English Rose Kitchen

Our nearly complete floor, with some extraneous STUFF which resolutely refuses to disappear

After a surprising amount of time during which our stacked up flooring was used as improvised kichen furniture, it’s finally been laid as actual floor and it’s gorgeous.

The delay was caused by residual STUFF that resolutely refused to leave until I insisted on moving some to storage and some to a charity shop (who, it must be said, were somewhat underwhelmed).

We’d agonised for months about what to do with the floor, but kept coming back to a harlequin design on top of he oak and this is where Wifey has come into her own. She spent days researching the best materials and techniques and has so far spent nearly two months taping, staining, restaining and lacquering.

I think I’ve mentioned before that the Wifey side of the family is not cursed by any sense of urgency, but in this case her excess diligence is really paying off. The floor looks fantastic!

50m2 of wood makes a great makeshift worksurface

I’ll be the first to admit that some of the articles on this blog have veered wildly off topic. There have been two reasons for this. Firstly it’s taken an embarrassingly long time for us to get things moving and secondly writing about a kitchen renovation is fundamentally boring and I dare say it’s not much more fun to read about it.

So this is probably of interest only to us, but we finally took delivery of 50m2 of engineered, unfinished oak this week. Currently sitting in what was the kitchen and will be the exercise area, Wifey, as ever, did a fantastic job of researching it and getting a great price.

We initially decided we wanted a harlequin design on the floor, but realised it would be too difficult, so we spent days driving around town looking at some amazing wood at fantastic (in the sense of fantasy) prices upwards of £100 a square metre. Then we thought we wanted something called double smoke white oiled or double oiled white smoked or whatever, but much like we just “knew” when we’d found the kitchen units we were going for, we knew we really wanted a harlequin floor.

That’s why we ended up with unfinished oak. It had to be engineered because we wanted it wide and the underlying flooring is crap. The technique we’re going to use was dreamt up by wifey. We’re going to get our chippie to rout out grooves to make it look like we have square wood tiles lain at 45 degrees, then stain or oil (open to suggestion) alternate squares light and dark, finishing off with a couple of layers of clear oil.

Now all we need to do is to get the rest of our damned STUFF into storage so that they can lay the floor in the first place!

If I’m honest though, I’m much more excited about our toilet that arrives on Tuesday. No it’s not one of those Japanese ones that analyses your stool and emails your doctor for you, but it does have one of those funky modern lids that you let go of an watch it gently lower itself.

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.

Remember how gutted we were to have to sell our gorgeous Smeg FAB28? I guess we still miss it in all its retro glory, but we knew inside that our storage requirements greater than it could offer.

It turns out that that we couldn’t be happier with its replacement, the glorious Electrolux American Fridge Freezer ENL62981XX3. Despite the issue of the exterior being far from the “excellent condition” described in the eBay auction, it works perfectly and it’s a revelation to be able to see and access its entire contents without resorting to Pilates style contortions. Also far less food is getting wasted due to either disappearing to the nether regions or getting frozen to the rear wall. Fridge burn is a thing of the past.

The freezer half of it too is a joy to use. Being able to see every item clearly is  a real advantage. The tendancy with our old box of a freezer was to put things in unmarked plastic boxes, stack them in one of the four compartments and … periodically wonder what they were.

The floor of our kitchen, which runs through to the living room, needs replacing. It’s sad, because it has a lot of character, most of it being original. In fact it has a little too much character because the gaps are now far too wide in some places (the newer floorboards mainly) and there are holes in the wood in others. We have to keep something over a particular pair of holes to stop our inquisitive cat from going down there.

We’ve looked at oak flooring and if we go with that we’re going to want each board to be prety wide just for the look. We’re planning to lay it across the old flooring at right angles to the current direction. I realise that’ll raise problems if we ever have to go under the floor for any reason.

Another flooring idea (Ray’s) is to use some sort of veneered MDF and paint it with harlequin style squares (i.e. the squares will be running diagonally). I have no idea how practical this could be, although it certainaly would be cheaper if it was and would fit the look of the kitchen. Ray also wants to put some of that aluminium flooring around where the kitchen units themselves are.