All systems go

It's been quite a weekend. Quite a week actually - so busy I was just about hyper-ventilating, finally lost my temper and snarled at my obnoxious colleague, and told my boss I want to hand in my sheriff's badge and go down to 4 days a week by July at the latest. She took it well (too well?) and told me I'm welcome to change my mind but I can't see that happening any time soon.
Flat-wise, lots on the go. :)

Last weekend, I picked up handles for my cabinet from BHV. I ended up going for slightly expensive ones that caught my eye and I'm really pleased it did. The end result is exactly what I'd hoped for. Now I just need to get the rest of the bathroom into working order...



I'm getting there. This weekend I've been working on the door. It's been difficult and I'm not out of the woods yet but things are looking promising. I ended up finding molding that was almost a perfect match in BHV - thank feck I didn't try and muddle something with bits of dowling, a thought which crossed my mind and was, fortunately, rejected. I can't imagine what a nightmare that would have been. To make the difference between the original bit and the new bit less visible, I ended up removing the good bit of molding on the right-hand side. It was tough getting the joints to align, especially as I don't have any sort of work table and my only saw is a small, increasingly blunt hacksaw (the last two weekends have been heavy on the tool-blaming front...).



Once I had the molding sorted, I set to trying to replicate the central panel. Lots of sanding to get the existing bit of mdf and the door frame smooth enough, little bits of sanding to soften the edges of the new additions and give them a similar look to the originals. Measured, glued, looks okay, probably should have let the glue cure a little longer than I did but I'm desperate to get my flat cleaned up tonight - I've been living surrounded by sawdust since Christmas and it's getting a bit old.

Getting the central panel into place was a real drag. The piece that was originally used to replace the kicked-in section isn't quite the right size, so I couldn't align it with any of the wooden edges or prop it on anything to keep it in place. I tried to glue it but I couldn't keep it in position long enough for the glue to set and I don't have any clamps or anything. I was also trying to manoeuvre it into place from inside the bathroom while peering round to the hall side to check it was correctly aligned. It was definitely an occasion when it would have been useful to have had another pair of hands. Or to have glued on the central panels once the main section was in place. Hem.

I ended up using some tiny nails which are hidden by the molding glued on the other side. I think the central bit will look fine once it's painted.


On the inside, I again resorted to the glue. Again, I'll withhold judgement until it's painted but I think it's a pretty decent save and it didn't work out to be particularly expensive.


The last thing I did this weekend was to finish the Shelves of Shame. Still shameful, but fully functional. I've been able to put away all of the stuff that's been cluttering up the corner of my bedroom since I moved in and my new Danish chair is now in place, just waiting for the rest of the room to come into shape around it. Bought new foam for the chair too, so a trip to the Marché Saint-Pierre will be in order too.

The Shelves:
- before: two clothes rails right at the back


- during: using my superduper new drill (AEG 600R) to throw up a heck of lot of dust


- halfway through: loading up shelves while cursing the mismeasurements that meant I had to shave half a centimetre off each shelf to take account of the cupboard narrowing towards the back and the top. With a small, increasingly blunt hacksaw.


- after: all loaded up with a salvaged clothes rail towards the front and space to hang brushes and the like between the clothes and the door. The organization will change slightly when I get a wardrobe, and I'm also planning to fix up something for shoes, but for the moment, it's a million times more useful than it used to be so I'm happy.

Shelves of shame

The shelves at the back of my hall cupboard, henceforth to be known as the Shelves of Shame, are almost finished. I will do everything in my power to ensure that NO ONE ever inspects them closely. It would do untold damage to any slight reputation I might have for careful, considered, neat, well-finished work.

Um, so I might have exaggerated a little bit about my chair being ruined. Maybe a tiny element of melodrama creeping in there. Might actually just be the fact that some parts have seen a touch more wear than others and are less glossy....

Should have known better.

