Finishing off at the back

Last time anyone on here saw a photo of our imminent new deck, it looked like the last photo in this post, which was the position after three days' work. Unbelievably, the next ten working days saw the whole job finished, including laying circular patios (two of them) and linking path, fitting a pond, casting a base for a greenhouse, (re)building the entire garden wall at the back, erecting about 50 metres of new fence, lining the old fence to match the new wood, installing a water feature, cabling everything up including various lights, laying a lawn, building two new gates, an arbour seat and two sets of pyramid-shaped trellis, and planting.

At the end of which, the new deck looks like this:
In the almost two months since it was built, I think it's been dry for something like five hours. I'm hopeful that we have chance to enjoy it once or twice this year, but at present it's covered in frost.

You should just be able to make out in that picture the clever planters that the garden designer included on the left and right borders. On the "attached" side, the planter is also backed up with a 5-foot screen so that we get some privacy on the deck. On the other side, the planter forms the edge of the deck, next to the path.

I'll save more photos for now, while the planting gets established and the year gets a little older.

There's only so many times you can say...

..."Nearly There."

But we really are. The "new new lounge" has been occupied since just before Christmas, and there's been quite a lot of progress since we were floored at the end of November.

That new radiator we were waiting for was fitted (and didn't leak), and also in this picture you can see our two new Stressless™ recliners that were delivered on Saturday. They came without hard floor protection so in the end we had to bring the carpet offcut down again for that end of the room, which will be there until the specialised sticky felt pads arrive in March.

The two other observations made obvious by this photo are that we're still waiting for the new curtains (probably worth a post in their own right as it's quite a long story) and replacement sofa (on order, due in about two weeks). Meanwhile the old brown leather sofa from the other room is performing seating duty. Well, I say old, but we've only had it a tad over four years. Nevertheless it'll be on Gumtree pretty soon. Maybe even later today.

This angle gives you a good view of the rug (yes, there's a purple theme developing :0) - it relieves the grey) and my top Christmas pressie from the lovely Nikki which has yet to be used but will undoubtedly also be the subject of future blogging. This photo also reveals that we're still undecided on a new ceiling light - we'd like it to make a statement but haven't found one that speaks loudly enough yet - and we need some kind of console table or sideboard or something for the right hand side of the fireplace.

At the other end of the room things are almost complete...

with the addition of a shiny new Panasonic TV mounted on a gorgeous BDI Avion Noir cabinet in black oak, complete with Arena cantilever bracket. This excellent piece of kit is the absolute dog's danglers in TV cabinets. The build quality is the best I've ever seen and the whole thing sits on heavy duty rubber wheels that allow it to be rolled out easily for access to the cabling, which has proved necessary on more than one occasion since first installation. Our original HDMI cables weren't long enough and our digital aerial signal needed a boost. And then I had to recable the BOSE system so it would work properly with the new kit. Probably also worth noting that both the BDI cabinet and the Stressless recliners have been bought from the proceeds of just over 18 months' eBaying activities and so were, essentially, "free."

The only thing still missing from this end of the room is a new aquarium, which we're still debating, so not quite there yet but... um... nearly.

Floored all over again

We've not been sitting around doing nothing while all this work's been going on in the garden. Well, *I* have, but downstairs in the new new lounge our Floormeister has been getting on with laying another tranche of American White Oak flooring, similar to what we had laid before refitting the kitchen last year.

He was quicker this time (smaller area; simpler job) and this is the result:

It still looks a bit like a furniture show room in there, since the newly sold parental dining room suite won't be collected until Sunday, and it echoes like a bastard with all the hard surfaces and no soft furnishings, but it now definitely looks the part.

New TV cabinet arrives on Monday, along with the plumber to fit the replacement radiator that was delivered a couple of days ago (fingers crossed this one won't leak), followed in short order by the new TV (Tuesday). We still haven't decided on what seating we want in there, so for now we're going to have to manhandle our existing sofa from old lounge to new. That'll be fun. It had to be taken apart to get it in (both arms off), so we'll have to have a repeat performance to get it out again.

Changes to the Landscape

It's been a long time coming. Procrastination before approaching a landscaping company, changes to the design, holiday absences for everyone concerned (us, the designer, the landscaper) none of which were coordinated, and enforced delays on account of the bad weather, but finally, today, work started on what will be a radical change to our back garden.

