Presenting: our kitchen!

This story begins a long time ago and is a long time waiting to be told.  When we bought our house in 2007 it had been a student house for 20 years and it showed.  The plan was to do it up, which is taking a lot of time as we don't have the cash, time or inclination to spend every weekend plastering and sanding!

This is how our kitchen looked.

See the 80s kitchen cupboards?  The big patch on the wall where the boiler used to be?  The burnt oven which must have been 30 years old at least?

There was a nice bit to the kitchen, my white painted shelves with the bunting!  The open door is the door to the dining room, the closed door is the door to the cellar, it was a real squeeze to get down there!

That's the back door with the lovely exposed pipes and the wide drawers which were too big to be organised.

Not forgetting the gorgeous lino, torn and stained all over.

And then, in April 2013 it was time for a new kitchen.  The dining room was full of the new cabinets, delivered and waiting to be fitted, so we moved our kitchen into the living room.  This was day one when it all seemed like an adventure.

Slowly the kitchen started coming apart.  Appliances removed.

Down came the cabinets.

On day two all the units were removed and the kitchen in all its beauty was exposed.

And that's when the discovery was made.  The plaster wasn't coming away from the wall above the door, the wall of the house was falling down.  Marvellous.  What followed was months of hell arguing with the insurance company, who in the end refused to pay up, then full building works for 2 weeks whilst our house was put back together.  The entire time we lived without a kitchen.  I will never ever eat another ready meal.  This was also the catalyst for my depression, so it sparked an extra year or so (please don't let it go on much longer) of hell.  All because of this innocent looking patch of bricks.

November 2013 the new kitchen was finally fitted.  So why am I showing you this over a year later?  Because I'd been waiting for kitchen curtains!  It turned out that they weren't going to sew themselves from the fabric I bought back in November 2013 and I had to do it.

We went with white units, black counter top, black floor, then injected colour with the multi-coloured tiles.  That meant I could use any of the colours in the tiles (all colours except purple) for accents.  I chose yellow for the curtains.

Unfortunately the exposed pipes remain, a year later I'm still waiting for them to be boxed in!

So ta-dah!  These cafe-style curtains herald the end of the nightmare that was our house falling down.  I love my new kitchen.

A frog in my kitchen...

Well there was a frog in my kitchen.  Gave me the fright of my life.  I actually screamed.  I was home alone as Mr CA was on site.  I'd been out to feed the bunnies, came back in, cooked some pasta, ate it, watched Saving Hope for a bit... went back in the kitchen and saw him!

See him*?  He's in the corner by the dirty unpainted door, next to the massive bag of hay to the right of the tea-towels serving as a doormat since the kitchen fitter decided I didn't want my doormat any more and threw it away.  So I screamed, grabbed my phone for a picture and tried to get him out.  He didn't want to go.  I poked him with a long piece of extrusion left over from the kitchen fit (no idea what it's for, but it works well as a frog-poking tool).  He jumped and I screamed again.  I really am such a wuss.  Took me about 10 minutes to get him out.

Eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed that's a sneak peek of the new kitchen... want another?

It'll be a few more weeks before I show you in full - clearly we've not painted, we need to wait for some pipes to be boxed in and another cupboard added first.  And I really must clean the window.

On to crafty stuff, though nothing made by me.  I treated myself.

This cute little bunny brooch is by www.emmiemckee.com, I love the brooch and her customer service is ace.  Go and buy something from her Etsy shop.

I've also had another giveaway win!  Jennifer at Knotted Thread was giving away a copy of the quilt pattern Hemispheres by Megan of City Stitches, The pattern is available for purchase as a PDF on Aria Lane.  It hasn't arrived yet but I'm looking forward to it.  I know I'm not much of a quilter, but I've been quilting all day today!


*I have no idea if it really was male.  I didn't turn it over to look at its "bits".  I also have no idea what either a male or female frog's bits look like.

My own personal disaster story

Morning ladies.  I realised I hadn't done an update on my tumble-down house.  The building work is all done now and we only have some painting to do once the plaster is dry.  Oh, and the entire kitchen to fit, paint and tile.  Do you want to see how it came about?

