How do I bathroom / kitchen / extension? etc.

Oh good shout, I'm done fucking with the house for a year or five but want to do more to the garden. An integrated dining area/shed is on my to do list.

It’s actually not original and was a later addition - the house is also the same age as yours it just happens to have been built as a wooden beamed cottage originally and then extended on over the years - meaning it’s got a nice size and character but the spaces feel poorly connected and under utilised for modern living. I think for the fire I’d like to keep the carved beam and just extend it on either end or move it to somewhere else.

Chair is Robin Day

OH FFS, this is getting weird.

If the beam isn't original then no worries, I would still be tempted to keep it but also yeah, not original so who cares.

Love the window bench seat.

One terrazzo tile has already broken and I'm not sure how, I feel this was a mistake.

I'm liking the terracotta Flute tile from Topps Tiles but not sure if it will age well...

How did it break?

Yea I looked at them but wife didn't like them.

I have no idea, it is just sitting in my living room.

Glad they gave me 3 spares, have a feeling I will need them all.

Window covering chat: We're now looking at black out Roman blinds from Blinds 2 Go. 1810mm x 626mm with free black out lining are £79 each, for reference.

Wrong thread, FFS.

free black out lining

Inclusive, maybe. Not free.

Some of the other ones they have done are great, but I thought that one was so disappointing for 60k. I'd have been gutted to spend so much for a result like that!

yeah, the design looked nice in VR but the execution ended up just looking muddy I thought. also: 60k!

It pays to check your builders’ work every now and then, even if you trust them.

The subbie roofer on our house is a slack bastard and this is the about the 10th thing he’s left unfinished. The scaffold is coming down today so it’s good job I had a quick dash round yesterday to check if there was anything to sort out.

Yes - I know plastic fascias etc aren’t as nice as wood but I don’t want to be repainting every five-seven years.

1 Attachment

Oh ffs - how did you rescue that?

There’s a little contoured spacer for when the boards needs to be jointed. There was a spare on a big box of roofing trim in our garage which they’ve turned into a ‘site office’/smoking den.

I’ve cut it and nailed it on with the plastic headed nails supplied. It was an easy fix but just a bit sloppy.

I’ll bring it up on Monday when we meet to discuss the rapidly disintegrating timeline on this job.

Obviously the scaffolders haven’t come so that will be at least one more day lost on Monday.

Our builder has used the cheapest guy around and he’s an unreliable bastard who pays his staff £80 a day cash and acts surprised when they don’t turn up.

Watch when the scaffolders take it all down. The ones on ours smashed the guttering and brand new fascia boards.

That’s very much on my radar. I also don’t want to stand there like a middle class dweeb shouting ‘watch the windows - they’re sapele’ to an ex convict.

😂😂😂

Although Sapele framed windows ☺️☺️

Yeah Sapele is where it's at

We've got a new kitchen work surface arriving in a few weeks, and possible plan to change two small kitchen windows into one much larger one soon after. If/when the new window goes in we will lose two wall sockets and the switch controlling the hidden dishwasher socket.

Do we pre install a pop-up socket in the surface to allow for this? Or is there another way?

Difficult question to answer without seeing plans or anything...

are the sockets used all the time? we had a couple of sockets that i think are more meant for floors in our worktop - something like this

it stood a littler prouder from the worktop that we'd hoped, but was pretty useful, and didn't get in the way too much when not in use

1 Attachment

I was planning on pop-up sockets for my worktop but realised that they took up a load of cupboard space.

We managed to get them on the wall in the end but the other option we were looking at was something in this shape to sit at the back of the worktop

I have one of these installed it on a new worktop shelf recently, works well, and unobtrusive. Also have a pop up socket on an island, as you say the annoying thing is losing the space in the cupboard, and also the fact it is unprotected in the cupboard unless you build a shield.

Ha, fair. Here's a photo and a quick sketch.

Currently have 4 double sockets, so would be down to 3 doubles.

A speculative pop up socket seems like the least destructive option, unless there is another way of moving them without chasing in etc ?

2 Attachments

We’ve got the below which looks great, but is rarely used as we instinctively choose to use wall-mounted sockets over the island pop-up one; it’s mainly used as a place to stack cookbooks.

The unit takes up space within the unit below as @aggi has identified so only suitable if you can afford a loss of space within these.

2 Attachments