It began like this:

At the beginning of October there were still leaves on the trees and the grass, in anticipation of being ripped up any time soon, hadn't been cut for several weeks. The old ratty hydrangea was still gamely hanging on to some fading blooms, but the camellia bush and most of the crocosmia had already been collected by a grateful neighbour.

The conservatory was long gone, having been demolished by the crew who fitted our bifold doors back in June, leaving behind a rather odd fragment of deck that was soon to meet its maker. Well, our neighbour actually, who requested it so that she can make planters out of it.

The site where the old garage stood has been a dumping ground ever since it was taken down in June 2009. It had also become extremely overgrown with brambles, some as thick as my wrist (I kid you not) which wove in and out of the flowering currant and around the bits of old skirting board and whatnot that littered the area. You can also see the rotting remains of the garden benches created from railway sleepers by the previous owners.

So, 8am last Wednesday morning dawned (just) and within three-and-a-half hours a team of three guys had chain-sawed everything flat, cleared the site, taken down the back wall and were making a start with the side wall:

A couple of dozen lengths of tannelised decking framework rested on a pair of trestles and all in all the site was unrecognisable from what it had been the day before. I was already well impressed with progress, but the following day things reached a whole new level with the arrival of a little yellow digger :0)

With the aid of this and the dumpy little turf cutter (just visible at the bottom of the photograph), the entire bottom half of the garden was stripped down to mud and all remaining tree stumps and large bushes removed. The digger then created trenches for the footings of the replacement walls and path. They also dug out the pond, being careful to save all of the rich loam that covered the whole site to a depth of... oooh... at least half an inch.

On Friday, the team changed slightly and split into sub-teams. Joined by a deck construction expert, two of them set to work creating the foundation framework for our new curved deck, while the third concentrated on building walls. By the end of the week the new deck was already taking shape with the framework in place for the apron and one of the steps emerging from the front.

New New Lounge

I threatened to return to decorating tales once the 100 Themes Writing Challenge was done, so this is me making good on that threat.

At the start of the year we decided to try and make 2012 the year the house was "finished." Although we're going to miss that target by a small margin, we have made amazing progress. The current project (which has been going on, unbelievably, longer than the aforementioned Challenge) is now nearing completion, with only a radiator to fit (due this coming Friday), new oak floor to lay (originally planned for the following Monday but now put back a week - to the 19th November - by the fitter) and some furniture to find, but we won't let the lack of new furniture prevent us from occupying what has become known as the "new new lounge" once construction and decor are complete.

"New new lounge"? Yes, well we did use this room as a lounge when we first moved in, but after suffering heat exhaustion during the summer of 2007 we decided to swap the lounge and dining room around, and moved into what was then the "new lounge" in August 2008.

But, you know, nothing ever stands still in the madcap world of the Beresfords. We've enjoydured four winters in that (North-facing) lounge, and now decided that, after all, we'd like it a little bit warmer. Since the main source of the infernal heat in the South Lounge (the polycarbonate-roofed conservatory) has now been demolished:

...and replaced with some nice new, double-glazed, argon-filled bi-fold doors, this room should hopefully be a lot cooler in summer. The scabby looking space where the conservatory once stood, along with the old decking to the left, is all due to be spiffed up once our Totally Fabulous Garden Design begins to be realised (another start date that has had to be put back, this time on account of garden peeps being delayed on other projects by the inclement weather). On the other side of those bifold doors, what was the dining room...

... has been transformed over the past five months (yes, it's been a long project, mainly because we started with the bifold door replacement and then arranged just about every other removal/ installation/ trade piecemeal thereafter) into its current state - new fireplace, old radiator stripped out, additional sockets and aerial points installed, plasterwork reskimmed, every surface painted (walls with Dulux Chic Shadow), so it currently looks like this:

with, as I said, the floor still to be replaced with lovely, smooth, draught-free American White Oak. Nearly there!

