Not a very good picture of our beautifully refurbished English Rose Kitchen units

It’s been a long haul, but we have seen the almost finished product – and it is beautiful!

To recap, our wonderful contractor ran around several car body shop places asking them what they’d charge to refurbish and paint up our English Rose Kitchen units. Of the 4 he went to, 3 refused point blank to to have anything to do with them (and our original choice Farouk, after displaying much initial enthusiasm lost interest when the push came to the shove and quote us £150 per unit).

The fourth is an absolute perfectionist and has done and incredible job on what were our beaten up old units made still worse by our unauthodox transport methods.

The photo doesn’t do it justice at all I’m afraid. In real life the colour is vibrant and high gloss and we can’t thank them enough. Great prices too.

Queen cartoon courtesy of rocktoons.com

At 15 and after much negotiation with my beloved parents I went to my first ever proper gig at Earl’s Court. It was mid 1977, punk was well into rearing its spiky head and my cousin’s band, The Clash, was just about the most credible bunch of people you could choose to hang out with. So instead I – er – went to see Queen, front row at Earl’s Court, where I’m convinced Brian May winked at me during his Brighton Rock guitar solo.

Today I returned there with Wifey nearly 32 years later to attend the far more sedate Ideal Home Show, although to be fair the Ideal Home brand has been holding exhibitions there for far longer than it has rock gigs.

We went with a purpose, to buy a set of pans for the new kitchen. We left with far more than we bargained for. Every turn brought with it a new essential item that we’d never heard of, but without which life now seemed somehow empty.

The normally shabby Earls Court looks better by night

Friendly and overly charismatic northerners and Scots recited their 10 minute scripts with increasing degrees of excitement as they resolved some kitchen, cleaning or decorating crisis you weren’t aware of before reaching a crescendo as they announced the price and threw in “as an exhibition special” an extra set entirely for free.

They possess incredible selling skills, but they’d met their match with my wife, who possesses equally impressive buying skills. In addition to the cookware we’d gone for, we carried home two sets of wifi headphones (batteries not included), an expensive electric massage pounding contraption with a free “How fat are you” machine, a glorified set of goggles that massages your face, a selection of cleaning products, some sort of leather renovating cream and some pads that simultaneously remove hair from and exfoliate your legs.

It was a close thing, but we managed to escape without a set of electronic cigarettes, a new-fangled hand blender that would find several similar friends in our home already, a new bed and a set of indicators for a push bike so garish that they would scare 7 shades out of any poor motorist that saw them approaching at night in their rear view mirror. Actually the jury is still out on the hand blender.

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.

An example of the craftsmanship for which this country is renowned

This country has always been well known for its craftsmen. Traditionally tradespeople have been trained as apprentices and considered themselves at least in part, artisans as well. I’ve long known that certain corners were cut in earlier work carried out on our flat, but this renovation has revealed an astonishing litany of howlers. Once more we don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

There’s an easy way and then there’s a quick way to make a hole in a wall through which to feed the outlet pipe from a sink. The quick way, which on removing the old kitchen units we discovered had been used, seems to involve a pickaxe straight through the wall. Astonishing!

If it hadn’t been for the fact that the flat above constantly leaks onto us we might never have re plastered the ceiling, which means that we’d have missed that a)the ceiling is too fragile to take the lighting we’d originally planned and b) the cavity was filled with newspapers, or, as C called it “tinder”.

The cavity is filled with a quality broadsheet

We took C upstairs to have a look around because he was concerned that our neighbour might have applied the same techniques to his bathroom that he had to installing the shower in our place. We have suffered the odd indoor water feature in the room below that houses our computers.

He and our plumber were horrified to see how the boiler had been installed. Apparently the pipe coming out of a boiler is supposed to feed straight into the sewer, because its contents are acidic. When they installed the pipe upstairs, they prised up part of the lead flashing on our roof (charming!), thus reducing its ability to keep out rain, which isn’t that great to start with due to the way it was fixed.

The pipe then … stops! Yes, that’s right, it stops on our roof and feeds into our gutter. The acidic fluid from the pipe will be corroding the lead and then the gutter, before overflowing into our next door neighbour’s garden, potentially poisoning our cat along the way.

Enthusiasm is an admirable quality, but it won’t build walls for you

Nothing is meant to last forever I suppose, but you expect a brick wall to survive more than about 14 years I would think.

One morning last week Wifey looked out of (what was) the kitchen window and shrieked. To be honest it was exactly the same as the noise she just made when she discovered that “someone” hadn’t closed the macaroni properly, so it was hard to know whether to run, walk¹, or pretend I hadn’t heard, but the fact was that a section of our five foot high garden wall had collapsed outwards onto the pavement and into the road.

A few things sprang to mind. Firstly and obviously, thank ^%&* nobody was walking past at the time. Secondly thank something-or-other there was no car parked by it and finally, thank the patron saint of scooters that it didn’t fall inwards onto Wifey’s pink Vespa.

