back to the house a couple of times this past week to make lists of things that are still to get done. He even managed to put the first coat on the kitchen wall where the splashback is going to go. As you can see it's a pretty strong colour - I have fluorescent socks in a similar shade. The idea was to break up the white with something a bit punchy... and yeah, it's pretty punchy. I'm getting used to it, and am looking forward to the second coat and the glass for a proper analysis. (Of course by then, it'll be too late to change it but hey ho).



On a different note, it was raining this evening so I had the sliding doors open a smidge. I heard a heck of a racket which turned out to be an enormous wood pigeon which had either crawled in underneath the door on dropped in from the top. Goodness knows why. And how come we've never had a problem with birds popping in when the entire end of the house is wide open? Anyway, in a pure cliché I got Rob to chase it out with a broom. Luckily all the poop ended up on the black ledge... gross. Will hose it off tomorrow.

A good cuppa joe

I like coffee. Most mornings I have a short espresso, and on weekends spend time frothing a smidgeon of milk to have a macchiato. Recently I was reading Easy Living magazine (I was on holiday. I don't usually read it) and there was an article on how to make the best coffee at home. The "experts" reckoned that you should grind your beans with a burr grinder, and then put them into a cafetiere (aka the Bodum plunger style) as you'd have to "spend thousands" to get a halfway decent domestic espresso machine. The optimum pressure to make good coffee was 9 bars, and you couldn't achieve this with a non-commercial machine, apparently.

Well I'm going to contradict Easy Living's advice. What's the point of having a burr grinder if you're going to put your freshly ground beans into a plunger? If you can spend money on a grinder, you may as well get a La Pavoni machine. You don't actually need one with a pressure gauge, but if you can afford it £319 will buy you a machine that'll produce coffee as- good as any you'll get in Italy (and a zillion times better than the rubbish they produce at Starbucks).

These pics are of our machine and as you can see the gauge is up to 10 bars. I like a thick crema as much as the next girl. Our grinder is Dualit and cost £60 on Amazon (though thanks to the strength of the Euro is now listed at £85, ouch) and we get our beans from Climpson & Sons in Broadway market, but you can buy them online.

Herbie Hancock

We used to live less than a minute from the cheapest florist in the East End so our flat was always full of flowers. At Rob's insistence I might add. The new locale means getting to Broadway Market before it gets too crowded on a Saturday (ie in the morning) and paying a bit more. So far I've managed it a few times but then get annoyed at the decaying debris left behind. Rob hates dealing with dead flowers. As do I. Actually I'm sure I read somewhere that growing flowers is bad for the environment (chemicals in the run off water, actually using water that could be better used elsewhere, eco footprint from transporting them across Europe etc etc).

So here's a good compromise I hope: herbs. Not just cut herbs in a tea cup but actual live ones. I'm kind of wishing I'd thought of this before the concrete got poured because it would've been cute to have a little groove inset in there for the pots to sit in. Next time maybe. I'm not much of a green thumb so chances are these little puppies won't last through the week. In the meantime, they're pepping up every meal and I've even got my three-year-old drinking mint tea.

A little bit of snagging

On Saturday morning we were heading off to Berkshire to test drive a boutique hotel for Mr&Mrs Smith. Hey, someone has to do it. (Fortunately great friends Kate and Tom, who live in Henley, took the girls overnight and even though the clocks went forward the kids slept in until 10am. Result.) As we were loading up the car to leave London, the guy who did our concrete counter top showed up to see if he could fix our cracks and sort the lacquer which has lost its sheen in places. Fortunately it looks like he can remedy the worst of it and we'll have to live with some crack "scars" which is part of the charm of concrete.

