Week 39 of 2014

This week has been dominated by our kitchen project.  Last Friday our old kitchen was ripped out, in preparation for the building work which started Monday.  We escaped for the weekend and went to visit the in-laws, who had invited us so we could escape the mess.  We enjoyed a visit to the local farmer’s market; H got to see his cousin and his cousin’s dog Eddie; we went to the park; and there was homemade chocolate cake. Sunday evening saw heading back to our empty shell of a kitchen for the week ahead.

On Monday the builders arrived, as did the skip.  They set to work knocking down the chimney breast in our kitchen.  Basically it formed the wall between the kitchen and the utility room, but was about 60cm deep, so it took up quite a lot of room.  So we decided to remove it and open the two rooms into one to have just a large kitchen.  As we needed to support the original tiled fireplace and the shared chimney above, we had to put in some steels to hold stuff up.  Here are our steel beams in the garden before going in.

So this is what our kitchen looked like for most of the week.  You can see the bare brick where the chimney came out.  The steels are in and hidden behind the pink plasterboard.  The builder managed to break a bit of next door’s plaster when putting in the steels, so there was that to sort out too.  Thankfully our neighbours were very understanding.  There have been some extra jobs of the sort that you find with old houses.  We had to have a rewire of the socket circuit in the kitchen because there was a fault that couldn’t easily be found (I got my electrician brother in to double-check this for me).  There were water and heating pipes where we weren’t expecting them and they will need to be boxed in.  The floor was a mess once the tiles came up.  This wasn’t entirely unexpected as there were two rooms with different flooring and of course, the bit where the chimney was too. So we will need the floor levelled too.  So some extra expenses and more work to be done, so I may have to wait a bit longer till we have the funds for some of my appliances. Now the plastering is all done and we have a bare shell of a room ready for reconstruction next week.