Pancakes

I just finished a little project and am feeling all buzzy and wanting to tell someone, but it's after midnight so a quick post will have to do. (I also want to share the news before I have to look in the cold light of day and realise that some important part has gone wrong....)

Start with one crappy kitchen floor. The tiles should be a mix of three different kinds (with some plain ol' concrete thrown in for fun), set at different levels, and at least half a dozen should be sporting big cracks.

Mix up a half a sack of Solplan, bought on impulse the day before because the guy offered to deliver the lino and the sack for free that evening and the sack weighs a hefty 25kg. (I've realised that I'm much more decisive when faced with free delivery and a shop that's about to close and stay closed for the next two days, especially when my kitchen is going to be installed the day after that and I risk not having a floor.)

Note how much the Solplan looks like deliciously creamy hot chocolate. Note that lumpy hot chocolate is perfectly acceptable, but that lumpy Solplan is a pain in the ass and will bite you about half an hour down the line.

Start spreading. Spend far too long faffing around smoothing and spreading the Solplan (which is self-levelling) and thinking how pleased you to have taken on this little job yourself and grinding away the little gritty lumps of unmixed powder and spreading and smoothing and....

Realise that it's gone and set in the bucket. Ooooh yeah. I think the fact that I don't have a professional cement mixer and had to stir it all up with the pole that used to support my kitchen worktop didn't help. By the end, there were quite a lot of little lumps that I had to mash out and that slowed me down quite a lot. Result: when I went for the last helping of chocolate milk, it was more like a thick mousse that I had to apply like plaster. Lumpy plaster. And I ain't a plasterer. It isn't perfectly smooth by the door because it was too thick to self-level, but I think, and hope, that I've got away with it. I won't count my chickens yet, but even in the worst case scenario I would just have to take it up tomorrow and do it again and it really wasn't that painful an exercise. And look how lovely and smooooth my floor looks now!

In other news, I painted my kitchen and bathroom ceilings, and Monsieur Y. came round to fix the gas, which is no longer leaking, although the downside is that I can't keep the pilot light on my boiler lit any more. Very mysterious, because he was nowhere near the boiler. Cold shower again tomorrow I s'pose.

Don't know where to start

I've been back at home for a week and a half now, gradually coming back down to earth. I'm not great at being a house guest, so four weeks on couches and airbeds (albeit staying with friends who couldn't have been more welcoming) while simultaneously trying to manage the renovation and finish up at work and suffering from a rather sore post-bike-accident shoulder, wasn't particularly easy.

Now that I'm feeling a bit more chilled, I don't know where to start. So much has changed in the flat, and I'm so generally delighted, that I want to post a million photos and write a thousand words. Instead, I'm going to go and buy paint and a better roller and finish putting undercoat on the new plaster and plasterboard in my bare-naked kitchen and bathroom and not let myself get distracted from finishing my part of the renovating deal.

Although I guess I could post two little photos anyway:


And some quick pictures of the unforgettably awesome weekend in Brittany:




And note that my oven is still hanging out on my bedroom floor in my pre-kitchen-installation, living-in-one-room arrangement and that, if those brownies are better than the ones we had that night, they must be MIGHTY fine.

And finally, to say that yesterday was my last day at work. Freedom!!

Almost there.

I'm hoping to get back home tomorrow night, or Tuesday at the latest. Things have come on great bounds in the last week and I'm really delighted with how it's looking so far. A few things that haven't turned out quite how I'd imagined, but no disasters. And still lots of work of a patching/painting variety to do, of course, but that's for me to get stuck into.

They left the electricity and the water off again this weekend so paint stripping wasn't really an option (I had to make an epic kitchen-ordering trip to IKEA anyway and, to be honest, I wasn't really in the mood anyway) but I did remove the broken tile on the bathroom floor and prepare one of the old baseboard tiles to plug the gap.

Lots of photos to come (of the flat and of the fantastic weekend I spent last week in Brittany with friends from work - bliss :) ), but I don't have my computer with me at this flat so they'll have to wait.