English Rose Kitchen

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!

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.

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.

It’s amazing how you can live somewhere for years pondering over a problem and then one day the bleedin’ obvious hits you in the face. Yesterday we realised that the new fridge was never going to fit through the door between the living room and kitchen, at least, not without taking the doors off and struggling (which is wha we did).

The problem we’ve been facing is that despite the fact that our kitchen/dining area is pretty big, there’s not a lot of usable wall space because of the positioning of doors, radiators and a cute wooden supporting structure that’s used to divide the space into three pokey little rooms. when we realised there would be a problem moving the fridge into the kitchen we thought “Why not swap the kitchen and lounge?!”. What is now the lounge has far more usable wall space and would allow for a centre island and still have room for a dining area at the end where the stage is¹.

¹Don’t get excited, it’s only about 6 inches high and 8 feet across and the only performance that has ever taken place there was about seven years ago by a Norwegian poet friend of mine, Øystein Wingaard Wolf. We call him Ø for short.

Bladders full to bursting we set off on the 15 or so miles to meet Mr Poole, or “Michael” as I’ll call him. 20 or so minutes later our satnav directed us towards some concrete bollards that cut his road in two and another 10 minutes later we arrived at Michael’s house.

The stark contrast between his welcome and the reception we’d found in Brockenhurst threw us momentarily. He took us through to his kitchen and we saw, for the first time, some restored and installed units.

In fact he had installed runs top and bottom along both sides and one end of his kitchen before getting completely carried away and using some of the units he’d intended to sell on along two walls of his dining area. Ray and I thought that that part was probably overkill, lending itself to the effect of standing in a show room, but that’s just a taste thing and you’d be hard pressed to fault Michael’s skill and enthusiasm.

He was full of useful advice and told us the processes he’d used to restore the units. I was planning to document them, but before I had a chance he posted a comment to say how here: Restoring English Rose Kitchen Units, Michael’s way .

In his garage was another restoration project of his, a beautiful 1937 Ford Club Coupé. Michael is sort of like Al. Only – er …

Michael’s Ford Club Coupé

He took us to a lock up garage he has about 15 minutes away to pick up the units. A double sink atop four base units, two full size wall units and  two half size units, plus a larder, a couple of end shelves and, as every self respecting seller on of English Rose kitchens has, a surpising amount of unidentifiable bits. We unscrewed the bottom run into two lots of two units and he knowledgeably guided us round them. He explained that some parts, particularly the backs, are steel rather than aluminium, which is good to know and now I understand why those are the parts that get rusty.

Mercedes Sprinter splitter vans are huge, but when configured for a band, there’s very little space inside for other stuff. We managed though and Michael thoughtfully provided carboard, a piece of underlay and some rope to help lash it all together.

We did plan to drive the lot of it back to my parents’ garage that night, but that would have meant clanging large pieces of metal around at about midnight in what is a very quiet area. That’s not a good look, so we drove it home (I did the best parallel parking job of my life in the thing!) and waited till the next day. Luckily Ed was on hand to help lift the fridge down from the van and then later to just inside our French doors, where it will remain till the Smeg sells (it’s coming up tomorrow and is currently an absolute bargain at £75).

Yesterday was the big run to pick up the American Style Fridge Freezer from slighty-angry-woman in Brockenhust and English Rose Kitchen units lot 3 from Mr Poole in Poole. Brockenhurst is in the depths of the beautiful New Forest down near the South Coast and conveniently only about 20 miles from Poole.

I got to Tiger Tours and picked up the van around 2pm. There was a problem with the van that they were gong to give me, so they gave me another, which was not one of their own, but rather funky nontheless.

We made it down to Brockenhurst for about 5:15pm. One of the wonderful things about running around the country acquiring bits and pieces is that you get to meet so many different people and get a 20 minute snapshot of their lives. Most of the people we meet in this way are incredibly warm and friendly and it can be a very rewarding experience.

Not so on this occasion. We were greeted by slightly-angry-woman’s slightly-interesting-husband, who showed us the fridge. To be honest out of the two of them the fridge had more personality, although their eBay description of it as being in “Excellent condition” turned out to be far fetched at best. Actually it’s only a side that you won’t see when it’s installed that has some scratches and dents so we didn’t make the fuss that we probably should.

It took the three of us, with the assistance of a slightly-interesting-neighbour, to lift the beast into the cargo compartment where we wedged it at an angle to stop it rattling about. We were desparate to empty our bladders, but as soon as the fridge was in the van I think it’s fair to say that they couldn’t get rid of us fast enough.

The nicest thing about that experience was the appearance of a family of wild ponies¹ outside their house, which unfortunately had wandered off by the time I got my phone out to take a picture, so here are a couple of pictures of what they would have looked like. Believe me, they’re more interesting than the sellers of the fridge².

¹ The New Forest in Hampshire near the souh coast is famous for a) being quite beautiful and b) being home to some 3,000 wild ponies
² Interestingly, when I first posted this article, several the Google ads that it displayed were to do with marriage guidance counselling and divorce lawyers. Maybe Google really does have special insight into all of our lives!