Bedrooms are coming together

While we were at Camp Bestival (post to come on that shortly), the builders popped back for a day of final fixes. Coming home to a virtually finished house after camping for four nights was a pretty amazing feeling.

I'm so happy to have a proper bedroom instead of the cluttered mess we had before...

And a good size wardrobe - for the first time in nearly six years! Will be great to get a free weekend (When? When?!) so I can unpack the various boxes and bags of stuff into the space.

The kids room is a little lo-frills right now but will come right. This bed has a spare underneath for sleepovers, so much better than a bunk bed as once the novelty wore off, no-one wanted to sleep in it.

The kids have a huge wardrobe too but not as many clothes as us, so we're storing linen and toys in here too.

And building a bed over the stair headspace means the room feels so much bigger than before!

Mostly finished bathroom

Ten weeks into the build and the bathroom is finished (except for a little snagging). And I started a new job yesterday. My summer off went super quick.

Here's the inbuilt shelving. Would be my preference to only have Aesop products but my family would disagree.

The cabinet is massive - managed to get all first aid and skincare items in my side...

View from the bathroom looking towards the hallway (lampshade is from B&Q - amazingly). The white box on the wall controls the underfloor heating.

Wall hung toilet and a Geberit flusher, which is the same style as the ones in my new office. Odd coincidence.

Slate non-slip flooring is from Topps Tiles.

Heated towel rail was from JT Spas - who delivered quickly and had excellent customer service (before and after).

Massive cabinet and lights were from Ikea...

...as was the double wall hung sink unit.

These photos were taken early evening - the light during the day is intense! Really happy with how it turned out. Kind of like a retro Case Study house.

Bathroom is almost finished

This is the view from the hallway looking into the bathroom. The sliding door is necessary in the space or it would be wacking into the double sink.

We ordered a shower door from a retailer on eBay but it took 5 weeks to get the bathroom ready to install it. When the builders opened the package they found that the shower door was smashed as were the brackets. The retailer wouldn't refund or replace as 30 days had passed since we ordered it. We found a better shower door subsequently and combined they were both cheaper than one from a reputable retailer so all's well that ends well.

The gunmetal grey tiles look on the brown side in these photos.

The giant wall panel to flush the loo allows access to the hidden cistern. I never knew that's what they were for!

The enormous towel rail accommodates all our towels and will keep the room toasty in winter - well, that and the underfloor heating (thank you Breaking Bad...)

The mirror is actually a huge cabinet which is sunk flush into the wall. The best bit is that the inside of the doors are mirrored so you can see the side of your head when it's open.

On the home straight

My builders are amazing: one stayed behind to sort stuff out and other drove all the way to Ikea and handed over an extensive four page shopping list. All our wardrobes and internal gubbins, kids mattresses and some bathroom lighting came to £1,551. The builder loaded up his van and drove back to us, and as he lit his cigarette he remembered he'd left various items on a trolley somewhere. He put out the cigarette and drove back - at least a 90 minute round trip - and thankfully the trolley was where he'd left it.

The wardrobes began to take shape and as the frames were nearing completion, the builder realised that the doors were missing. As well as some of the internal racks that were on the shopping list. It turns out a third of the pile of flatpack boxes had been left behind at Ikea...

So for the 3rd time in 24 hours, he went back to Ikea and again, thankfully the items were still there. (NB we are missing one shelf and 6-8 of the little things that hold the shelves in place but in the scheme of things this is both expected, and accepted).

So - 8 weeks after starting we finally got to sleep in our bed for the first time. The bedroom has no blinds or lighting, and we've swapped places so that Rob can be nearest the window. Despite this, after two months of sleeping on a sofa (with occasional respite by being away), I slept like a baby on our extremely comfortable bed.

The kids are sleeping in a double bed in our spare room, so they're not being too hard done by. This is their bedroom, which is full of parts for their wardrobe...

Carpet is in!

I've just enjoyed a week in Croatia with some lovely friends and it felt delightful sleeping on a proper (single) bed, after many weeks of kipping on the sofa. I got back to find the bathroom was 75% finished, the walls painted in eye-hurtingly bright white and the skirting board had been mostly laid. Today the carpet got installed in around two hours.

