English Rose Kitchen

So we spent the day going round timber merchants and flooring places receiving more and more conflicting information. Most conflicting of all was whether it would be better to use solid or engineered flooring.

Even more confusing than that was the cost. Looking online we can see all sorts of flooring that seems to match our needs around the £30..£40 a square metre for solid oak, with engineered boards coming in at considerably less. Going round today the only flooring we saw that we liked was in the £110 range, with engineered flooring costing about the same.

Also we’d previously been advised that we’d be best off using solid wood, but today a very nice man in a very reputable shop told us that because we’e laying on top of a pine floor with a 15″ drop underneath it our best bet would be to put down a layer of marine ply to cut off the damp, and then use engineered planks, partly because the lower layers are better at absorbing damp and partly because engineered boards are stronger at the width we want them, around 180mm. That’s in sharp contrast to previous advice, which was that solid wood is stronger for wider boards.

Ho hum.

Interest rate update
Well ain’t that great? The letter from the Halifax just arrived this morning confirming that our interest rate is now 2.84%. That’s below the supposed 3% floor. Hmm - wonder if it really will go any lower.

  

The symbol that rules our lives

The nice thing about the Bank of England’s recent bout of generosity dose of realism regarding interest rates is that we’re now paying far less interest on our mortgage than we were before re-mortgaging.

In fact we already were because we moved the whole thing onto a tracker deal that’s slightly below the Bank of England base rate for 2 years. The catch being that we had to pay a bit for it (I’m sure they called it something like an “arrangement fee”). It’s worked out rather well and there’s talk of interest rates dropping even lower than their current 3%. In principle if they go low enough, the bank will be forced to pay us to buy our home!

Unfortunately and probably for precisely that sort of reason, according to the BBC our mortgage lender won’t allow tracker mortgage rates to go lower than 3%. It’s probably all there on the agreement if I could be bothered to dig it out, but in common with most of the rest of the world I can’t and in any case, nobody foresaw rates dropping this low a year ago so nobody paid any attention to such details.

Am I aggrieved about that? Probably not - my own fault for not caring paying more attention, but I’m pretty sure there was no upper limit either, which would only be fair!

Our contractor inspires confidence

… well of sorts.

Our contractor came round today to take another look and discuss the schedule. His biggest problem at the moment is that he still doesn’t have a clue as to what English Rose Kitchen units look like aside from the one small top unit I could show him (remember our entire collection is still in my parents’ garage).

The good news, especially if you happen to be my parents, is that we worked out when everything is going to happen. So, roughly:

1. Start of December - we get everything into storage (and I secretly hope that most of it stays there!).

2. At the same time we order the wood for the new flooring. 180mm solid oak since you ask, and if anyone knows where we can get a good deal we’d love to hear from you.

3. At the same time we get the roof fixed. It’s never been quite right whenever it rains and the wind blows in a certain direction since .. well someone fixed it with minimal lead and a lot of guesswork.

4. Mid December the wood arrives and sits around getting used to its new home. We’re timing it like this because realistically we’re not going to get anyone to do any work over Christmas so it might as well be used fruitfully allowing the wood to acclimatise itself.

5. Around the same time we take the kitchen units round to Farouk to strip and powder coat. Having seen the results of people’s attempts to paint them, it seems powder coating is the best option.

6. January 1st 2009 (or thereabouts), Mr Contractor comes in with the boys to lay the flooring, work out how to fit the units and … oh, we forgot to tell you about the steam room that we’re also renovating at the same time, but that’s a story for another blog.

Wish us luck!

Axx

 

So close and yet so far

Getting the home improvement loan
Stepping back a bit, I realise I’ve never told the sorry tale of how we’re managing to fund the project.

I bought the property 10 years ago during a slight dip in the market and just before the sustained house price boom of the late 90’s to the mid naughties, so we decided to re-mortgage to raise the money to renovate the flat.

Re-mortgaging
The was just before the credit crunch grew its head of steam so things were a little easier and as it turned out, by switching to a new mortgage company and to a lower interest rate, we effectively raised the entire home improvement loan while slightly reducing our repayments. It’s a tracker mortgage, just below the Bank of England base rate.

