Day 260 - Bathroom Tiles

Finally the mosaic tiles to finish off the main bathroom arrived on the slowest donkey in the world from Italy. The tile shop originally advised us 2-3, in the end they took 10 weeks!

 
 



Very pleased with how they look - here they're in place but not grouted in - just wish they hadn't taken so long

Day 260 - Rear Patio

More progress at the back of the property...

 
The first of the natural stone slabs have been laid

 
This was another one where you have to choose slabs from a picture in a catalogue without much idea of how they'll really look.

We're pleased with these though, if they look this nice on a cloudy day in March they can only look better bathed in sunlight, right?!


Rest of the stones waiting to be fitted


And the drainage runs that have to be fitted between the patio and the lawn - I know, what lawn?!

Day 252 - Landscaping continues

The front landscaping is taking shape, the big piles of rubble and trees have gone and we have a level surface, ready for the new chippings & slabs.


 

 
Inset drain

 


Shaun suggested using old railway sleepers as separaters between the drive and the beds and we really like how they've turned out.

 

Day 252 - Curses!

The reason the builder's havent used the new flooring we bought to fill in the area in the dining room where the boiler cupboard was?


It doesn't match!

The reason we managed to accidentally buy the wrong colour flooring?

IKEA don't make the beech flooring that I have anymore - oh heck...

Unfortunately I think this means we have to replace the entire floor in the kitchen and dining room - bugger.

Day 246 - Hall coats cupboard

Our new coat cupboard takes shape



 

It made sense to build something into this space as there's a soil downpipe on the right hand side that had to be boxed in so we decided to extend it into a shallow cupboard for coats and shoes. There's a drawer at the bottom (to hide things away) and a cupboard at the top (which also hides the fuse box aka consumer unit!)

The coat hooks will be somewhat shielded by a covering panel and have been designed so people who are 5 foot nothing can still reach them!

Both the drawer and cupboard have catchless closings, although they're not working very smoothly yet...

Day 246 - Stair Supports

When replacing the stiars the builders discovered that, like many other parts of the house, a few shortcuts were taken with the stairs and they weren't very well supported.

 

So they've added a couple of supporting posts (there's another round the corner) in the understairs cupboard to provide better support.

Day 242 - New Stairs

I know they don't *look* very different but they have all been updated. Thanks to the underfloor heating we put in upstairs the whole upstairs floor level is 20-30mm higher than it was which meant the stairs finished with a bigger last step up. This isn't allowed by building controls, our brains do complicated things with steps and get confused if steps are uneven so we've had to have them all changed so each step has the same rise.

We're also now replacing the seventies style banisters and rails. Originally we'd planned to keep them, I quite liked their retro styling, but they just look out of place now everything else has been updated so I've ordered some oak stop chamfer style ones to replace them.