Another update

We worked on the toilet and back bedroom at the same time, due to the location. The toilet, as you may remember, had pinky-purple floral paper and a beige radiator. The walls underneath were a kind of yellow and the back of the door was a greeny-yellow.

before

The walls were stripped, cleaned and covered with a mix of paint and sand and this was painted with the Vent de Sable colour from the hallway but at a quarter strength. The light colour is lovely on the walls and it highlights the flecks of stone in the light floor tiles. The radiator was painted white and the paintwork (window and door) have been painted blanc casse - broken white. The ceiling was painted a soft white.

after

tile detail

All together it's a warmer feel and smarter look than before. Just a note that the outside of the door remains as is until we have finished with the new bathroom and toilet as there will be so much mess and we decided to wait until that's finished to decorate the hallway. No pics yet of the bedroom as I still have to do the windows.

We are working like the clappers to get the large dining room done so that when the plumber and builder come in to work on the new bathroom and toilet we can focus on getting those finished - getting there!

who's behind the new door?

Meanwhile the weather has taken yet another lovely turn and it was positively warm today with 22 degrees and Cassy panting and looking for shady spots! Spring is really in the air and the plants - and weeds - are busting into bloom - it's really quite amazing. The change of seasons here is much more dramatic than in NZ (at least Auckland) with the hesitant "shall we flower or shall we wait a bit" feeling. We can expect this weather for the next 10 days or so.

acacia (or mimosa) - classed as a weed here!

erable

planting gladioli bulbs

Lastly, it was Cassy's 8th birthday last week, so on the weekend we decided to give him a nice long walk at one of the local parks. He was having a ball sniffing places he doesn't normally go and suddenly he disappeared from view - just at that moment we realised we were close to the fishing pond.... We heard "quack, quack, quack" and called Cassy back. As we reached the brow of the hill, there he was standing, dripping wet, wagging tail, ducks looking put out and two elderly fishermen further round the pond.... as I slipped Cassy's leash on both Wouter and I tried to look casual as we continued our walk. Needless to say, Cassy had a great time! Luckily for us he didn't try to catch a fish or a duck.

Entrance Hall

It's a while since I posted a blog with pics. We have been busy with lots of things as the weather becomes more agreeable. But one task which is complete, apart from maybe some further wall decoration is the entrance hallway. You will remember that we had some dark green, yellow and orange velour type paper on the walls, and on the floor the greeny-brown tiles which were also in the kitchen and living areas. The ceiling was a sort of brown paper we've never seen before - it took a lot of paint to make it a soft white - I think about 5 coats.

front entrance

towards the loo

towards dining room

So a list of what we did - clean, paint ceiling and scotia; strip walls of all paper, sand to remove any glue residue, apply crepi (this is a type of plaster) and then paint the walls; lay and grout floor tiles and plinths; decorate with some second hand chairs we found and our own cabinet and some new light shades; remove, paint and reinstall radiator (this was an awful job....); painting the doors was a huge job and the photos below don't really show the pooey pink they were before they were painted - each door has 18 glass panels and 2 undercoats and 2 top coats each makes........ (18 panes x 4 coats x 2 sides x 3 doors = 432!). One door remains - the door to the dining room. The current one is not big enough for wheelchair access so we have another ready to be installed once the doorway is adjusted.

towards our room

lamp

Now we feel that the house takes on more of our character and has a brighter atmosphere.

Another decorating story to come as I'm just doing the finishing touches in the loo and back bedroom - after that it will be work on the new bathroom and toilet with special attention to wheelchair access. And of course this will include a stairway to the first floor - we currently have a 'trap' (pull-down stairs). All these things are joint efforts as I need Wouter to do things like removing door handles and knobs, taking down and hanging doors, and so on, and he leaves me with painting while he does another 101 jobs elsewhere in the house or outside.

What else? We are working on the web pages so that we can be googled and hopefully get some business from 1st May - yes, we are mad enough to believe we can get all this extra work done by then.... You've seen the TV programmes where the first guests arrive and the painter is leaving by the back door!

Also we are busy in the garden preparing for our vegetable and flower crops - have bought lots of seed packets and are weeding, working the soil and planting. Temperatures are becoming more like NZ spring with cool mornings and lovely afternoons. The days are more sunny with about 4 days a week full sun and the other 3 grey, overcast, and a bit of rain - almost perfect.

For those of you who haven't had an update recently, after a few meetings and Wouter registering as an auto-enterprise, we are now waiting for the siret number which allows Wouter to trade as an ebeniste and for us to be able to get health insurance. So everything seems to be coming together at long last.

Kitchen

Finally here it is - the Kitchen story. I suggest if you don't have much time, just look at the pictures.

