Montag, 26. Januar 2015

Advent Sundays part 2, Christmas and New Year: Change, my dear. And it seems not a moment too soon!

My last post left us with some smooth concrete where there had been a heap of earth, lots of biscuits and tea, and some gloopy, sticky glue holding up the wallpaper. I have to say that putting up the wallpaper completely transformed the kitchen! I actually wanted to move in right then and there! But there was still so much more to be done, namely this: tiles for the "Loch", installing the new kitchen worktop, putting up a new plasterboard wall in front of the old brick wall in the "Loch", and the biggest and last piece of work for 2014: the new windows for the kitchen and the bedroom.


Operation "Let's hide the ugly brick wall", step 1: put up metal framing. 
The amazing, Photoshop-savvy Marcel very kindly combined all of our plasterboard images into one neat panorama.



 So, with the ugly wall well hidden, we were able to get started on the tiles. We'd ben visiting countless DIY stores to find the right colour tiles before stumbling upon those purely by accident in the very last store we went to. The darker ones are the same ones we had already used in the kitchen, thus creating a bridge between the old floor and the new.
A growing tile floor.







And the finished floor, complete with the dark brown edges, but still missing the grout.

 While this was going on there was another new arrival to our kitchen. Say hello to the brand-new, extremely shiny kitchen worktop! Isn't it fantastic?



 In fact, it is so lovely that none of us want to cut out the holes for the sink and the hob!

This leaves us with the big one: new windows!

 The old windows had to go.
 Single-glazing, ancient wooden frames: our local energy provider would have loved them! As they weren't exactly energy-efficient, our bill would have been astronomical.
 So, away with them.
 Of course we had to pick the coldest day of the year, just after some heavy snowfall to cut two huge holes in our wall!
 But it was definitely worth it. Here they are, our new windows.

 Removing the frames.
 Veeery carefully!

 No windows!



 New windows!



 The bedroom window.



 And the kitchen window.

 December 30, 2014: it was soooo cold! That cup of tea was well-earned.
 From the outside.

 Looking good.
 Looks great from inside, too.
 Final bit of tidying.

 Almost ready for our first dinner! New Year's Eve 2014, home-made pizza, my plates, real cutlery, a nicely decorated trestle table, and we were ready.



Happy New Year 2015!

Samstag, 20. Dezember 2014

Advent Sundays, wallpaper and rapid progress, part 1

In my last post I went far back into past, showing pictures of the history of our house. I think at some point I'd like to put together some sort of "then and now" series, using the old photographs and putting them next to a current one taken in the exact same spot. For now though, here's what happened in the last month or so since my last entry.

First of all, the lovely Marcel and his equally fantastic dad filled the little opencast mine we had going right in the middle of the house.
A bit of rebar

 Some concrete

 Freshly mixed, of course.












 And into the hole it goes!




What a transformation! It starts off as merely a hole in the ground...



...first gets filled with a thick layer of sand and some polystyrene insulation material.
 Plastic foil.












Then the first layer of concrete, the rebar and then...
Ta-daa! A nice, smooth, even layer of perfect
concrete and the "hole" is no more!










 Woo-hoo, wallpapering! Everybody's favourite work. Long, unwieldy strips of paper that cling to everything but the wall they're supposed to stick to. And bucketloads of gloop. What's not to love? :)















A wallpaper selfie ;)


A well-earned tea break, courtesy of Marcel's mum. Home-made Christmas biscuits, cheese sandwiches, tea and candles. Happy 2nd of Advent!
















With our stomachs full of Christmas tea and biscuits we were able to quickly finish wallpapering:






The kitchen looks completely different now. Almost ready! More to follow. For now I really should go to bed. Off to see The Hobbit tomorrow! :)