Shame-free shelving

I've had a great weekend: a nice lazy Saturday and then two days of beavering away (today's a public holiday) with lots to show for it. Things to say about the smoky downpipe in the loo, the leak (eek) in the bath, tiling at the sink, a slightly disappointing mirror situation, knitting and, above all, my hall cupboard.

When I arrived, my hall cupboard looked something like this: two rails for hanging clothes and a two-thirds finished space up top for stuffing suitcases and the like.


In January 2008, I christened my new Christmas drill and put up shelves. The Shelves of Shame, to be precise. They were shameful for two reasons. First, I mis-measured, so one of the brackets at the back was about half a centimetre out. This was particularly shameful because I actually went so far as to chisel a half-centimetre sliver out of the skirting board to account for this difference, but at no point did it occur to me to triple-check my measurements. Very stoopid. The other thing was that I got the shelves cut to the right width at the shop, not realising that the cupboard gets narrower towards the back and that I'd need to leave space for the bracket system, so lots of half-assed slicing of little strips ensued. With a desperately blunt old hacksaw. Yeah, embarrassing.

Add to that the totally knackered old paint job and the dusty holes and gaps left behind by the workmen and the random electricity and gas paraphernalia and it was a pretty grubby place.


I liked the blue paint, but it was in a terrible state and this was a good excuse to use up some of the many random tubs of white paint and primer I have lying around taking up space. I made the mistake I make every time and completely forgot that I needed to do the door as well until I was halfway through and didn't want to be adding sawdust and grit to the mix.

This was the scene last night, with shelves everywhere and an old tin of primer used up on of the blue (most of it anyway - I ran out with a couple of square feet to do at the bottom corner):



Today, it's been painting city. Actually, I haven't been outside for two and a half days now I come to think of it.... Fortunately, the outside comes inside, even at night.

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!!

Finished.

I've done it! I started on April 26 so it's only dragged out for a measly four months, but that doesn't matter because it's done. DONE! And boy oh boy but it's beeeooutiful.

Soooo beautiful. Sigh. I keep going into the kitchen just to admire it and have little daydreams about how lovely it could look surrounded by a non-disastrous kitchen.

Anyway, here's a little "see how far that window's come" set of pictures:
- back in March, when there was scaffolding outside my window and I kept forgetting and ambling through to the kitchen straight after my shower thinking that my window still looked out onto a wall and not onto a bunch of builders doing work on said wall. Oops.


- getting started back in April. When I was still a paint-stripping innocent and had no idea what awaited me. Although I have also realised that the whole thing, including sanding and oiling and more sanding and more oiling and blacking and polishing this weekend, probably took about 45 hours all in, which is exactly how long that little baby blanket took to knit. Not that I'd be queuing up to knit baby blankets if rubber gloves were part of the equation.

- here it is before I went on holiday, when I gaily thought that the sanding-oiling-blacking-polishing bit would be done in two shakes of a lamb's tail. I thought it was pretty then, but the extra work has made all the difference. And no, I can't believe I'm getting all gushy about a window either, but there you go.

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- and here's the blacking in progress:

- and here's the blacking and polishing done:

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Yay.

One day, I will finish my kitchen windows.

But for the moment, I'll just keep on sanding away. Lots of sanding last night and tonight - I'm now just about ready to oil the easy half and am in the middle of a little experiment with the iron-protector cream, which is really more like shoe polish than anything else, to see how it copes with rust.

Anyway, I'll post pictures of that and of gorgeous beaches as soon as I get them off my camera and sorted out. In the meantime, here's a photo of the little blanket I knitted for my newest nephew:

Not remotely complicated, but quite pretty for all its simplicity and I think my brother and sister-in-law were pleased. My nephew responded with a small vomit, but given that he doesn't have a lot of other ways of expressing himself yet, I'll take that as a positive...

Here's my very first video post. Doesn't show the full glory of the beaches, but heck, what could be cooler than an airport where the plane has been known to be put in a holding pattern, not because there aren't any landing slots, but because there's a fat seal lying in the middle of the beach. :)


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Damn. Leaky bath... again.

