What’s cooking?

Yesterday the next house project got started with some preparation for a new kitchen. If you’re keeping track, this is the third room which we’ve started work on and, no, neither of the previous rooms are finished yet!!

Here’s the current kitchen, which is going to a good home unlike the old bathroom which has mostly made it to the local recycling centre:

To get started we’ve had the radiator moved from one side of the kitchen door, which is helpfully in front of the fridge door, to the other side of the kitchen door, where we’ll hopefully have a kitchen table (assuming we can find one small enough)!

Now you don’t see it…

…now you do:

So just a minor hole or two in the wall/worktop! (Thats a couple of cat5 cables which came through with the pipes. They’ve been gradually working towards a socket near the kitchen table, via the bathroom while everything had been pulled out.)

Since the central heating system was being drained anyway, we got a few thermostatic radiator valves put in the bedrooms upstairs at the same time, which is nice.

Update: yesterday all the old wall cupboards departed a day ahead of schedule, so the kitchen is looking miles better already! Today we swapped some original features (nasty artex and poorly-repaired-leak-damage-bulge) with an incredibly smooooooooth new ceiling. (4 May 2012)

I can’t tell you how much I’m not looking forward to doing the mist coat on Monday!

Update: we have a new kitchen!! Not the new kitchen, but it has a microwave in so it should see us through the next week… or so! (6 May 2012)

Next ingredient: white paint!

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Floor show

Another quick floor related update- if only doing the work was as quick! Despite the best efforts of the pipes to get completely in the way, there’s a now a new bit of floor in the house…

I even stood on it without ending up downstairs in the kitchen! It took a little longer to fit than expected due to the cunning B&Q cutting service plan not quite working out as well as I hoped. Luckily the new piece of chipboard was too big to start with!!

As if to prove a point, the original leak has got worse, so will definitely need to get that fixed soon. At least there’s a floor to put the drip tray on in the mean time!

Who moved my floor?

As if by magic, a hole appeared…

For bonus points, all the pipes survived and, even better, that’s not blood on the radiator!

Tomorrow I will mostly be aching.

New boards please

So looking through my big book of DIY I had an idea for a completely new style of DIY book. The books I’ve seen all have illustrations or photos of someone confidently performing some task with exactly the right tools, and no chaos or clutter. Either I’m the odd one out or this version of reality is somewhat unrealistic. My new, “Accurately Illustrated Guide to DIY” will instead have illustrations of someone looking confused or throwing tools at the wall, and photos of battered pieces of wood nailed crookedly to a wall… through a pipe.

In chapter one I’ll be explaining how not to go about fixing floorboards damaged by a leaking radiator.

Helpfully there are plenty of other pipes just underneath to provide an excellent opportunity for disaster.

Any suggestions or material for future chapters gratefully received. That and any sensible tips for repairing floors!