Where does one start? I guess you are wondering what we've been doing the last couple of months. Ha ha - it has been a huge job to redo this area. When you don't have a proper kitchen to cook while work is underway, coupled with the fact that our electricity was a bit unreliable, I must say I got sick of running down to reset the switch but maybe it helped to keep me fit. It was also tricky trying to juggle more than two pots on one element - I had 2 possible elements but if I used both it would blow the fuse....

Rather than give you a complete rundown on every single thing we did and every single problem we encountered in changing the kitchen/dining, it's better to list what we did and show before and after pictures. I've tried to put them in chronological order so it makes more sense.

Unfortunately we don't have many pictures of before we started pulling things to bits, so hopefully you can use your imagination a little. Some things do not show well on the photos we have so it's probably hard to see what we've changed. The layout is very similar for practical reasons, like pipes and power supplies, but some changes have been made like the addition of a pantry and we've expanded the area slightly.

You can see that the former kitchen fittings were good quality and sturdy - they were just outdated and needed refreshing and modernising. None of the items will go to waste as Wouter can either use them in his workshop or we can somehow use them for guests if they want to be more self-sufficient (that's the current plan) is difficult to imagine all the different textures and colours that were here - overwhelming would be a good word. There were so many differences we found it didn't really come together for us and that's why we did a lot of things which other people might have left alone.

Electricity has been done throughout as much as possible, puissance changed so we don't blow any more fuses and we have a 'night rate' which is more economical. We have also had more plugs installed where possible.

This is the camp kitchen (in the lounge):

I had a list of befores and afters here but the formatting looks awful so I've removed it. I guess if anyone really wants to know the details you can email me for a list.

Note that the kitchen is not completely finished as Wouter needs some tools to work on the pantry. In the meantime I have a cupboard to assist with storage until the pantry is done. The overhead units are not yet installed as we are going to do the wall tiling first. The wall tiling (above bench) is not yet done as we only picked up the tiles 4 days ago and need some more cement and grout, as well as an aluminium strip to do them. The rangehood is to be installed once the tiling is done and Wouter is looking at another cabinet which may suit it better than the one we already bought. The dishwasher is yet to be connected - we may get the suppliers to do that for us - and I can't wait to be able to use my very first dishwasher!

The floor tiling was done in stages as poor Wouter did the first day alone and then felt like a broken man. So as I already mentioned in a previous blog, I assisted with cementing the backs of the tiles and delivered them to Wouter when he was ready. It took us 5 sessions to do the whole floor in this area. Grouting was about the same number of sessions but less time, and by the end it was turning out pretty well.

The interior of the cupboards is easy clean melamine and for the 2 corners we have carousels (one installed and one to be collected).

One set of doors is almost done paint-wise - final coat to be done once weather warms up, other windows opening up to outside will also be done then. The only doors I can do at the moment are 4 interior doors, so I won't be bored....

There are two cupboards to go on the walls - one above the fridge and the other above the bench against the wall which meets with the dining room - this one will have under lighting to help with the problem we had of only being able to have the one cable to the ceiling.

Before the units were installed Wouter had to change the plumbing around a little to accommodate the new dishwasher and sink unit. Because the old gas unit was no longer legal (we found out when signing the house contract when buying the house) we had to replace the line with a copper pipe and get a new pressure regulator tap. This was done by two lovely young guys from the local plumbers - they were calling out to each other what sounded like "an-ka-va", which I figured out finally was actually "encore va", meaning push the pipes through a bit more....

The original extractor fan was a huge thing which needed a huge hole in the ceiling. After removing the chimney stack itself, Wouter made up a wooden platform to support concrete which was poured from above in the attic. It was left a couple of days and then the wooden framing removed - et voila! It's been decorated up to look like the rest of the ceiling, and while it's not perfect, it's pretty close and will be sort of hidden (or at least camouflaged) by the new cupboard containing the new extractor fan.

All the doors have to be (or have been) trimmed as the tiles raise the floor level by 12 millimeters. The doors from dining to outside had to have the lock replaced as the previous one was totally shot.

All in all it was a huge job and we are glad to be finally using the kitchen and able to use the room next to it with the fireplace (as a sitting room). It's so cosy. We've "dressed" the room as well so have our furniture - chairs, bookcases, tv, globe, coffee table, lights, persian carpet and of course Cassy's towel (still searching for his duvet!) We gave the room a test run when our guests were here last week and it was given the thumbs up. Now we are already onto the next job which is the entrance hallway - this needs ceiling painted, walls stripped and finished with plaster (they call it crepi here), painted, floor tiles (same as kitchen), plinths, paint doors.

Well done if you made it to the end!