Gardening with a crow bar

In preparation for new front windows and front door arriving any time soon, I've been waiting for a fine day to take down the pergola. We've always hated the damned thing - an ugly erection of tanalised timber beams with a stunted *something* growing up each side that puts out weedy flowers once year but otherwise just looks untidy. No idea what it is, but we've lived here more than five years and it's barely grown a foot in all that time. Not exactly the greenery of choice to rapidly cover a pergola in a shock of colour, it being neither rapid nor any colour more shocking that insipid white.

Fine day duly arrived, yesterday, so out I went armed with stepladder and screwdriver to disassemble, de-erect and knock down. Some of the screws were a bit rusted but through a combination of brute force and ignorance (my favourite tool) I got most of them out and the rest gave up when I pulled the beams about a bit. The main uprights posed a brief problem but I soon discovered that if I leaned my enormous bulk against them they'd snap off just below ground level.

So no probs with the pergola, but what was I to do with Mr & Mrs Weedy-Growth? At this time of year the shed door swells up to the point where locks are not required as a barrier to entry, and all gardening implements remained inaccessible behind that swollen edifice. I set to with the only tool (a) available and (b) strong enough to deal with weedy roots that were, as it turned out, anything but weedy. A few well-placed strokes and a bit of subterranean leverage and out they popped and straight into The Green Bin.

Mission accomplished. We are now growth- and pergola-free at the front and much nicer it looks too. It'll be even nicer when the old worn out drafty blue porch door is replaced with a stunning new one.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Yeah. Early exposure to Christmas has spilled out of the malls and department stores and infected commercial radio. Friday night we're listening to Smooth FM and here comes Bing bending our ears with his 1951 Christmas number, and it's still only November 26th.

It' s felt like a quiet couple of weeks but although at the time nothing seemed worthy of blogging, or I couldn't muster up the enthusiasm, looking back there's been quite a bit going on.

The big news is that Nikki decided she wanted livestock again this Christmas, after having plumped for tropical fish last year, so a week ago last Friday I took off for Yorkshire and left a deposit (in the nicest possible way) on this little guy.

He's about six weeks old here, and won't be ready to come "home" until a couple of days before Christmas, but we've been promised more photos between now and then, and the hunt is now on for a name. It's been a while since we last owned a cat, so his impending arrival prompted a trip to Pets At Home to stock up on supplies (a bed, scratching post, bowls, etc).

On the kitchen front, the news is that there's no news. No recurrence of the leak problem, granite guys haven't said when they'll be coming to fit that last short bit of upstand, electricians haven't said when they'll be coming to fix the intermittent fault on the lighting transformer. Only the flooring guy has come up smelling of roses, having said he'd pop round to add beading to those few places where we thought we were going to replace the skirting board but later decided it wouldn't look right, he DID pop round, exactly when he said he would, beaded as necessary and refused all payment. Top bloke.

Leaky

When we arrived home, having taken a slight detour to Bolton en route, Nat was at work, so there was no-one available to explain the towel on the kitchen floor.

Dropped by accident? Left over from the last load of laundry? Who knew. Didn't take long to discover it was there to soak up the water seeping out from under the corner of the cupboard unit housing the oven. But where was it coming from? It continued to seep out slowly overnight, so the following morning we called Kitchen Guy. He was round within the hour. Removed the plinths, revealing evidence that the water had been there for some time. Wet footings under the tumble dryer and washing machine, but which was at fault?

And why had it taken so long to manifest, when neither machine had been used for a week?

He pulled out the dryer and sat it on a table protector to avoid damaging the floor. We ran a programme through the washer. Nothing. We dried a wet towel in the dryer. Nothing. We let the dishwasher run an empty cycle. Nothing. The mystery remained.

After an hour or so he had to leave, but we agreed it was sensible to leave the dryer out and see what transpired. The answer was... pretty much nothing. We'd brought a suitcase full of laundry back from the Lakes, so Nikki attended to all of that - three loads; washing and drying. No further leak. We loaded up the dishwasher with the Sunday pots. No leak.

The dryer sat in the middle of the kitchen through Monday, Tuesday, until on Wednesday morning Nikki discovered a small puddle on the dryer's mat. On closer inspection the puddle was larger than first thought, having seeped under the mat. I tilted the dryer to let Nikki wipe under the wet side, and more water pissed out on the other side. Where was it all coming from? The dryer hadn't been used since Sunday!