Our fantastic crew that C put together happened to turn up just as we were standing outside and helped us to move the debris to the end of our driveway and later our chippie turned up and patched up the gap with a piece of driveway gate that’s been doing nothing for about 18 months.

Oh and the piece of wall that collapsed, on closer inspection, was built at the same time as the extensions to the flat under the auspices of (or possibly by) the same enthusiastic chap responsible for the shower room plumbing. The mortar seemed to be more sand than cement and wasn’t tied to the walls either end properly.

¹Wifey once called from the shower to tell me there was a slug creeping up the wall shouting “Come on! Quickly!”. I ran (because I’m a dutiful husband), but I had to ask, just how slowly would I have had to walk in order to miss a slug?

The shower/steam enclosure with – er – more wood

One thing that’s been impressing me since the renovation got truly under way a few weeks back is the sheer competence of the guys doing it. C has put together a fantastic team who seem to have the ability to Just Get Things Done.

But mostly I’m enjoying having burly men strutting around the house all day long. I mentioned this to Wifey who found the concept mildly disturbing, but I explained to her that she was free to enjoy having them around the house too.

Looking at the shower/steam enclosure here, I was wondering how you tile right into the corner where the curved bit joins the wall. The carpenter told me that it “won’t be [his] problem” and that’s a good enough explanation for me.

File this under things you wish you’d said at the time you spotted the problems under the shower.

I never thought I’d quote Margaret Thatcher, but

REJOIST REJOIST!

(Grabs coat, exits sharply through French doors).

This picture isn’t at all amusing

When we originally started to look at John Lewis of Hungerford’s Creme de la Creme reproduction of English Rose Kitchen they told us that their paint comes from the wonderful Fired Earth range, so for around a year we were convinced that Fired Earth was the place to go for our paint.

A few weeks back we finally got to Fired Earth in Holland Park. As we got near the end of Portland Road we saw a door in the most incredible vintage blue/green with a hint of pastel. Very hard to describe, but you’ll understand when I post the pictures.

Fired Earth just didn’t have quite what we were after, so we left a note through the beautiful door (it was Obama’s inauguration day and we could see the TV on inside so we didn’t like to intrude) explaining our situation and the owner was kind enough to call back the next day, saying that they had a pot of the paint left over that we could borrow to copy from.

Our fantastic contractor C, by the way, did a lot of research to find our who would give us the best deal on coating them. He found a body shop under the Westway that’s doing them right now – getting dents out and coating them with our chosen colour.

I can’t say enough good things about C. Only I’ll leave that for another time. Suffice to say that if anyone needs a recommendation I’ll put you in touch. Meanwhile, just because an article is a bi boring without any pictures, here’s a picture of the shower/steam room with the shower enclosure being built. Note that we actually have a floor in there now. Note also that this is a blog about our kitchen and I keep talking about the shower/steam room. Ho hum!

The floor where the shower used to be

Now I’m actually good friends with the guy who built the extensions on and subsequently sold me the flat, but his work tends to focus on the creative rather than the practical. We were thinking of trying to rescue the floor tiles in the shower/steam room, but in the event we realised we’d need to rip them up to fit in all the new bits and pieces. Thank goodness we did.

It turned out that at one end, the shower had been so badly fitted that it had been leaking water onto the underlying floorboards and joists for around a decade and a half, and at the other end some particularly dodgy plumbing around the washing machine had done a similar number on the flooring there.

The floor and wall where the washing machine used to be

Only the fact that the damp had spread up the adjoining wall saved the joists that end from a similar fate.

In addition the leaky washing machine plumbing was inches away from the mains outlet. It also turns out that most of the house was running on one electricity circuit. Our electrician said that it’s a miracle that we haven’t had a fire before.

One of the pipes had been fitted rather rustically whereby instead of using an elbow to go round a corner it had simply been bent.

My friend’s enthusiasm for renovation projects knows no bounds however, and he has since moved on to demonstrate his own peculiar approach to carpentry and plumbing to the French. Vive la différence!

The Larder They Come

I’ll be honest here, my reasons for starting this blog were 100% mercenary. It was only later that I discovered writing about stuff not exactly kitchen renovation related was more fun.

I knew that when we’d finished the kitchen we’d have a load of English Rose Kitchen units left over and now that we’ve worked out what we’re using there’s a whole bunch of stuff that we’re going to sell on.

I’ll itemise and photograph them properly later, but at the moment if anyone’s interested in a rather nice ERK larder (about 5′6″ tall) and a wall unit in great condition, both still with the original paintwork (which means they could do with freshening up), let me know. You can’t have the larder yet cos we’re using it to store bits and pieces during the renovation, but this is a heads up!

We also have a few doors, draws, odds and sods. More later. Oh – and we can tell you where to get them repainted too.