English Rose Kitchen

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.

Last view of the old kitchen with disassembled bits of the new kitchen in the foreground

I realised that if we didn’t let our contractor C. get going things would continue to drift. Weekend after weekend we’d find new excuses as to why searching for ovens, sinks, shower heads and the like could wait until the next weekend. Finally on Tuesday I gave the go ahead and he and a mate came in to rip out the kitchen.

When I moved into this place just over ten years ago the thing I first fell in love with was the kitchen, but imperceptably over the years and with no apparent intervention from anyone it’s become a fixer-upper, complete with wildlife and a variety of frankly non kitchen-like odours seaping in from heaven knows where. By Tuesday evening we had no kitchen, but some idea of where the smells and wildlife came from.

Not that I haven’t lived in worse places as a student …

I’d always imagined that it would be quite a traumatic experience, but as it happened we were so behind in the taking-STUFF-to-storage project that I was literally emptying out the kitchen units as they were prising them off the walls, so I didn’t have time to think about it. In the photo it doesn’t look so bad, but in real life it looks like he result of one of those “precision” strikes you get shown video of whenever some invasion or other is being justified. It was, however, rather traumatic for our cat Smirkle, not least because we had to move her food and water bowls into the bathroom.

Nice in Paris, but has no place in a house

On Wednesday they came back and ripped out the shower/steam room. That was definitely not an emotive experience because it had been falling apart for about 5 years and reeked of rotting wood. The steamer itself was a great idea, but had been mounted on the wall with its array of pipes and cables in a manner that was apparently cool when the Pompidou Centre in Paris was built, but has no place in a home.

During the process they had to lift part of the floor to get to the stopcock and turn the water off for a few minutes. It was a couple of hours before we noticed that Smirkle was missing and we weren’t really sure where she was until we heard wild mewing noises from under our feet. You’ll be relieved to hear that I lifted the floor again and Smirkle lept out.

Reds attempts to show Geordie John what he’s made of

Well last Monday came. And last Monday went. As did C. He took one look, said “You guys aren’t nearly ready”, explained that we’d better pull our socks up by this Monday “or else” and left.

So this Monday it will have to be and the flat is currently full of not just STUFF, but the boxes into which it must go. It’s daunting. The sheer weight of STUFF that we need to shift tomorrow. Or else!

John shows how “In my day we used to make our own entertainment”

Completing the impression of an indoor urban wasteland, today we¹ fetched nearly all our English Rose Kichen units back from my parents’ garage. Those with long memories (or a mouse with which to click on the following link) will recall that the units have been enjoying my parents’ unwitting hospitality since they were away on a cruise back in May.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that the kitchen units in their current form look like something that Mutoid Waste Company would enjoy using as raw material, but we took the necessary leap of faith around 9 months ago that we could make this work. Oh yes – aside from putting the remainder of our worldly goods into storage tomorrow, I’m also charged with reassembling the bizarre metal puzzle that is to be our new kitchen by matching all the bits against the few complete units that we have.

Just how crap can we made the kitchen look?

In the meantime I just ate what’s probably my last meal from our current kitchen because it’s the first thing that’s going to be ripped out on Monday. It’s sad because we’ve had many wonderful social occasions based around the kitchen, but the sadness is tempered somewhat by the fact that for at least two years it’s been virtually unusable, partly because the stove now only has two working rings and a well known singer/songwriter friend drunkenly kicked in the oven door one night (quite seriously unintentionally!) and partly because of the STUFF accumulation that’s taken place.

To add to the confusion, our shower/steam room is being ripped out and what’s currently our living room is being transformed into the kitchen. We will spend the next few weeks with no kitchen, living room or shower room. Wish us luck.

¹In the interest of giving credit where due, I enlisted the help of my good friend and Rotten Hill Gang assistant Geordie John and his (t)rusty van. In a surprise move he brought along Reds (from RHG) to help. The two of them did stirling work and refused my offer of a curry or similar in return. I think I’ll still make them have one though.

How we looked at the fancy dress competition according to my memory

When my sister and I were kids we used to get entered into a lot of fancy dress competitions, which we would almost always win due to the ingenuity of our dad. Dad had a simple rule. If you can’t make it good, make it big. The winning outfit that springs to mind at the moment was when we went dressed as the Yellow Submarine ^{1 and 2}.

Invariably the foundation of the outfit would be a selection of cardboard boxes (and in this instance a lot of yellow crepe paper), which we would collect from our friendly-local-corner-shop³. I was reminded of this today when I realised that I needed to put a whole load of afore mentioned STUFF into storage this weekend because – now I hope you’re sitting down for this, the renovation starts on Monday!

You see last weekend Dave’s friend Corrado, who’s going to be effectively project managing the renovation paid us a surprise visit. Except that we were the only ones who were surprised, because evidently we’d arranged a start date of last Monday. Oops! I guess the intervening Christmas cheer was a little more cheerful than I remember.

Frankly we needed the kick up the old wazoolee and this Monday he’s coming round with an electrician to start ripping things up and installing new lighting and – well – whatever else it is that electricians need to do when you’re moving your kitchen from one room to the next.

Remembering those halcyon days of winning fancy dress competitions and not being willing to part with another £25 to our storage company, I popped round to our friendly-local-corner-shop and picked up a selection of cardboard boxes for free. I’m just about to pop up to the storage to press them into action …

¹I hate to sound like a Monty Python sketch here, but we really did have a lot of fun with some cardboard and some gaily coloured paper. Granted you’d be hard pressed to make an Xbox out of it, but we didn’t know about them then so as far as we were concerned this was as much fun as you could have.