I checked the configuration of the drains and spotted what I thought was the problem. The dryer was connected to the same outflow pipe as the boiler condensate. I figured there was some siphon action going on when the boiler was pumping out. We called the plumber. He looked sheepish, and extended the home-grown standpipe he'd installed to take the dryer output, so that it had more than 1" of head above the condensate outflow. Sheesh.

For the time being, we've left the dryer out to prove the solution, and I'm left wondering if we'll ever have a job done in this house without something going wrong :(

A Kitchen with Knobs On

Although it felt like ages, it was less than two weeks between completion of the main kitchen fit and the final arrival of our knobs. Since we elected to retain our AEG fridge and freezer (the only appliances left from the original kitchen), we also chose the Franke "silk steel" sink and tap, and decided therefore to continue this theme in the knobs and cup handles, which are all brushed steel.

It's hard to take an impressive photo of the kitchen from any angle, with it being so long and narrow. I've been wondering whether it would be possible to get hold of some "photo stitching" software and take a row of pics at 90deg to the units, ending up with a long photo of each side, but I've experimented with PhotoSynth and the results are patchy at best. It doesn't cope well with panoramas in small spaces, apparently, so these will have to do.

So this final stage was completed on Thursday 20 October, the day before we left for the Lakes. Apart from the small section of granite upstand under the boiler cupboard, some short lengths of oak beading around those bits of wall not covered with cupboards (which we'd intended to fit skirting board to, but changed our minds), and fitting a proper door stop to replace the lump of wood that's behind the door right now, it's... ALL DONE! :o)

Ups and Downs

I'm in danger of writing more apologies for hiatuses (and possibly apologies for incorrect plurals of 'hiatus') on here than 'real' blog posts this year. It's been a year for interruptions. Or to put it another way, a shit year. One with the usual ups and downs, but where the downs have tended to overshadow the ups. Which only underlines the seriousness of the downs, because the ups - especially where our house is concerned - have been huge. First the shed (whose saga fell in the middle of the Great Blogging Hiatus and hence has never been told) and now the kitchen.

So when we left the kitchen, we were knobless but otherwise to all intents and purposes complete. The appliances plumbed in and working; cooker and hob connected and working; fridge and freezer back where they belong; lights all shining brightly. All that remained was to empty the contents of the dozen or so plastic crates piled up in the dining room which comprised the totality of The Kitchen Before (crockery, dry & tinned goods, etc), decide where it would live in the new scheme, and follow it up with everything else we own that could possibly, legitimately, live in a kitchen (glasses, decanters, bottles of booze, candle supplies, the old Kenwood chef - hardly ever used - that has been languishing in a forgotten cupboard since we moved in, ...) thus freeing up space in the last ground floor room to be given The Treatment.

And that's how we spent our time for the whole weekend following completion. In between cooking on The New Hob, we washed and dusted, carried and discussed and packed away, opened and closed the cupboards and drawers with their temporary handles (wood screws covered with masking tape) until by Sunday afternoon the dining room was looking much more like a dining room than it has for the last three months, and everything was put away. Not that I could find anything, but it WAS all put away.

Inevitably there was some jousting for position. No, we can't put the bean-to-cup coffee machine under there because we can't get to the reservoir to fill it with water. No, we can't put in on that side either, because the water level indicator is against the wall and we can't see how full it is. And so on.

That was an Up, that weekend. We got a lot done, felt very happy with it all, and excited about the new kitchen. The following morning, Monday 10 October, just after I'd returned from ferrying Nikki to work I took a phone call from Paul to say their Mum had passed away. Downs don't get much bigger, or come much quicker, than that.

Kitchen fit: Day 14

A day of surprises. A day that, I thought, would be wall-to-wall painting, but which turned out to be hardly any painting at all and other much more exciting things like downdraught extractors, induction hobs and putting the fridge and freezer back into place.

Neff induction hob, with de Dietrich extractor (in "deployed" mode). Ooooh. Finally, after all the waiting we can... er... boil a pan of water. But! Never was boiling a pan of water *quite* so similar to being on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Touch sensitive surfaces and a whizzy little dial thing that is held in place with a magnet and taps and spins to control the hotplates.