Rather a frustrating weekend. It started full of ideas about shelves and doors and cupboards and ended up with a damaged chair. Not best.
On Saturday, I braved the sales crowds at BHV and Leroy Merlin but came home empty-handed - no brackets for shelving at BHV, realised I'd forgotten a key measurement for my door supplies, queues at the tills and the wood cutting too long for me to buy wood without being late for dinner, handles I wanted for my black cabinet all sold out, harumph.
My very grim bathroom door has been kicked in, poorly repaired and poorly painted at some point in its life. It's one of the uglier features in an already ugly space:


Knowing I'm probably going to end up buying a new door in any case and have nothing to lose, I took a chisel to it when I got home from work on Thursday night to see if it might be fixable. I think the chances are slim. First, I'd thought the molding was separate and would come away fairly easily but it's actually a continuation of the body of the door so I don't have a very clean join. Second, they don't sell this kind of molding in BHV, Leroy Merlin or M. Bricolage, so if I'm going to get a near match I'm going to have to do lots of fiddly work and even then it'll never be quite right. It's almost definitely not worth the effort but I'll give it a shot anyway.


Having failed to get the necessary supplies yesterday, I was a bit stuck today so I just went for an amble by the canal and stopped in at the depôt vente... to find, waiting quietly, the chair I've been hoping to find for the last few months - new cushions and it'll be perfect. I had a seat and a think and a stand around and another think and went for a hot chocolate to think some more and came back for another look. It was when I came back and had a little heart-sinking moment when I thought it had been sold that I decided to stuff the price and just buy it. I carted it home there and then.
Which is when the trouble started. I wiped it down with a damp cloth and some detergent because it was pretty grubby and flecked with white paint here and there. Unfortunately, I made the STUPID mistake of rubbing too hard at some of the paint and I've ended up raising the grain. I felt sick when I realised what I'd done. It's not a disaster but basically it's gone from being a beautiful Danish Modern armchair, albeit with some flecks of paint, to being a dull-looking, albeit paint-free, second-hand chair.
I'm hoping oiling or waxing it will repair the damage but I'm not doing a thing until I'm sure I won't make the situation worse. Damn. Ah well, I'll get over it - it's still a lovely thing with beautiful workmanship and gorgeous honey-coloured wood.

Also spotted at the depôt vente today: the fantastic "cowhide commode". Intriguing and terrifying at the same time...

New year, new glam cabinet

December was a bit of a write-off between work blues and winter blues. Looks like January and February aren't going to be any better on the work front but I'll keep my little fingers crossed...

I had a good few days at home over Christmas and came back with all sorts of ideas about things to do in the flat only to have a major reality-check when I opened the front door. Heck but there's a LOT of work to do. At least I now have a clearer vision of how I want it all to come together design-wise. The key will be getting the electricity sorted. Once that's out of the way, I'll be able to get the sitting room and bedroom into shape and the kitchen and bathroom will come along in their own sweet time.

In the meantime, I decided to go for a quick win. Not quite so quick in real life but a win nonetheless. Still a few little things to tidy up but, over the last couple of weekends, I've:

- taken the other, very shabby, bedside cabinet I bought in the dépôt vente by the Bassin de la Villette

- (that I'm planning to put in the bathroom once it's all tarted up and has a new, smaller sink and more, em, forgiving, tiles)

- sanded it down (resorting to nail varnish remover when it came to extracting old wax from the more inaccessible carved areas - surprisingly effective)

- sanded it again with fine grain and wiped it all down

- and painted it with black gloss

Needs a little finishing but it's looking pretty fine, though I say it myself.

Note, also, that the bedroom door is CLOSED in that third picture. Yep, I decided minimizing dust levels in the rest of the flat was a bit of a priority so I went at the door with the roughest sandpaper I could find and managed to get rid of the extra layer of emulsion/gobs of old paint/sloppy-drips-and-runs that were keeping it from closing. Crazy amounts of dust - I now understand the work that will be required if ever I'm to close the other doors in here...

Drawings into images

I worked out how to do the jpeg transformation! Here's the latest thinking with regard to my kitchen floor:

In other flat-related news, the insurance guy came today about my loo ceiling. Result? I'm strongly advised to leave the window open until May, when he'll come back to see if the ceiling's dried out enough for them to repaper. They can do that when the humidity is at 12%. At the moment, after a full month of drying, it's at 80%. Ouch.

Praise be for the post!

