The day has finally arrived….
Our new kitchen is in the building – in bits though!
The new room is nearly ready to have the bits fitted and with luck, will acquire floor tiles & necessary plumbing tomorrow with the kitchen going in next week.
All building work has now been completed; walls & ceiling have been plasterboarded (“dry walled”) and joints taped/skimmed; electrics are all done; radiator replaced; and the ex-dining room floor levelled with a “underlay” course of tiles to bring it to the same height as the utility room floor.
More photos to come…!

Haven’t posted anything to here for a while, but work is needless to say very much ongoing!
Since the last post bedroom 1 has been replastered (and is still currently slowly drying out before we can paint it!); walls & ceiling in bedroom 2 have been repainted; walls in the “en-suite” have been repainted and we’ve finished wallpaper stripping in the lounge and ripped out & removed a “window seat” in the bay window along with cleaning up the resulting mess it left behind.
The first piece of plumbing work has also been completed seeing some pipes (which presumably used to feed some sort of corner wash basin in one of the bedrooms) that had been left rising from the floor, capped off underneath the floor along with the excess removed.
I did briefly debate using those new-fangled push-fit fittings to cap the pipes but ended up going with a more traditional compression
fitting… Was working on the basis that if the pipework is going to be tucked away under the floorboards I’d rather know that the caps were secure and not going to weaken over time or suddenly decide to part company with the end of the pipe. The idea of suddenly acquiring an unexpected water feature in both a bedroom and the corner of the lounge ceiling really doesn’t appeal!!
Finally, we’ve also had a couple of builders out to come and quote for knocking down the dividing wall between what is currently a kitchen utility area and a dining room – intention being to create a larger open-plan kitchen-dining area rather than keeping a smallish utility and a formal dining room.
Next steps to include installing coving in the bedrooms; painting bedroom 1’s new plaster, and having the lounge, hallway & stairs replastered to finally removing one of 1970’s finest creations – floor to ceiling patterned Artex….!!!
Well, despite having had the keys for less than 24 hours we’ve hit the ground running on day 1!
With the aid of a massive amount of help we’ve made a start on cleaning the house from top to bottom, cutting back & clearing up the garden, starting to strip back the lounge to prepare for having walls re-skimmed, and of-course, changing locks.
The day’s also seen our first (of many) expensive trips to the nearest DIY store along with a visit from a tame kitchen fitter/supply company to measure up and arranging quotes for plastering work.
Looking around the house, that to-do list has already started to grow…