Yesterday, I steeled myself and went ahead one of my least favourite tasks in the world: cleaning out the bath plughole. I can't stand it - it really brings me to the point of vomiting. My reward? A bath that drains... directly into the floor underneath. Soaking concrete, welcome back, we've missed you. :( Clearly my manoeuvres had dislodged the precarious plastic pipework that links the bath to the rest of my plumbing. Just what I needed. Back to buckets... I haven't done anything on the flat this weekend apart from cleaning. Last night I went for ciné/dîné with J. We saw Tabarly, a terrific documentary that I'd highly recommend. I found it quite moving, in part because he and J could be father and son. The likeness - from their faces, to their physiques, to the way they walk - is remarkable. In the trailer, it could be J in the little black & white interview (and in the shot that comes just before, where he's in the red shorts climbing the sail ;) ). It was like seeing everything that's good about him up on screen, the shyness and kindness and toughness and sense of humour, but without being confronted by the stubborn, headstrong, uncommunicative aspects of his personality. I've been feeling quite melancholy all day, mainly because Eric Tabarly seemed like a genuinely decent human being, but also perhaps because I know that it will never work with J, however fond of each other we are.

Anyway, all that's as may be. Even if I did nothing this weekend, I did at least work pretty hard last weekend, zapping woodworm and stripping paint on Saturday night until 2:30 am. It's so painfully slow. I started here:

And five hours later, I was here:

I've worked hard for about fifteen hours and I reckon I've got another twelve hours to go.

In the background, you can see the plant pot hanging system I've rigged up. I'm very pleased with it. Here's a close up:

Very pleased with my plants in general. My passion fruit plant is like slow-motion fireworks at the moment. Almost every day there's a new, glorious flower somewhere. They're so beautiful and delicate and bold.

Busy having fun

It's been a busy few weeks. Lots of work (no surprise there), but also lots of socialising and even a few days away.

Flat-wise, the stripping continues:

Flower-wise, the impatiens in my kitchen window are (I know this sounds uber-cheesy but I'll say it anyway).... delightful. Really:

Friend-wise, I had one of my favourite former colleagues and her equally lovely husband staying for a few days on a quick stopover in Paris between travelling in Asia and hiking across Spain. I so enjoyed hanging out with them, especially as the friend is none other than the Casual Baker and she decided to whip up some delicious strawberry yoghurt muffins one sunny afternoon:

Holiday-wise, I and another friend set off with S&R to join them for the first few days hiking through the Pyrennes. Damn but it was GOOD. The weather was phenomenal, the jinks were high, and the walking was just right:

Wisteria in the alley

Another flower-centric weekend. The wisteria in the alley has bloomed:

And I came home on Friday night to find the vacant shop across from my flat has turned into a florist! Super-pleased. I bought some flowers to celebrate.

Although it's been beautifully sunny, I've spent most of the weekend inside, stripping paint from the kitchen window. I worked from 10pm to 1:30am last night and from 11am to 4pm today and only have the central strip to show for my efforts (although it is the most fiddly part, because of the metal). It's not even perfectly finished, as this photo shows. Such hard work - I was already grateful for my parents' work on my bedroom but I now really understand how much my Dad had to do to get such a good finish on the bedroom window.
Oh, and it seems I'm doomed with shelving. I screwed the shelves to the brackets, did some polyfilla-ing and painting to cover the screwheads, and loaded them up with books... to find that I'd forgotten to take account of the added height of the books when working out where to position the shelves on the wall so they look a bit too high now. :(

Shamefree shelving

I managed to borrow an extension lead from work so I put up my shelves this afternoon. I had a day off (my old school friend was over for the weekend and left this afternoon) - holy smoke but it felt good to have a three-day weekend, especially because I had a few sleepless nights last week, finding myself hopping out of bed in the middle of the night to check that my wall wasn't collapsing... hem.
I need to buy some little wood screws to attach the shelves to the brackets before I load them up, and I also want to cover and paint the screws, but the hard bit's out of the way. They're nothing special but I'm pleased.