My very welcome guest caught a train to Amsterdam on Thursday afternoon. He came by my office beforehand so we could have lunch together and he could give me back my keys. The lunch bit went very well, the key bit less so. Four hours later, chatting to a colleague about his visit, it struck me that my house keys, office keys and post-box key were all on their merry way to Holland. Ah...
Fortunately, my spare keys were with a friend rather than in a shoebox beside my bed so I've been able to function, but I've been lying awake at night wondering why on earth I told him to post me my keys rather than insisting on UPS or registered mail or even just jumping on a train to Amsterdam for the weekend. I should add that I have the most hard-core five-point dead bolt system on my steel-reinforced door (heck knows what the previous residents have been scared of but they did not want visitors) so getting spares or replacing locks is an expensive business.
Anyway, all this to say that my keys finally arrived at work this morning and boy was I relieved. Probably even beats the Aerobed delivery day in terms of wide grins.

Busy

Busy-busy last week and an unexpected but very welcome guest most of this week so I'm having a lazy weekend to myself. I did a proper clean this morning - crazy dust bunny activity - and have been enjoying mooching and drinking tea in my lovely flat this evening.

In November, I:

- "restored" my sitting room floor:

- hung new curtains (the long, thick dining room curtains of my childhood but, as it happens, pretty much perfect for the room and nothing I would ever have had the guts to choose myself):

- reorganized my furniture with the aid of two conveniently-sized cardboard boxes (not the final layout! This photo was taken in the middle of all the cardboard swooshing):

- bought two bedside cabinets, not a pair, one of which is now doing sterling service hiding all my computer and telephone wires (and the other of which is now clean and will, one day, do sterling service in a renovated non-submarine bathroom):

- wrinkled my nose every time I went into the loo because of the disturbing smoke/mould smell which, I assume, is coming from the ceiling:

- sussed out, I think, the way I'm going to organize the kitchen (but can't work out how to transform the drawing into a jpeg file),

- and made another ginormous pot of soup. :)

Old friends

My best friend from school was over for a flying visit this weekend. I think we must have talked 24-hours straight as we wandered the streets of Paris and ate and drank. It was great to see her properly and I was super pleased with the places we went. Sometimes, it just works out and you land on the nicest, most handsome, most interesting streets by accident. On Saturday afternoon we walked all the way down my street until we reached the Seine, crossed over to take a walk around Notre Dame, ambled up through the backstreets of the 5th to the Luxembourg Gardens then back down into the 6th, where we stopped and bought a mini-macaroon each in an impossibly glamorous cake shop. Fortified, we set off again.
Further through the 6th, peeked into the lovely courtyard of the building where I lived in a tiny 8m2 studio my first year in Paris, headed down to Bon Marché where we took a detour around the incredible food hall to compensate for the Christmas windows not being up and running, walked back through the poshest parts of the 6th and across the Pont des Arts into the beautifully illuminated courtyards of the Louvre.
Stood by the pyramid and waited for the Eiffel Tower to start her sparkling gig (which she didn't), then walked off through the Marais to a café just beside the place des Vosges where we had a well-deserved kir.
Again fortified (but now quite footsore), we walked up boulevard Beaumarchais and the boulevard Richard Lenoir until we got to the canal, where we settled in for a lovely long dinner and lots of good red wine. Home at 2am.
The next morning (the Aerobed was a great success - yay!) we walked down rue Lafayette until we got to the rue des Martyrs, ambled down oohing and aahing over all the beautiful cheese shops and flower shops and everything was just impossibly French and classy. Perfect for visitors. Cut along the boulevard to the Moulin Rouge for a photo op then all the way up the back of rue Lepic into the touristy bits of Montmartre and Sacré Coeur before lunch, coffee and a stroll back to Gare du Nord.
And that was that. Hope I get more visits like that soon.

Oh dear. I guess getting home after a couple of glasses of wine and attacking your kitchen wall with a scraper maybe isn't such a great idea:


But then, it's difficult not to be suspicious of your walls and attack anything that looks vaguely damp or mould-concealing when your afternoon has revolved around this:



And when you've been dealing with that the previous day, what you really don't want to notice when you're getting out of the shower the next morning is a big ol' crack that runs the length of four tiles halfway up your bathroom wall and corresponds perfectly to the big ol' crack that your excavations revealed along the kitchen wall.




There are times I really really wish my Dad lived up the road.