I'm following up from my last post on the subject, so if you missed it and want to see how bad it was before, click on that link.  The photo above is the corner of the dining room.  We now have a doorway leading to the cellar where once there was just a wall with a humungous crack in it.  

This view from the kitchen shows the new lintel.  The one before was wood (I think) and very bowed.

This is the kitchen ceiling, above the doorway in the previous post.  There was an empty crisp packet up there, an early Walkers one.  Maybe I should have sold it on ebay, could be worth a fortune, after all it was "vintage".

Here's the entry from the kitchen to the dining room now clad in plaster board.  

And from the other side of the doorway.

Of course, they filled that hole (not sure if the crisp packet is still up there or not...)

Then they plastered and put in the door frames.  It looks so much better already.  The pre-plaster that they put on was the smelliest thing on earth. It stank of wee and as it was the kitchen, dining room and both hall ways, the entire house stank of wee.  Delightful.

And here it is all plastered and waiting to be painted and have the doors fitted.  I'm going to wait to do that until the kitchen is fitted.  I've only removed the brick dust from the main areas as we don't see the point in doing a massive clean only to have the plasterers round and then the kitchen-fitter sawing wood and stuff.  Now I just have to wait, there's been a bit of an issue with the fitter and getting it done could take some time.  I'm trying not to cry about it too much.

house update

I thought you might like an update on the whole house falling down business.  Today is the start of the third week in what was originally a 2-week job before we found another wall falling down.  Of course, when the builders have finished, the plaster, electrician and plumber come in and my Uncle will carry on with the kitchen refit that was aborted in April...  I can almost taste the real food from a real oven...

We came back from our holiday to find that someone had stolen part of our house.  I took the picture in the dining room, looking into the kitchen.

On the left is the basement stairs, the right is the dining room.  Mr CA likes it like this, all open plan and wanted to keep it.  Unfortunately that would also mean keeping those steel pillars which are holding the rest of the house up.  I said no.  Understandably.

Last week they got working in earnest.  This is the dining room/cellar wall, the one they discovered was falling down whilst we were on holiday.

You can see the difference between old, Victorian bricks and modern ones.

Whilst trying to replace the lintel that ran across the doorways leading to the dining room and the cellar from the kitchen, the builders discovered that the lintel also holds up the doorways in my neighbour's house.  That is not normal at all.  A new plan had to be made and the cellar entrance is being bricked up and the doorway moving to the dining room. The kitchen is the smallest room in the house so that's actually quite good news.

This is what I came home to on Friday!  It's starting to look like a house again.  Despite the bare brick walls, the two remaining steel props, the plastic sheeting nailed to the ceiling and the brick dust everywhere.  I'll be glad when this is over.

Wendy's house is falling down

You were supposed to sing the title to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down - did you get that?  So I mentioned we'd been on holiday, we went down to Devon with my family and had a lovely, sunny week.  The same week, the builders started work on our tumbling down house.  This is what I got back to...

That's the view from the dining room to the kitchen.  That's the wall we knew was falling down.  When work began, we also discovered the wall between the dining room and the cellar is falling down.  Check out this crack.

Here we're looking from the kitchen into the dining room to the right and the cellar to the left.  They were going to replace both lintels, but the lintel goes all the way through to next door - not normal!  Instead, they're going to brick up the entrance to the cellar and make the doorway from the dining room (where the crack above is) as that wall has to come down now anyway.

Those big metal poles and beams of wood are holding up the house... quite scary as we have to edge past them to get to the kitchen (not that we have much of a kitchen, but the temporary sink and the fridge are still in there), Mr CA has cut himself on one of them already.

This is the first floor landing, through that door is the bathroom.  As you can see they've taken all the plaster off, added wire mesh and great big metal brackets to hold the walls and floors together.

This is the top floor.  That slat wall is an old-fashioned stud wall!  Again, it's all had steel added to hold it in place.

There are also random patches that have been steel-meshed.

I couldn't get a picture of the top floor landing, but it's the same as the one below, with the addition of a bird's nest above the window!  

We've been to the beach so there is sand everywhere, with the added bonus of brick dust everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE ...  How does that stuff get in your EARS??