Warning: contains images that may shock.

This is going to be a picture-heavy post, but I figured if I'm going to go for disclosure, I may as well go for full disclosure. If you think you have a rubbish kitchen and you still feel that way at the end of this post, you have my sympathies.

So, here goes. Come on in...

That's pretty much everything you need to know. I have a grand total of two cupboards and there's always a lot of junk under the work top (to be fair, that big green plastic sack isn't there and I usually have the rubbish in the rubbish bin - I must have been using the bucket inside as a water pail when the photo was taken).

But oh, this is meant to be about full disclosure, and if you're going to shake your head in disbelief when I tell you I paid dollar (let alone top dollar) for this place, you need to see a little more. Let's start with the gas, which kind of hangs out right in the middle of the wall, taking a break after its great long journey right the way round the wall:


"Hangs out" is literal rather than figurative. The meter isn't hooked to the wall. I'm guessing that's really not a good idea, but the gas boiler was replaced about a year before I moved in so a gas person must have seen the meter then and not felt it was a major issue.

The electricity also takes a looooong journey into my flat. It comes up the stair to my front door, then treks all the way through to my kitchen, which is as far from the front door as it's possible to be, stops for a count, and then heads all the way back through the flat. It would be so much happier kicking back in my hall cupboard, but the guy who just gave me a quote for kitchen-bathroom-electricity-plumbing-heating (did I mention I don't have heating either? and that I paid good money for this place? while being quite aware of all of the above... sheesh) wants to charge me big bucks for shifting it (even though all the electricity will be getting ripped out), so I guess it's going to stay in the kitchen for now.

That little blue meter is the electricity. (Take advantage of this opportunity to admire the window - it's the only nice thing you'll see in this post).

The white box above contains.... fuses! Wooo! Every time I've shown this to a contractor they've shuddered.


The other really fierce thing is this downpipe and the plumbing in general. As I mentioned, all this was visible when I bought and I STILL went ahead with it. I've always thought people who say they have a "coup de coeur" for a house are soft in the head but that's exactly what happened to me with this place. I wasn't even over the threshold and it felt like home. When they offered to show me the kitchen and the bathroom I was all "Ooh, it has a bathroom too? That's great. Lovely!"

The water pipe sprang a leak the first weekend I was in here (fortunately just on the building-side of the tap!) but there haven't been any issues since. It's just so terribly, terribly ugly though. I've never really looked at it this closely before - I'm borderline horrified.

Let's move on to nicer things: cupboards!

I have a big one:

And a little one under the window:

Between them and my fridge I survive quite well but it will be awfully nice to have more storage space when I get the new kitchen. I think it's going to be one of these "how did I manage before?" moments.

Anyway, here's an aerial shot for a bit of perspective:

And a picture from just after I'd moved in:

Oh, and remember there's a giant hole between the kitchen and the bathroom, just to the left of this picture.

Like I said, if you still feel bad about your kitchen, you have my sympathies.

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.

Small-scale photo extravaganzette

Beach weather... For me, this was one of our best days, surrounded by storm clouds but quite happy in a little pocket of sunshine.

Which isn't to say that anoraks aren't still de rigueur when it comes to beachwear...

Although I'm quite happy if wearing an anorak is the price to pay for enjoying this. :)

The huge west beach - bleak, beautiful, and ferociously windy.

Best beach find: a perfectly-formed, translucent prawn skin. It was about as long as one of my fingers and even though it was extremely fragile, all the articulations still worked. It still had its feelers and everything. First time I've seen one!

The house where my great-grandfather was born.

And some others that don't need explanation. It was a good holiday, the kind of open air and space that makes me wonder what I'm doing living in a city.

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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On holiday

The island is as wild and peaceful as ever, although the weather leaves a little to be desired. At least that means I'm getting lots of time to knit a blanket for my latest nephew, who was born ten days ago.

I'm also managing to unwind a bit from work, helped by the face that I resigned on Wednesday 23rd July. No smiley in the world could do justice to the relief I feel, but here goes anyway. :) I found my new job so quickly that it all took me a bit by surprise and I didn't really have time to think about whether it's really what I want, but I do think it'll be interesting and worth doing for a couple of years at least. We'll see, but whatever happens, it was certainly time for a change. God but it feels good to know I'll be out of there long before Christmas. I'm a happy happy kid.