²Purely to embarrass him, I thought I’d mention here that my brother, at that stage still learning to speak, used to sing “We all live in a yellow sumbarine”. He also used to enjoy something called “Bread and ha-ha” with his breakfast.

³In the UK a “corner shop” is roughly equivalent to a convenience store in the US. They’re almost always friendly and they’re definitely shops, but the striking feature is that they’re called corner shops whether or not they’re actually on a corner.

The answer to my prayers

Quite what it was that I was doing on December 11 that prevented me from writing the final installment of “All our worldly goods” I don’t recall, but I was prompted to revisit it today by a dream I had last night; a beautiful, glorious dream that we’d finished moving all our stuff into storage ready for the renovation to commence in earnest.

You see, during the five years since that first night spent in a sleeping bag on the kitchen floor I brought in items of furniture and decoration slowly and tastefully, in keeping with the style of the house. At all times I was in control and could make sure it never became too cluttered.

Then I got married.

Now I love Wifey more than anyone or anything, but nothing could prepare me for the astonishing onslaught of STUFF. Each time she went to visit her mother in Maryland she’d bring back huge crates of STUFF and as if that wasn’t enough, frequent visits to Argos ensured that more STUFF conspired to fill any remaining corners. International tat bazar eBay too, has been a prime provider of STUFF.

The last straw was that during 2008 branches of Primark and TK Max (purveyers of VERY CHEAP STUFF) opened in London, ensuring that the final pathways to storage areas are now completely blocked with YET MORE STUFF. Since we can now no longer reach the limited storage space we do have we can’t even use that to store the STUFF that’s blocking it and walking from one end of any given room to the other involves placing ones feet in very precise positions. In fact some cross-room paths can no longer be negitiated without arial movement.

I’ve previously mentioned that a considerable amount of the STUFF comprises shoes and suggested several ways in which their storage problem could be resolved. More practically though (at least in Wifey’s eyes) is the fact that we put down a deposit on some storage space some three weeks ago and, following the wonderful, heavenly dream that I had last night that the flat was as empty as the day I moved in (or rather, the day before Wifey arrived), tomorrow I’m going to start taking some of the accumulated STUFF up there.

Following my musings as to whether Halifax would let their tracker rates go any lower I can now answer “yes”. Pegged as we are at 0.16% below the Band of England rate, we’ve paying 1.84%.

How I still imagine the mortgage company’s lawyers to be

Solicitors are doin’ it for themselves
I walked to the next (correct) corner and located my actual front door, the door that my lawyer had mysteriously informed me that had been stolen from me since I first viewed the flat only weeks before. If anyone wonders why it takes so long to buy your home in England or Wales (the Scots wisely have their own laws on the subject) they need look no further than at the self serving obstacles that lawyers put in your way.

One of the last phone conversations in which my lawyer engaged me – with the clock ticking, naturally – was to ask whether I knew there was a railway line running some 300 yards from my house. I responded by informing him that there was a dotted white line down the middle of the road, and that I was charging him £80 an hour to research the fact. Oddly he didn’t get my point and further padded my bill by exchanging a series of letters (price £50 each) with the vendor’s solicitor regarding the positioning and usage of our rubbish bins (that’ll be garbage cans on t’ other side ot’ pond). You can read more solicitorial lunacy here.

Since I had no landline I took out my mobile and rang the first person I could think of to tell them the news, who happened to be in Sweden where I’d spent the previous week. “It sounds like you’re in a large, empty room”, he said. I put the phone down and looked around. He was right. In all my excitement to move in I’d forgotten that aside from the flat itself I had almost no posessions whatsoever, not even anything to sleep in.

After a call to a dear friend on Portobello Road I acquired a sleeping bag, two mismatched dinner plates and a fork (I still have all of them) which, during a trip to Sainsburys I augmented with a frying pan, two toilet brushes (”TWO toilet brushes?!”, my friend admonished me for my extravagance), a packet of spaghetti, some olive oil and some vegetables. I still have all but the food.

That night I slept on what is now our kitchen floor. One empty room was pretty like much the next and since the vendor had removed all the curtains I had to choose the one with the least direct street lighting.

The final instalment is tomorrow, the 10th anniversary of my moving in.

Some stuff similar to he sort of stuff we might be moving into storage

We put down a deposit on some storage space this week and are now setting about the task of doing an inventory of everything to move into it. It’s illuminating an horrifying in equal parts. I’ll get onto that shortly, but in the meantime it brought to mind the following, which I shall reveal in chapters as I get time to type …

Chapter 1
I moved in 10 years ago this Thursday (December 11 1998). T’was a Friday as I recall and it was the first place I’d ever bought, so you can imagine my excitement as I arrived at Foxtons (my estate agents or something called “realtors” according to my American wife) to pick up the keys and you can also imagine my dismay as they told me that “the person with the keys won’t be back for two hours”.

This was a real problem because I’d booked visits from the electricity board and phone company to come and change the pre-pay key meter into a proper one (this was previously a rental property) and to install a phone line, respectively.

I missed them of course, but finally got to the house at about 5pm. Actually to be honest I got to the wrong house at about 5pm because in my excitement I’d forgotten where I now lived and turned right one road too early.

The house whose front door I attempted to unlock was similar to my own in that it was a corner house and had a driveway, but was disappointingly run down, was missing an extension I was sure I’d bought and had a car I knew I didn’t own in the driveway. None of that stopped me from jiggling the key in the lock for 5 minutes and reaching for my phone to curse the Foxtons before it dawned on me that I didn’t live there.