It's the same carpet we have on the stairs - New Zealand wool with a rib, and cost an eye watering £2K including underlay. The skirting board is a rebellion against the generic white standard issue most houses sport. Ours is made from layers of ply and can be stained any colour.

The photo above is looking where the wardrobe will go, and shows the loft access ladder slightly ajar, which probably means the spring is not strong enough to hold it shut.

This is the view from the master bedroom showing the sliding door in place, and the nasty faux Victorian era banister boxed in (yippee!).

50 shades of grey

I've been adding photos of dark tiles to my Pinterest board for months. Incredibly, Rob and I looked at the same photo and I said 'Those tiles are dark grey, possibly black' and he insisted they were light grey. In the end, I managed to source gunmetal grey tiles in high gloss which were the same shape. Rob wasn't keen, insisting on even smaller tiles, in light grey, with a matt finish. His fictional tiles don't seem to exist so with the plastering all done, my choice won out.

The colour looks like a browny/grey but with the light pouring in a dark colour works fine - and now we're going to argue over dark vs light grey grout...

Looking straight up at the Velux you can see that the builders have used jaunty angles to vault the ceiling. It gives the room an architectural feel. The finish on the plastering and paintwork looks like it was done by professionals which makes all the difference. If I'd had to paint this myself it would look pretty dire...

Time and money

Five and a half weeks into the top floor renovation and things I have learned:

• The build always takes much longer than whatever you've estimated
• The build ALWAYS costs way more than you've budgeted
• My sofa is quite comfortable
• I'm so happy we put a second shower downstairs last year, or we'd have spent (so far) over £5k on renting nearby
• I should have taken out my summer holiday essentials before packing everything away to save having to buy replacement aqua socks, beachwear, playsuits etc

I'm off for a week in the sun with some friends on Wednesday - Rob's holding the fort with the kids (yay!). When I get back we should be on the home straight - the bathroom should be finished and the carpet will have been laid... It will all be worth it (I have to keep telling myself that).

Bedside reading lamp

Bedside lighting: pretty boring topic. Unless, like me, you have mismatching bedside lamps due to various previous accidents involving clumsy cleaners. Also there's something irritating about the snakes of cables getting caught up around the bed.

So when the above lamps popped up as a featured design buy on fab.com I sent the link to Rob and suggested they might be great for our refurbished bedroom. He agreed but we didn't buy them immediately. They sold out and the Spanish manufacturer Dalainor didn't return my emails. I trawled t'internet looking for something similar, to no avail. Yesterday, I decided to phone the manufacturer and was delighted to find they cost €40 each, plus €40 for delivery to the UK: this is £104 all up - which is about £40 cheaper than we'd have got them from fab.com - result!

Postscript

They arrived yesterday - 3 working days after I did the bank transfer! Thank you Dalainor!

Let the sun shine in

Today is the longest day of the year - happy Summer Solstice - and how timely that the Velux is in so we can see just how much light it lets in. These photos were taken at 6.20pm just after a cloud burst, so not exactly the brightest conditions, but as you can see there's a tonne of light:

The Velux uses an electronic system via a remote control to open and close, and has rain sensors which means it will close automatically.

It's as if we have a megawatt bulb on but it's just daylight.... and late afternoon daylight at that. I wonder how much electricity we'll save by not having to turn the lights on every time we go in there now...

Plastering has been done

What a difference a weekend makes, at least I think most of this happened over the weekend. I've been off on a bit of a jaunt chasing Depeche Mode around (well, only 4 shows so far) but this meant I had a trip to Germany followed by a trip to Paris less than 48 hours later.  The good news was that most of the horrible stucco effect had been removed and the surfaces of our walls and ceiling were now super smooth. The bad news was that the power points were in odd places for the new room layout, and there was no provision for reading lights over the bed.

The builders are going to chase the cabling into the walls for the reading lights and reposition some of the power points, but it means smashing up the plaster work.  In a way, it's been super useful that I've been off work so I can answer questions quickly and make decisions on the spot, but those few days when I was off travelling meant that no-one was here to sort the plugs out. Ho hum.

The top two photos show our bedroom, and the bottom four show the girls room (check out the mess on the floor - there are footprints all over the house all day, every day...)