Ringing in the New Year

The London winter hasn't really eventuated, so maybe we were being a little pessimistic booking a week in Lanzarote. At the time we were motivated by my friend's recent visit which involved tracking down a Famara beach house bungalow, as seen in Broken Embraces, but we'd left it too late as all the good ones were booked out. Plan B was an all inclusive resort, the Costa Colero, which turned out to be pretty awesome (review on Trip Advisor to come...).

Anyway, it was a balmy 12 degs celcius in London over most of Christmas - and since we've been back - vs 24 degs in Lanzarote. Warm enough for the kids to swim, well, one kid as Marlo had a burst ear drum and was on antibiotics all week. The true highlight was the bonkers public art and architecture mostly influenced by Cesar Manrique - prolific and jaw droppingly awesome. You can see his work all over the island as shown here...

On a roundabout.

In the Jameos del Aqua (yes that's a bar inside a cave).

At the Mirador del Rio...

And most impressively (to me) at the Lag-O-mar residence... (also pictured top):

90% of guidebooks say the residence was designed for Omar Shariff, but a visit to the site reveals that he owned for one day having stupidly lost it in a game of Bridge to the European Bridge champion. You'd think he'd have not honoured that bet given the unfairness of the situation but no, he paid up and left it. Shame as it would've been an unbeatable party house.

If you do go, eat elsewhere first as the restaurant onsite offers up the most over-priced and pretentious food I've had the misfortune of wasting money on in ages.

Burglary a year on

(Wow that photo is a bit dark - it's taken from upstairs looking into the extension, to show the Christmas lights)

This time last year a burglar was settling in for the night somewhere in East London. It's a busy time of year for burglars, with lots of booty up for grabs and merry revellers not being as cautious as they should be. This week we heard of a local policewoman who had her door kicked in at 3pm and had everything taken from her home - presents included. In hindsight we got off lightly as our burglar only took electronic items and cash.

Only yesterday someone asked what the outcome of the burglary was for us - and I had to explain that we didn't get a penny of insurance because MoreThan are an unfair company. According to them, I should have double bolted the doors and slept with the alarm on - even though Rob was still out. Actually he was out til around 4.45am, and I would not have been a happy camper being woken up by him unable to get in. We have switched to a more ethical insurance company who mention that 'reasonable precautions' are made but none of the nonsense that MoreThan say we should have done. It has to be said, if you do happen to double lock your doors and sleep with your alarm on you probably won't need insurance against burglary, or fire for that matter as the chances of escaping in order to claim would be fairly slim. (Ok I am officially in a bad mood about this now - but thinking about losing £2,000+ worth of stuff that we had to replace despite paying premiums for so many years because of a ridiculous clause is irkesome).

Anyway - in other semi-related news: earlier this week the car alarm went off at 4am, repeatedly. It could only be reset by locking the door with a key and Rob gallantly made me do it. The same week one of the sensors in our security system decided it needed a new battery and it took 3 days of waiting for an ADT engineer to come round to replace it. Also in the same week, one of the wires on the garage door wiggled free which meant the entire mechanism wouldn't work (thankfully Rob has fixed it, for now). The theory that things happen in threes seems to hold true here!

Pictured above: Church Street in Stoke Newington, great way to spend a Saturday FYI.

Happy Festivus

Yowser, it's the middle of December yet I still feel in denial about the impending festive season. I blame the weather - this weekend kicked off with slight chill and a massive full moon rising (pictured top) which was visible through the night via our glass roof (yay), or rather it would have been if we were at home instead of raising all kinds of hell at a terrific party (cheers Tubbs! Happy birthday!).

The next night started with an impressive sunset, a dinner for 10 to watch the final of the X Factor and then out to another terrific party, where I DJd for the first time in public since June. Just goes to show that being jaded makes you play better as there was no shortage of lovely people coming to hi-five me mid set (that's never happened before).

