Spring.

Might be time for me to come out of hibernation soon.

Double needles, aka "getting too big for my boots"

After feeling very smug about how nicely my mistake-stitch scarf turned out (the black in the second picture is accurate - don't know where the navy blue in the first comes from), I'm now getting my comeuppance in the form of double-pointed needles. Oooh-là. Not easy. I'm trying to make mittens to accompany the world's most boring scarf (the mistake scarf was knitted as a Christmas present for one of my favourite people). I'll persevere for the moment, but this may well end up being one of those projects that isn't spoken about in polite company.

Happy new year.

Remember this? Hideous, wasn't it? And, from a very long time ago, this? Well, I'm pleased to say that after many hours of working and thinking and planning it's all come together and my kitchen now looks like this:

Yay! I'm totally thrilled. Still a few little things to iron out, like the shelf at the end of the top cabinets and the splashback, but it's worked out better than I could ever have hoped and I really enjoy spending time in there. I'm doing loads more cooking than I used to (not surprising really, but still) and having a washing machine after five and a half years of schlepping up and down endless flights of stairs is BEYOND exciting. Really. I spent a year on the fifth floor with no lift and three years on the sixth with no lift so even though moving to this flat, which is on the first floor, made it much less painful, not having to go to the laundrette is just the best thing.

I found two lovely little stools at an on-street antiques fair just before Christmas. I'd been looking for ones like that for a while and even though I knew I could buy them new at one of the big art shops at Nation, I quite fancied getting old ones like we have at the engraving workshop. They're working out perfectly and are perfect for perching on to read a magazine while I wait for things to cook or to make a change from eating on the couch. They spin down to the right height for my dining table and spin up to the right height for my wooden worktop so they're nice and multi-purpose and exactly what I'd hoped for. Very reasonably priced too, which is lucky because I'm rather skint after all this work. The little one could do with a bit of waxing to bring up the colour of the wood but that's small beans. Very pleased. :)

Here are some random tulips to finish. I was very surprised but quite pleased with how the second photo turned out.


Happy new year to anyone who stumbles by. Hope it's full of good things.

Hanging in there.

Just had quite a difficult few weeks there which left me with neither time nor energy for rambling on about my flat. Anyway, life is getting back on track so I guess I can get this little show back on the road too. But not until I've finished knitting my best friend's Christmas present and been home for the holidays. :)

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.

Quick update

Very very quick.

Things seem to be going fine and now that the electricity is almost finished, it should be possible to see some progress soon. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, this:

has become this:

This:

has become this:

This:

has turned into this:

and this:

Now they just have to put it all back together again...

And they're off!

Travaux started exactly a week ago today. I'm staying with various friends, on a variety of airbeds and sofas, so I'm pretty tired and email access isn't easy. Suffice it to say that I'm still hemming and hawing about kitchen lighting, and that I had to water my plants with bottled water at the weekend, and that having felt really quite disoriented by seeing my lovely home reduced to dust and broken plaster I'm now feeling an awful lot happier and really quite hopeful. Pictures to come as and when I'm able to upload them. :)

Exciting times

I've accepted a quote for all my travaux: looks like the dust and destruction could start as early as next week and, even more excitingly, that it could all be clean and beautiful and new a mere four weeks after that! I don't know what I'd do with a proper, functional, hole-free flat but it's a terribly enticing prospect.

I'm going to be spending this weekend finalising decisions about taps (so difficult!) and kitchen floors (so know what I want, so don't know exactly where to find it or what kind of material to choose) and windows and tiles and I'll probably find time to second-guess my thoughts about baths and sinks too.

Just in case there's anyone out there, here's a picture of three ways I might end up doing the high window I'm going to create between the kitchen and my dark, underwater bathroom.

Any thoughts? I know which picture I like best, but I have a feeling that might not be the best real-life choice. The proportions aren't anything like the same, but this is the kind of effect I'm looking for:

Picture: Apartment Therapy

Also, does anyone know about Kludi taps, specifically the Bozz? I've never heard of them but I saw them in BHV, which is a pretty reliable sort of shop, and I like the look of them, but I'm slight concerned that the url ends "...bad-bozz" and that I received a note from my neighbour today telling me off for keeping him awake by running my washing machine at 1am (yeah, I don't have a washing machine... yet) and he is called... Mr Bozza! Subliminal messages or mere coincidences?

Anyway, all of these things to ponder AND I need to drum up the enthusiasm to drag myself out to spend yet more time in the 6-and-a-1/2th circle of hell that is the IKEA kitchen department.

On that note, here's a flower for some cheerfulness. It's one of my long-suffering gardenias, flowering. Those poor babies have been sunburnt and overfed and burnt again and dried out (and, of course, appreciated for their hardiness and sheer stubborn ability to return from the precipice every time). Even after all that, the big one, which had clearly been pumped up on plant food by the garden shop and looked like a goner for a couple of months after I got it home, has managed to produce TWO flowers this year. Here's the most recent:

Smells lovely too.