Fixing our sagging floor

Finding (or admitting to myself) that the floor in the boys room was not in any way flat or level, was a pretty demoralising time. It happened at the start of a week off which I’d aimed to use to get the room all done apart from the painting; instead, I spent most of the…

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Worktops, fronts, and tiling

With all the cabinets built, fitted, and levelled, the next thing was to tackle the work top. We were on quite a tight budget at this point, and actually hadn’t worked out exactly what we wanted (top tip: decide on a worktop ahead of time) so were limited to worktops which would fit IKEA cabinets,…

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Building character?

Well, this seems like a bit of a problem. I’ve been sort of aware that the floor’s not been right but clearly a bit in denial about the whole thing… I put a level on it today and realised a bit late, that something should probably be done. The floor in here is 3.4m wide,…

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Concept proven…

So, one side took about 4 hours, and there’s the extra work of lining out the shutter boxes to do when I remove the old slats, but it seems well worth it to me. With some beads on and hung a bit better, they should look like they’ve always been there!

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Prototyping…

So, lots to say about projects, but that will follow… Today, I’m mocking up some shutters, just so see whether it’s doable with £50’s worth of ply rather than the slightly mad £2000 quote from our window makers. Clearly I’m making something totally different just sticking ply together, rather than building them properly with rails…

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METODical kitchen fitting

We have had a kitchen for the last 8 months, despite my total failure to write about it up until now. I took a week off work once the room was all plumbed, rewired, and the new subfloor in, and spent most of that putting in the slate. Once that was done, everything was ready…

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Laying slate

At the end of my last post, the floor was ready to tile, and our slates were all ready to go. I got sorted out with some adhesive, a 10mm notched trowel to make a good deep bed of said adhesive, some 5mm spacers and some grout. First up, since we’re using natural slate, it…

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Preparing to tile

We needed to replace our floor in the new kitchen, and decided to go with a slate floor since DIYing it meant that didn’t get too expensive. We already had to replace the floorboards, because there were quite a few missing and I wanted to save the good ones for repairs elsewhere in the flat,…

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Deafening

In flats, soundproofing is important. There are loads of rules about it in the building standards, but having lived in a modern flat and now in our Victorian flat, I think they did a better job of it 120 years ago. When it comes to soundproofing, mass is your friend. Lightweight materials won’t absorb and…

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Today is a day for taking up floorboards

We’re back in our flat now- a good long cleaning session on Thursday night let us move things back to where they should be so that we can now get into our bedroom- hooray! That means it’s time to ramp up the work pace again, with an aim of building the kitchen cabinets in a…

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