And so, onto Sunday, where we hosted some Christmas drinks and mince pies and sat around our fake fire (yes it's a DVD)...

...and marvelled at the Christmas tree which now the kids can decorate by themselves (Result! And that's why you have kids)... so I guess it's time to start feeling festive. If the rumours are true and it snows this weekend then I'll be truly out of denial. Until then, I'm in an extended autumn frame of mind...

Back to the drawing board

Procrastinators unite! We finally got the builders round this week to check out our plans with a view to getting a quote. A previous post referred to putting the bathroom into the existing garage, and creating a utility room in the current cloakroom.

The builders saw the waste pipe two feet off the ground and said that it was all possible (good) but that there would be cost implications (bad). If we wanted to run the new waste pipe from the shower and loo it requires a pipe of a certain size, and we'd have to join it up with the existing pipework which would mean finding it under the floor and checking it's suitability. This would cost anything up to £2,000 depending how much digging was required. Plan B was to put in totally new pipes and run them into the outside drainage system, but this requires permission from the council, which would take time and the cost for getting the permission is £500 before any digging gets underway.

Plan C is to stick with the configuration we've got and shoehorn a shower in there. It means we'll end up with something a little less spacious and probably more like a wet room. As I don't think anyone is fond of dealing with a shower-splashed loo, we'll need to put a screen in there but as the room is so narrow (less than a metre) it's going to be a bit of a challenge.

Pictured at top is a teeny basin, which in all likelihood is about the size of what we'll end up getting. Hopefully we can sort out a new layout/plan and get a quote before Christmas, so we can worry about the cost and mess over the festive season...

Visualising the new bathroom

OK it's not as bad as I thought. For some reason I'd convinced myself we'd been here for four years and I'd put up with the old bathrooms and very limited wardrobe space for a ridiculous length of time.

On closer inspection, it's coming up to three years. I had a three-year gap between kids as that was about the right amount of time to forget the horror of popping out a newborn. Renovating is similar. I'll be pretty chuffed it we can get the next part of the downstairs renovation done in the next few months, so it means we can gear up for the top floor project (eventually).

Rob made a 3D drawing of where stuff will go in our downstairs bathroom - it's not representative of the actual things that will end up there, but we wanted to show the builders the layout and spacing. It's a bit tricky to do that while staring into the current room as there are so many boxes, a washing machine, dryer and overspill from the kitchen cupboards. (Seriously - if we got hit by more riots/severe snow etc I wouldn't need to leave the house for weeks).

The builders are busy until mid-January at the earliest, but we're keen to get them round to do a quote soon so we know what we're in for.

If you want to see a truly inspirating before-and-after renovation project, go and 'like' Hotel Lautner on Facebook - it's now a drool-inducing mid-century eye-popping design fest, check out the early photos to see how it used to look. I'm a fan of John Lautner's iconic architecture - and the new owners of this hotel have done an amazing thing. Below is a photo of one of their renovated bathrooms, I hope there are similar tiles at Topps Tiles...

Movie mecca in East London

Well not really a mecca but I was referring to my last post title. Anyway, in a few days what used to be The Ocean music venue on Mare Street (10 minutes walk from here) is going to open as the brand spanking new Hackney Picturehouse.

This is exciting as despite having two large TVs I still enjoy seeing cinematic films at a cinema. 99% sure I'll become a member too as it seems really good value (£30 per person or £58 for a couple) for the whole year. You can see a list of the membership benefits here actually. And to see if there are any upcoming movies you're keen to see, here's the Hackney Picturehouse What's On page.

In other news - Rob almost had a heart attack on Sunday morning. Proper chest pains, aching arms the whole thing. Turns out it was probably deferred back pain coupled with adrenalin and huge amounts of stress, owing to the incredibly tense Rugby World Cup Final (in case you don't give a toss about sport you may not know that the All Blacks finally won after 24 long years - and we only won by a single point, against France).