 

How I imagine the mortgage company’s lawyers to be

Bloody conveyancing lawyers!
The re-mortgage agreed, the fun began. You see lawyers for mortgage companies, estate agents, buyers and sellers of property have contrived to milk the arcane system of property ownership in this country for all it’s worth. To explain briefly, my property is a house comprising two apartments (OK, flats to us Brits). I live on the ground floor and, as is common in these situations, I share the freehold of the property with the owner of the upstairs flat, while each of us has a 99 year lease on our own floor.

We’re just about ready to rock with the kitchen renovation, so, partly in light of the credit crunch, we decided to review where we are financially.

We started by taking a good, long look at what was being taken out of our bank account every month by direct debits to see if we could make any savings there and the results were astounding! To save repeating myself, you can click on how to survive the credit crunch to read about it.

It’s either a story of future hope, or a sad tale of past folly. Suffice to say that the saving every year is enough for a good holiday, or at least to keep us out of the red.

A possible fate for Ray’s shoes

What’s going on in the ERK household?
Well I’ll level with you. I’ve been so darned busy recently with Rotten Hill Gang (a post on my other blog that includes nice pics from a stage at Notting Hill Carnival) that I haven’t had a moment to call my own so I’ve had no time to write . Which is pretty lucky really because nothing much has happened here.

Another scenario for the fate of Ray’s shoes

So why all the excitement now?
Well for some time now we’re been sleeping in the living room awaiting the finishing touches on the bedroom. This has had the interesting effect that Ray’s shoes, which are normally piled up all over the bedroom floor have, for the past few months, been piled up all over the kitchen and dining area. My recollection of what our beautiful old, solid wood dining table looks like is dim and walking from the living room (also currently full of items more normally associated with a bedroom) to the one working bathroom means traversing an assault course of footwear, bags, the holes in the floor, more footwear, some books and a box of records. There is barely room to plant a foot for each step required.

A third possible outcome for Ray’s shoes

So why all the excitement NOW?
Are yes that. Well from my position in the office I can hear all sorts of banging, wheezing, grunting and the odd bit of swearing coming from the bedroom. No, there isn’t a geriatric porn movie in production, it’s Ray finally finishing the painting of our new fitted wardrobes. She just called me in there to look and it’s beeyootiful!

Woohoo!!
Woohoo indeed. The mattress on the poor sofa in the living room cannae take any more Captain! Nor can our backs. All that remains now is to get the wonderful Farouk to weld part of our bed (the bed is a work of art that deserves a separate article and shall have one) back together and we can move in, disappear the shoes into the wardrobe (in my dreams I suspect) and press on with the kitchen. Woohoo!

When Madonna appeared on Jonathan Ross¹ in one of the best interviews I’ve seen him do, she was trying to prove her credentials as a born again Brit by claming that she liked nothing more than to while away a few pleasant hours in a lovely old English pub². Thinking he was calling her bluff. He asked her what her favourite bitter³ was. “I’m quite partial to a pint of Timothy Taylor” came the reply. Wossy⁴ thought she had just made something up to save face, but the next day a newspaper found out that Timothy Taylor did indeed exist and was made by a small brewery in West Yorkshire. Subsequently a few pubs here in the South East have started to stock it and I’ve found that I have something in common with Mrs Richie, I like the stuff too.

This evening Ray and I must have been having some kind of argument (we can’t remember, the Timmy Taylor has kicked in in between) because she ran off round to the North Pole, one of our locals. The argument (and remember we’re not really sure if there was one) can’t have been that serious because she called 5 minutes later to tell me that the North Pole now sells TT.

Ray is gregarious almost to a fault. When I arrived at the pub she was already entertaining one of the locals, Dave, who in turn was entertaining her with a virtuosic display of cockney rhyming slang⁵. Now strictly speaking, because I was born within the sound of the Bow Bells, I’m a cockney, but my parents hammered out any trace of a local dialect when I was young by sending me to elocution lessons. That’s right, I’m a Londoner born and bred, but I cannot do a London accent! Nonetheless I managed to teach him “It’s all gone Pete Tong”⁶.