When we got back - after a hard night of drinking various elixirs and a morning of retching into a very stylish Duravit basin - we were delighted to see that Teia had fixed the bottom two drawers in the kitchen below the hob (pictured). Because of the pipes from the top floor bathroom these drawers couldn't slide open, as there wasn't enough space to house the runners once the pipes had been boxed in. The solution was to put the doors on strong spring-loaded hinges. They work a treat, and I've now moved the heavy Le Creuset cookware to the bottom 'drawers' which has freed up the top shelf in one of the cupboards for tall bottles of vodka and what not. They'll remain there for a the foreseeable future as I can't seem to get excited about mixing cocktails right now...

Lacquered counter top

Ta da! The concrete has been lacquered to within an inch of its life and check that hi shine effect. There's only two more days till we move in and we're about halfway done with the packing. We're running out of boxes but I'm told more will be delivered tomorrow morning.

The burglar alarm is being fitted early next week, the phone's been connected and the broadband should be sorted the day we move in. We've redirected our mail which was more difficult than you'd expect: The Royal Mail website wouldn't take payment online, and the wait in an actual Post Office took 20 long minutes and involved a conversation with a teller who seemed to model her customer service on the Little Britain character whose line is "Computer says no".

On the upside, the glass manufacturers phoned this morning to say the provisional installation date for our extension is... December the 16th! It might even be sooner depending on the production process and transportation from Germany. I can't believe it, I'd convinced myself we'd be camping out until January and now it looks like three or four weeks tops, hooray!

Boiler and leakage

This boiler has to stay on this wall. It's kind of ugly but necessary so the plan is to accommodate it within the bespoke cabinetry. The cabinets will also house misc house items, like DVDs, cookbooks and vases. The plan is not to exceed our storage capabilities with more stuff.

The roof has been fixed up a bit and you can see the wall of plywood which is protecting us from the elements for the forseeable future. It's been raining in London these last couple of weeks - not a spot of drizzle, but proper, driving rain. The plywood has a length of tarpaulin at the top to make it slightly weather proof, but the rain is still coming in. The concrete on the kitchen floor (below) is a tad soggy and will probably be like this until the glass gets fitted. Did I mention I have two small children? I wonder if they'll understand instructions about not playing with the floor muck...

Kitchen lights

I think Rob enjoys stressing me out. He says extraordinary things and then waits for a reaction. He's had plenty of fodder in this renovation project to turn me into a hysterical banshee but I've learnt that he's prone to exaggeration and is fond of creating drama where there isn't one. Case in point: he told me the lamp shades we'd chosen as pendant lights were too big. He said even if they were hung a little higher than they should be, they looked wrong for the space. I pointed out that they cost less than £120 so were a temporary solution until we could find something we really liked.

When I saw the pendant lights in real life, I have to admit, I couldn't see what the problem was - they look absolutely in proportion to the space to me. In fact, they look better than I thought they would. I definitely don't feel motivated to replace them just yet. Here they are in a photo, let me know if you think they look too big...

Concrete counter

Ok, so this photo doesn't really do it justice, but here's the concrete counter top and our new tap. The counter top is going to have a coating of lacquer and then it'll be buffed to a high shine. This shade of grey might go a tad darker with the lacquer, but then a bit lighter with the buffing. Either way, we'll end up with a concrete coloured counter top, made from, uh, concrete. It's really wide and solid, which should help reduce wear and tear - and cracks, hopefully. The white kitchen with a light grey contrast is an aesthetic I really like, thanks to Pierre Koenig. Recently I read that he'd designed houses with acoustics in mind because he loved music so much. A man after my own heart. It's a shame we forgot to wire up our own home for speakers while the walls were exposed...

London snow

This is the kitchen from a couple of weeks ago, apologies for not having any recent photos but I spent last weekend in bed with a nasty bug. Imagine it without the plastic covering the fridge and oven and this is pretty much how it'll look until January. There'll be no natural light as the back wall is completely boxed in and covered with a tarpaulin. It's going to be dark and cold - and how about that unseasonal snow fall this week? The first time snow has fallen in London in October since 1934. I have a feeling this is going to be a very cold winter. I guess it's good to be thinking about wrapping up warm and not running the central heating, from an environmental perspective but also a cost one. I hope my kids understand why we're being so "mean"… heck, when I was a kid we didn't even have central heating!

