Or: How We Learned To Stop Worrying and Accept The Price Of Cabinets

We’ve finally decided what we’re doing at the back of the house, and we could focus on redesigning the kitchen. The extension part is going to need some fairly extensive work to get it up to snuff.

The wall cavities need properly insulating and sealing from below, and the floor needs to be sealed around the edge to stop the wind whistling in from under it. We want to replace and likely change the shape of the windows, and put in a new back door.

OK, well, here goes.

Continue reading The Kitchen Redesign

We had some visitors in June and July! Lockdown was finally at the point where someone could come say hi, but for that to work we needed a room for them to stay in. Unfortunately for us, things were looking a little dire…

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So we got to work. And finished it all, in a week.

Continue reading Guest Room Cries, Time Flies, Family ties

We were puzzled to find when delving into our walls that the plaster and the brick were both jet black and sort of crumbly. I may have mentioned this in an early post (which was months ago, you can’t expect me to remember that) but on researching this I found it seems to be more or less unique to South Wales.

There was a big coal industry here, and it would appear the cheapest material for them to bulk out plaster (and whatever our interior walls are made out of, seems to be a sort of precursor to a breezeblock) was crushed up coal.

This stuff gets everywhere, is a nightmare to clean up and prompted us to quickly buy sealed respirators. Don’t fancy getting black lung from our walls.

We’ve since found the best thing to do once it gets exposed is to paint it with PVA glue. We bought a huge 5l tub of the stuff, and it also gets mixed into our mortar mixes that we now use to repair the walls.

We’ve had to build up the tops of walls to meet the ceiling so that we can then plaster or fill it flush with the rest of the wall, or to fill really deep gaps where filler just takes too long.

Alongside the work going on inside the house, we decided to spend the Easter Bank Holiday (like a lot of other people) at the garden centre well and Wilko as pots and soil are super expensive at the garden centre….

We bought several plants and seed packs.

We got to work planting the potatoes, onions, fuchsias, spearmint and oregano that weekend. We also replanted Lyn’s crab apple tree in a much bigger pot.

Continue reading The Occasional Gardener

After we had the heating upgraded, we had dreams of finishing off the downstairs. We decided to return to removing wallpaper in the kitchen in the hope that the other walls wouldn’t prove as difficult as the first one. We picked the radiator wall to start with by the dining room table as some of the wallpaper had already been stripped back when the radiator was replaced.

Continue reading Perks of Removing the Wallpaper

Ben and I weren’t keen on how all the light switches in the house are supplied power through trunking. So we planned to bury the cables in the wall.

Continue reading Electric Dreams

So if you’ve managed to get this far without the understanding that the kitchen in this house gets pretty draughty we thought we’d do another post just to emphasise this.

Continue reading More Draught Proofing

Here’s a post we wrote months ago and just haven’t had time to finish. Instead of pretending we’re posting then, it now includes more updates about the same things.

After the heating was done we finally got around to sorting out our upstairs doors. They all needed planing to actually fit back into their frames (most of them had never fit even before the new carpets were put in, honestly what was wrong with the previous people?? This took maybe half an hour to fix per door), but we hadn’t had the heart to tackle it yet.

Continue reading Shelves, Doors and Structured Cabling