Dave, it turns out, is a builder/decorator who works with other builders/decorators on rather high end projects some as the National Galery and Very Rich People’s Homes. He explained to us (in ever shortening loops, the more he had to drink) that he’s “not cheap, but we’ll give you the date that we’ll turn up and we’ll be there on that day. We’ll give you a schedule and we’ll stick to it and we’ll give you a quote and that’s the price you’ll pay”. For some reason we believe him, so we explain what it is that we’re trying to do and arrange to have him round to take a look. He did, after all, paint a large mural at the end of a cul-de-sac just near the North Pole.

Notes for non UK readers

¹ Jonathon Ross is a popular TV presenter with his own chat show, known for being hilarious and making his interviewees look good at the same time.
² I can confirm that this is (sort of) true. When she and Guy were living in Holland Park, she apparently used to frequent a pub called the Windsor Castle, notable for two VERY low doorways (one is about 4 feet high). A friend of mine was in there once and noticed her in the corner. When she got up to leave about half the pub got up with her, because they were all her security guards.
³ Bitter is what the rest of the world thinks of as “warm, flat beer”. An acquired taste usually guaranteed to turn the stomachs of non Brits, along with Marmite. Strangely Ray has acquired it since she’s been here.
⁴ Mr Ross makes a feature of the fact that he can’t pronounce his “R”s. A musician friend of mine is terrified of being interviewed by him because he goes out under the name “Ranking Roger”.
⁵ Cockney slang involves finding a (usually 2 or 3 word) phrase whose last word rhymes with the word you actually want to say, then sometimes only saying the first word of the phrase. So “look” becomes “butcher’s hook”, which is usually reduced to “butcher’s”, as in “Let’s ‘ave a butcher’s”.
⁶ Pete Tong is a DJ specialising in dance music and his name, when used in the phrase “It’s all gone Pete Tong”, means “wrong”. It’s very modern slang, probably only about 10 years old, so it might not count.
⁷ (Yes I know there isn’t really a ⁷, this is completely gratuitous). Isn’t it amazing how quickly the singer James Blunt’s name became rhyming slang?

What were all those non English Rose Kitchen posts doing here anyway?
OK It’s finally happened. From the word go Ray was nagging me not to post non kitchen renovation articles to this blog. “If you must stray from the subject, at least make it related!” she’d say. “Bathrooms, fine. Interior design and home renovation in general, also fine!”. I toyed sheepishly with my mouse as she said “But why on Earth do you think you ought to post items about your band, about Notting Hill or about Timothy bloody Taylor beer to a site about our home?”.

And she had a point. Well - not the “Timothy bloody Taylor” bit actually, I made that up. she’s American, so if she said that it would have sounded something like Liza Doolittle, but that was the gist of it.

The trouble is I like writing
I like the sound of my own typing too much. And so Notting Hill Diary was born. The site is about our neighbourhood. It’s growing all the usual stuff about the history Notting Hill, Notting Hill Carnival, bars, pubs, restaurants and cinemas in the area. But I’m also I’m trying to keep it topical and entertaining with interesting articles you won’t find on one of those sites that’s little more than a glorified RSS agregator.

And I’ve sent all the offending articles over to their new home. I’ve enjoyed having them here, but we all know that it’s for the best that they reside in a more relevant location. Fairwell irrelevant tittle tattle that I can’t help writing. We’ve enjoyed entertaining you, but now it’s time to get serious about kitchens once again. We’re nearly back sleeping in our bedroom (we’ve been sleeping in the living room for what seems live forever), which means that we’re about to take the Great Leap Forward as far as our English Rose Kitchens plans go.

Footnote: OK I’ve finally removed all the non kitchen related articles to http://www.nottinghilldiary.com. It’s sad to see them go, but they’ve found a better home there.

I’ve now installed the DoFollow plugin to this blog so that anytime you add a comment any link to your own site will actually count for something in Google’s eyes. I’ve already explained why that is on my other blog in the article Notting Hill Diary now a nofollow free zone so I won’t bore you with the details again here.