The extractor raises itself out of the depths with the touch of a finger and sinks back down again when it's finished sucking.

All this more than satisfies my life-long fascination with knobs and buttons.

Nice to have the fridge and freezer back in the kitchen too, even if it does mean that for the next three or four days we'll be performing a reversed version of the dance we first started back in July. Now the usable cooking facilities are in the dining room and all the food is in the kitchen. Back then it was t'other way round. Not for long though.

Well, I SAY not for long, but as we discovered today it'll be slightly longer than expected. Here's a photo that gives you a bit of a clue, even though the main reason for including it is to give you another perspective on the lovely new hob (purr, purr)...

See the problem? Yes, that's right. No knobs. No, I mean on the cupboards and drawers. The hob is supposed to be knobless. The drawers aren't. Slight delay in delivery. Slight as in "the week after next."

Well, we can't wait THAT long to get into our new kitchen, so the fitter's going to come up with some Heath Robinsonesque solution involving screws and masking tape apparently. Lovely.

Kitchen fit: Day 13

Plumbers returned again today. After yesterday's gorgeous tapness, today we were being treated to a radiator.

This radiator, to be precise. We thought it looked good in the brochure but it looks even better on the wall. And what's more, it gets warm. When the heating's on. In't central heating brilliant? (TM)

Meanwhile, back in the rest of the kitchen, there was painting. There will, apparently, be painting again tomorrow too. And with all other significant installations either complete, or not happening until Friday, I might have to find something else to blog about.

Kitchen fit: Day 12 - at last a tap

When you've been filling your kettle, via a large plastic jug, from a wash basin under the stairs no bigger than a loaf of bread, for a month (almost to the day - the last time we had a kitchen sink was way back here), and also using that basin to slop out the coffee maker, and empty the fish tests, and pretty much everything else vaguely sinkish apart from washing up, then this picture is like a vision of heaven.

Yes. We have a tap. Awesome isn't it?

The rest of the day's progress was limited to more painting and, as I may have already mentioned, putting a second coat of cream onto cream-painted units makes little visible impression, there are no "progress" photos to share today. Apart from the awesome tap, of course.

Kitchen fit: Day 11 - the granite men

After the templating activities of ten days ago we had been awaiting the delivery of the granite worktops with eager anticipation. From template to cut normally takes a week. In our case the extra time was down to the complexity of the cuts and the need to radius several of the corners to match the curve of the units.

Today, the wait was over. The granite men arrived just before 10am and within an hour more than half of the worktops were in place.

This is the small worktop to the left of where the hob will be - at the south end of the kitchen on the right. There used to be a tall built-in cupboard here. The finish we've chosen is called "riverwash" - neither the most common highly polished version (fingermark hell) or the slightly less common but still not uncommon matt (greasy fingermark hell), this has an etched surface that is slightly rippled. Still relatively rare (only the second one these particular granite guys had fitted and something the plumber hadn't ever seen). The colour is "absoluto" - the darkest kind of black.

And here's the new sink. There's been a small miscommunication about what's happening under the boiler. Granite men assumed a small box around the pipe work; we wanted a completely flat surface under the cupboard so the boxing in will eventually stretch along most of the wall, meaning the upstand had to be recut and left loose until the box is complete.

They took it all in their stride though.

Kitchen fit: Day 9

While the electricians busied themselves finding the source of yesterday's black, quiet fell on the works. The quiet of a solitary, painting man.

Priming and sanding yesterday, and a start on the first coat today. No photos for the time being. The colour we've chosen (Gardenia by name, but cream to you and me. A kind of creamy ivory, to be precise) is virtually indistinguishable from the colour of the primer that the units came with, so yesterday's, today's and even tomorrow's look remains largely unchanged apart from a subliminal increase in richness and lack of blemish.

The only change that impinges on the senses is the faint smell of paint, and as Blogger doesn't yet support smellyvision I can't convey that :o)

The lights are going out all over Britain

Well... all over the house anyway. Well, the ground floor.

Nat stepped into the hall around 9pm last night. Dusk had fallen and darkness lit the hall with a soul-sapping lack of light blacker than the black pit of the blackest black thing anyone ever went back to, when they were trying to go back to black. She turned the light on and it didn't. She did the only sensible thing.

