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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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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We have a boiler!

Major plumbing milestone: heating and hot water have returned! There’s still a way to go- with no hot water or heating in the kitchen, there are holes in the wall, we need supply and drainage for the washing machine, but at least we’re ready to hit our usual November heating switch on!

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Plumbing the depths…

I think it’s often easier to do stuff yourself than pay for it to be done. The last fortnight has been quite difficult for us, having the plumbers in: it’s a week after the expected finish date for their work, and we still have no hot water or heating (which would be off anyway, but…

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Back to work

After finishing the bedroom in May, we took a bit of a break from work on the flat. It was welcome, and great to live in it and get used to having our space again, but we also didn’t have a lot of choice. The next project needed to be the big one: moving the…

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