A few weeks back when it was announced that our star player Dan Carter couldn't play any of the remaining matches due to his injuries, every New Zealand rugby supporter felt worried. Then there was Piri Weepu. And now there is Stephen Donald - a whitebait fisherman no less. Stephen Donald has gone from being possibly 'the most maligned figure in New Zealand rugby', to a modern day national treasure.

Despite living away from New Zealand for 12+ years I still feel extremely patriotic when it comes to the All Blacks. And I'm so very glad we finally won!!!

Shopping mecca in East London

The most exciting (?) thing to happen in our neck of the woods lately was the opening of Westfield Stratford City. I'm told it's the largest shopping mall in Europe. It's two tube stops from our house and I was a little hesitant as I'm a fan of shopping locally to support independent businesses. Having made a few trips to Westfield for various reasons I'm pleased to say I've spent a similar amount in local shops over the same time period.

During winter we can see the top of the Olympic stadium from our top floor, but it was a fabulous discovery to find the 2012 themed room within John Lewis. Floor to ceiling windows looked out across the site facing west which afforded a really unbeatable view of the stadium taking shape. The kids weren't bothered but that could be due to the post sugar comedown from the Millie's cookies & Krispy Kreme donuts.

I'll probably avoid Westfield in the run up to Christmas but now that it's here I can't see any reason to go shopping in Central London ever again. Woo hoo!

Downstairs revamp

Our downstairs configuration has been a topic of conversation lately. It turns out the current cloakroom isn't big enough for the Roca toilet and sink combo. Rob then had the genius idea of swapping everything around - moving the shower/loo/sink into what was going to be our utility room, and moving the washer and dryer into our current cloakroom (NB cloakroom is what the British call a small toilet, usually positioned under the stairs).

It's such an obvious solution I can't think why we didn't come up with it in the first place. It might be because the stack (plumbing arrangement involving large pipes) is about two feet up the wall - which might be tricky when plumbing in a loo and shower waste pipe. I'm sure there's a solution - maybe smashing up the floor until we find the outgoing pipe and joining it up there. Additionally we'll need a dedicated hot water system - gas or some kind of electric pump - otherwise the top floor bathroom will have no pressure when the downstairs one is in use.

As the room will have no natural light we'll need to consider lighting, and of course heating and venting out the steam. For inspiration I quite like these two bathrooms - large slate tiles and a glass shower door - practical.

(Both photos via housetohome.co.uk)

Tidy house, tidy mind

Ah surfaces - how I love thee. In addition to de-junking the spare room last month, I also made us of the extra storage provided by our new sideboard to clear away the various piles of stuff. Amazing how many unread bits of mail, magazines and debris just accumulate and if you leave them long enough, they turn out to be irrelevant and can be chucked. The trick is to biff the kid's creations into the wheelie bin, if they see their efforts in the kitchen bin they tend to go a bit hysterical.



So now when I look around our room my eyes don't land on anything that should be tidied away. Unsurprisingly this has allowed me to spend more time doing nothing instead of making piles of stuff to deal with. (Doing nothing when you have house guests is considered polite FYI.)



Below is a panorama of the downstairs space to show a continuous expanse of room rather than what was there before, which was a mishmash of newspapers and kids toys. With any luck we can keep this up at least until school starts back next week.

De-junking

The mid-century fixation continues as we're enjoying more space. Our wider than normal hall which leads to the spare room now houses the retro bar (pictured top). And we finally hung the teak mirror I bought 18 months ago on eBay (pictured below).

The middle floor now feels like a shrine to G-Plan with the mirror, sideboard, bar and coffee table. Having this stuff in place makes the room feel like more or less finished, which is a bit of a relief after nearly three years. Now all we need to do is hang our accumulated art.



This photo shows the spare room now - a couple of weeks ago you could barely see the floor or walls for boxes stacked in there. Apologies to everyone who's stayed here since we moved in - but feel free to come back and revisit!