"Dad? The lights aren't working."

The trip had tripped. I noticed in passing that it was now a blue trip, where before it had been... black. Black thoughts clouded my mind as I returned to the dark hall and tried the lights again. They did. But flicking a switch in the newly wired kitchen brought the black back. I tripped it twice more, just to prove I had the knack for a black attack in the shack.

Kitchen fitter phoned the sparky this morning. "What's the crack, Jack? We've got black, you'd better track back."

Sparky came. The problem was the blue trip. Rated at 30mA, it was no match for 5x78mA bulbs in the hall light (from cold), or six 12mA spots in the kitchen. "These RCD trips are the bane of any sparky's life."

So, rather spookily, the solution was to change the blue trip back to black.

Kitchen fit: Day 7

A very noisy day in the house today as the fitters were filling and sanding the joints in the cornice all day. Electricians returned to complete their installation, with a tail for the possible later addition of a kick space heater (after we've lived through a winter and decided whether a single radiator is enough), hob lights, connecting up the new ring main, cooker and hob feeds to the board and completing all tests.

So today I was able to set the time on the cooker. Never thought I'd be able to say I enjoyed THAT chore!

Kitchen fit: Day 6

Another leap forward in visible progress today as the electricians returned to start second fit.

All the lights went in (with the exception of the two over the hob space), light switches, socket covers (still not powered up) and power supplies to the appliances and appliance spaces (i.e. the hole for the fridge and freezer). A very full day's work.

On the "units" front, the kitchen fitters stayed out of the way of the sparkies and concentrated on cutting and fitting the plinths.

But the most obvious, and in many ways most exciting change, was the installation of the oven. The phrase dog's bollocks comes immediately to mind. The wiring still has to be tested so there's no power to the (double) oven as yet, but a kitchen never looks quite like a kitchen until there's an oven, and now there is.

Hare today

Having taxied back to Chesterfield from Friday's nuptials, yesterday morning was largely taken up with breakfasting and then heading off in one car to pick up the other two (the logistics of which are fairly simple compared to some of the stunts we've pulled in the Lakes).

Neither vehicle had come to any harm during their enforced stay in the pub car park, and duly retrieved, we set off for an afternoon's amble around Chatsworth gardens, taking in the general ambience and enjoying some of the unusual sculptures that adorn the gardens at the moment as part of their "Beyond Limits" exhibition.

I christened this one "Hare On My Bell End" - for obvious reasons. Never did find out what it's really called, and as it's not mentioned over here or on the "sculpture map" I'm still none the wiser. Maybe it's a permanent feature.

Anyway having indulged in more ice cream and pasties than were entirely good for us, we returned to P&V's place (via the Robin Hood for a quick quaff) to refresh before wandering over to the Market Pub for a couple of extra pints in advance of dinner at The Old Post. And WHAT a dinner. Superb.

All too soon the evening, and this morning's breakfast, with such charming and erudite companions was over and we returned home to examine what progress had been made, kitchen-wise in our absence on Friday afternoon, which was - as I'm sure you'll realise if you've been following - "Kitchen fit: Day 5".

The answer was "not a lot" - certainly nothing that would be visible in a photo. The guys had been concentrating on completing the essential and fiddly bits that aren't especially noticeable, while staying out of the way of the granite men. Expect more obvious progress tomorrow.

Kitchen fit: Day 3

Appliance day! Well, the delivery of them anyway. And suddenly once again the house became an obstacle course with boxes everywhere.

Dishwasher, double oven, hob, sink, taps and fixings in the hall; washing machine and tumble drier in the kitchen, and the downdraft extractor already unpacked and stood in place so the fitters could marry up the outflow fitting with the position of the ducting (coring for which was completed, with much cursing and swearing at the quality of Victorian stop brick, this morning).

The rest of the day was taken up with cutting the cupboard to fit around our wall-mounted combi boiler. The cupboard went up and down more times than a fairground pony, largely due to the shape of the wall, which kept distorting the carcase during fitting. In the end drastic measures were necessary, in the form of a diagonal cut across one corner of the cupboard to relieve the stress. This will be invisible after painting, but it did make me wonder how the joiner would have coped with the problem if we'd chosen solid wood cabinets.