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.

Back yard view

Oops, should've posted this before now as it shows the view from the top before the walls started to get built. The three rows of wooden supports should be four - Rob told the builder the deck should be three metres deep, going against the architect's drawings, but we really need it to be four metres after all so that it can house a dining table and chairs, without anyone falling off into the grass. This means the builders have to make some more holes, pop in some support poles and concrete them in. The bottom of the garden is full of overgrown shrubs and miscellaneous debris. I imagine we'll pull the whole lot out and plant something quick growing to create a bit of privacy, some bamboo probably. Neither Rob nor I are keen gardeners and we know next to nothing about growing stuff outside. In an ideal world we'd get in a landscape gardener but for now, we'll live with a bit of scrubby lawn and some bamboo...

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...

Skimming and plastering

The Brazilian plasterers look about 22 years old and totally buff (all that lifting?) but by golly, their work ethic and their skill is jaw dropping. The plasterers who did our current flat by comparison were middle-aged and didn't do a half a good a job as the young Brazilians. Maybe age and experience doesn't always equate to a job well done?

Anyway, here's the view looking at the front door. The space is a little dark and glum as the opportunity for natural light to flood is minimal at the moment. Once the back wall of the house has been knocked out we'll get a sense both of the true sense of space and how much brighter it will be.

New stairs

This might not look very interesting, but it is. These stairs originally had a 'dog leg' and the bottom four turned at a right angle. This is necessary if it meant continuing down the stairs would put you face first into a wall, but as we had removed the wall it meant we could straighten the stairs out. I prefer this look as it's more modern and streamlined. This was one of Anthony-the-architect's ideas early on in the discussion process and it's really quite satisfying to see it in reality. Dog leg stairs are fine in period homes, but for modernists they're not at the top of anyone's wish list. We'll still have a dog leg upstairs though but it won't be so noticeable as the stairs are now cloaked in the waist height wall (replacing the ugly wooden balustrades, see photo below). This will look fantastic once it's been plastered and "made good". For true fans of alternative stair ideas, check out this photo blog called Stair porn.

Another brick in the wall

The concrete didn't stay lonely for long. The brickies arrived and within minutes there was the beginning of our new walls (yep, two of them). The cinder blocks were going down in double quick time and the walls will have been finished within a couple of days. When this photo was taken last Saturday it was a really balmy summer's day (despite being mid September) and I felt sorry for the building crew having to work over the weekend. They'd had some days off during the week for various reasons so I shouldn't feel too bad I guess… but at this rate, the glass people will be able to measure up next week and as this is the slowest part of the equation it's really important that this happens as soon as possible.

Concrete is hard

I popped round to the house on Friday afternoon, five weeks after the build kicked off, and was beyond thrilled to see the extension foundation had been poured. Here's the view from the bottom of the garden in the late afternoon sun. (Yippee - the east facing garden gets sun for most of the afternoon!) If you look closely you can see that the fence that used to run along the perimeter of the garden has been removed to allow the concrete to be poured right to the width of the house. The fence will be rebuilt in time, with a small access gate allowing people to arrive straight onto the deck area.

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...

Kitchen tap

Five weeks in and I reckon the build probably has another eight weeks to go (not counting the glass which is being manufactured in Germany). Not bad really. At least the end is finally in sight. We've started shopping for various items and it's a combination of frustration (I wish we had another £10,000 to spend on everything!) and fun (oooh, maybe we should go a bit silly on the uplighters, most of them are hideous…).

First purchase was a tap and I have to give a shout out to Tony Morton from The Tap Centre. We emailed back and forth a dozen times because the Burgess II tap we originally wanted was out of stock. Then I thought it was back in stock... but it wasn't... so I had to get clarification on the replacement product several times over. Rob is a stickler for detail and it's not enough for him to know that there's two tap settings, he wants to know where the button is to active it, and what kind of spray settings they are… Anyway, a couple of weeks of going back and forth and I took possession of our new Burgess spray tap (pictured) last week after being couriered overnight. It's actually ten times better than we expected - it came in it's own dust bag, is extraordinarily heavy and much bigger than we thought it would be. The components feel pretty solid and despite having a chrome plated plastic spray attachment, the whole thing looks expensive. It cost £89.95 (RRP £160) and we're pretty chuffed. Can't wait to see it in the kitchen in a few weeks.

Stair progress, concrete and security

I posted about my favourite renovation blogs a while back and this is an update to let you know that the NY food writer's kitchen is finally finished (yes, that's it in the photo). I must admit, after five months of this renovation I was a little underwhelmed by the results. My own renovation project will come in at much less than five months from start to finish, and we're doing two entire floors of a house and the equivalent of four rooms and some hallways. Perhaps the photo doesn't do it justice but still.

I'm told our house has had the wall on the side of the stairs built as discussed and the kitchen cabinets have been installed (though some of the drawer fronts are upside down because Ikea had drilled the holes in the wrong place… it's being sorted as I type). More exciting than that is the concrete for the extension has been poured and tomorrow a bricklayer arrives to start building up the side of the new walls. Once that's done we can have the surveyor from the glass company come over and measure up to get our new doors and glass roof manufactured. It's a 9 to 12 week wait once the order's been placed, so this is sort of the time frame I'm thinking of when it comes time to move. We may move in before the glass gets fitted just to try and reduce our outgoings though, urgh.

On our shopping list is a security system - wireless ones seem to cost around £250 and hard wired ones up to double that. Still waiting for more quotes to come in. Does anyone have a burglar alarm? Do they really need to be monitored?