Knitting for stress relief

I guess I could have done "sanding woodwork for stress relief" or "protecting wrought iron with the special cream I bought for stress relief" or "anything basically USEFUL for stress relief", but I've been feeling so anxious about this potential work situation that real, hard-core procrastination was the only thing that would do. So I took a trip to one of my favourite places in all Paris - the Marché Saint-Pierre (the website is worth visiting for the translation alone) - and went yarn shopping.

And then stayed up until 2am this morning trying to work out how to do seed stitch. And yeah, I know it's dead straightforward once you've sussed out that you need to change from knit to purl and back by pulling the yarn through the gap BETWEEN the needles, but that is something NONE of the knitting sites tell you. And by the time you have a durrr moment and work it out for yourself, it's already 11 the next morning and you've probably unpicked everything about, oooh, three times. Sheesh.

Anyway, my wedding washclothes are now ticking along nicely and should help keep me busy when I'm home in Scotland for a couple of weeks from Sunday next (assuming my needles don't get confiscated by the meanies at CDG). I'm also dreaming of granny squares and ripple blankets, because another procrastination project over which I can then procrastinate is probably just exactly what I need at the moment...

Hope and hard work

The hope refers to a big ol' fingers crossed about work and the hope that I'll be able to spill the beans in the next week or so.

The hard work refers to my kitchen window. Yep, I finally did it: all stripped. I was starting to wonder whether I'd ever get there - it's such ferociously hard work and takes so LONG and I hate wearing rubber gloves, especially when they get wet and sweaty and my hands smell of rubber for 24 hours after I finish. Other than that, great fun.

Anyway, still a few little bits of scraping left but I'll do that dry, without any paint-stripper. The important thing is that the windows are washed and ready for sanding and oiling, even if it took me a good part of my long weekend. I did a big session on Saturday afternoon then spent another seven or so hours this afternoon.

It was a glorious 14th of July outside, so shame I was inside fuming it up, but at least it'll be another "memorable" Bastille Day. My first 14th July, I went to the Firemen's Ball in the 6th and the fireworks on the Champs de Mars with Georgina, the second I was painting my then-new flat at Bastille and almost fell off my ladder when the jets and helicopters flew past after the military parade, the third I was up in Granville and met J for the first time, the fourth I was in Rouen with D and had a fairly massive post-break-up fight with J on the phone (oh yeah), and last year, I went to the fireworks on the Champs de Mars with... good ol' J. Heh.

Catch-up.

No posting for a couple of weeks due to a mix of good times and bad.

Good times: S&R arrived back from Spain (with dulce de leche :) ) and stayed for a few days before heading back to Canada. As always, I really enjoyed having them around and it was a great excuse to hold my first proper dinner at the flat. We managed to get eight round the table and managed to feed them all too, thanks to S taking care of pudding and an inspired decision to plug in the oven in the bedroom and leave the kitchen free for plates and other gubbins. Not the best picture ever, and I've no idea what exciting story was being told, but I think it kind of captures the atmosphere:

More good times last weekend, down in Cannes with another friend and her cute-as-all-heck 10-month old. Three days lazing on the beach and spending the evenings sipping rosé on the balcony was just what the doctor ordered... yep, work is hideous at the moment. Resignations a-go-go and one of the new recruits is giving me real headaches by behaving like a jerk with clients and then getting aggro when I try to coax/steer him back on to the right track. Very unhappy state of affairs which isn't leaving me with much energy for anything else.

In the circumstances, not much has moved with the flat. I finally sorted out my bedroom curtains yesterday, and I'm going to do more paint-stripping in the kitchen tomorrow night. At least my flowers are still looking nice. :)

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.

Damn. Woodworm...

So it's a lovely sunny day here. I was out for dinner with friends last night, had nice English muffins for breakfast (a neighbour who's gone away for a week left them on my doorstep yesterday along with a pineapple and some bananas), and I have woodworm in my cool little telephone table. Darn.
Not too much, but it means buying and applying more chemicals and keeping my fingers crossed that the little buggers haven't had time to get into anything else in the flat.