More kitchen progress

The concrete counter top is proving to be a big hit - Rob loves it. And it'll look even better once it's been given a high shine laquer and been buffed up. I'll reserve judgement until it's finished... it's hard to tell what kind of impact it'll have when most of it is covered with building equipment.

As you can see from this pic the double oven is in, and so is the extractor fan. The fan sits quite a bit lower than we're used to, but maybe this will be better at extracting cooking smells as the one in our current flat doesn't seem to do much.

The Knob's knobs

The appliances were all delivered exactly when they were meant to and the builders immediately slotted everything into its rightful place. I was a bit peeved when I clapped eyes on our Smeg hob for the first time as it has 'Mickey Mouse' style knobs. Rob complained that the photo on the website he ordered from was tiny and he couldn't make out the details. I asked why he hadn't searched for a bigger photo on a different website, and was met with "Why don't you order everything yourself then?". Actually, I like shopping online - I prefer it to shopping In Real Life so I don't know why he took it upon himself to order up all the fun stuff.

To Rob's credit, he's since found a website that sells Smeg knobs, so we can switch them over for £32 plus P&P. We'll put up with the wingnuts for now and get around to replacing them eventually..

Kitchen comes together

Here's the Ikea cabinetry coming together. The drawers in this photo are upside down, the finger grooves should be aligned to the counter rather than the cupboard underneath. It looks like Ikea has drilled the holes in the wrong place. All reference material shows these drawers up the other way. The actual size of the kitchen is marginally smaller than our current place, which is up for rent in the next 8-10 weeks (mid November, hopefully. If anyone would like more details please leave your contact details in a comment.)

We'd been told by numerous experts that Ikea base cabinets are as good as the ones in high spec kitchens, and that to add value you can replace the doors, counter top and appliances with more expensive versions.

I mentioned in an earlier post that we ended up with a nasty cheap laminate counter top from Ikea as it had accidentally been included in our order - which we'd put through at nearly 10pm on a Friday night (just as the store was closing and Rob wasn't being overly conscientious with his checking). Unfortunately we can't get it back to Ikea due to the length, but as it only cost £70 we're going to reuse it, maybe as shelving in the store room or something.

Kitchen progress

Here's Rob, Anthony-the architect and Teia-the-builder inspecting something in the kitchen. As you can see the boxing has been made in preparation for the concrete counter top to be poured this week. We've received the undermounted double sink and have the dimensions of the gas hob so the boxing needs to have shapes allowed so that when the concrete is poured, everything just slots in perfectly afterwards. I'm keen on a very high shine finish, in a lightish grey or off white. Apparently it's low maintenance and only needs sealing once a year. I still feel a little sad about my Corian, especially as the money saved isn't going to equate into a bathroom Velux as we're so over budget...

Pendant lights

I'm not a massive fan of halogen lights, which is a tad ironic given that this is how most of the house will be lit. However, we're going to have a couple of pendant lights over the kitchen sink to make the space less clinical (all that white!) and provide a bit of warm light. It's a bit of a stretch finding a pendant light that doesn't scream "Ikea!" when our budget is so compromised, our thinking was to find something that will do for now that we can update when we're a bit more flush (uh, 2012?).

There are some really gorgeous retro lights from the 1960s at Alfies Antiques Market but very few of them are under £500 each. We were thinking something in the region of £200 for both would be an acceptable sum, but this is a price point that sadly means we'd be stuck with Ikea/Woolworths/Argos. Then we popped into OneDeko in Spitalfields and found a simple, clear pendant light that looked like a future classic. It was £75. A few days later I went to order two of them online but decided to do a quick search to see if they were cheaper anywhere else. And they were, everywhere that stocked them was cheaper than £75. In the end, I got the "Josephine Acrylic Pendant light" from Exit Interiors for £59 each, plus £5 for delivery. £123 all up, which is pretty good going. Let's hope they look like future classics hanging over our kitchen sink...