Everything has halted in its tracks while viewings come and viewings go as we try to sell our house.
The tiles that I’d so lovingly chosen have gone back to Homebase (after all that!), and my sneaky sofa yearnings have had to be put on hold (we have had this one for nearly seven years and I’m pretty sure I can see an outline of our bums). Continue reading
We’ve been looking round at tiles again and nothing’s striking either of us, so we’re thinking we might just stick to white floorboards for the whole of the bottom floor. It would match, although there might be a bit too much white in the kitchen then, so I may finally get my wish of it being painted pale grey. We definitely need to stop the new radiator from dripping first!
The other option is to have a darker wood on the kitchen floor (think dark grey). I prefer the white, myself. Bracing myself for the bill that’s over £500 just for some floorboards though.
The old kitchen, hob and oven are selling well on eBay – finishing this weekend and then we can wave goodbye. Can’t wait – we’ll have a bit more space in the current kitchen (not that that’s a huge issue now), and can carry on painting the room.
It’s our five-year wedding anniversary this weekend, which ironically, is our “wooden” anniversary. Spoiler alert, Barry: if a new kitchen and flooring don’t count as an excellent wooden gift, I don’t know what does.
Many of my posts include the words I can’t decide, or something to that effect. I hadn’t realised I was so indecisive! Because we’re spending a lot of money on the kitchen especially (and will continue to do so for, oh, the next three years), we want it to be perfect.
I’m going to continue with affirmative phrases. I like kitchen tiles. We’re having an upstand made of the same wood as the worktop (walnut), but I believe that we need something above that to protect the walls. We will be getting tiles of some description. I like the tiles that are rectangular, like bricks. I like these ones from Wickes (pictured).
But! Is it boring to have white tiles, or is it chic? Do we have enough colour with the purple units on the bottom? What shall we have for tea?
Decisions, decisions…
Barry and I made a little trip to a friend’s this weekend so Barry could put a coat hook in their solid wall because he’s got a fancy drill. We were talking about how nice it was to do a job and it having a definite ending! We were also instructed to take a photo for the blog.
He’s spent the weekend here plastering and sanding – I can’t even help at this stage, which is frustrating for me, but probably more so for him.
We’ve had our first visits from friends to see the new space (and have a cup of tea, of course!), and the items we were selling on eBay have all sold, which is good. Money is now being automatically translated into its equivalent value in DIY or household materials. But would you pay £26 for a used loo (= a tin of paint)?
We’d decided on slate tiles in the kitchen before we’d even thought about getting a new one, never mind knocking down walls and making it bigger. However, I’m not sure about whether they would go with the units we’ve now chosen, so I’m still wavering. We’d settled on these ones from Wickes, which were on sale when we first saw them, but now the square footage is getting bigger and they’ve come off sale, they’re looking more and more expensive. I think we’d have to shop around before making a decision anyway.
Another option is to take the white wooden laminate (discussed previously) from the living room right through to cover the whole ground floor. However, I’ve been strongly advised by colleagues not to have wood in the kitchen – one leak and it’s all over. Anyone wishing to share their experiences is welcome to do so!
This is the flooring we have at the moment – bog standard laminate.
One factor affecting the choice of a black/grey tile is the colour we’re going to paint the kitchen. At the moment, we’re thinking brilliant white on all walls, as colours may clash with the units and they’re enough of a statement on their own. However, in the show house we visited before we bought our house, they had matt black painted up the stairs on both floors. It sounds a bit gothic and depressing, but it really worked (honest!), so I think we may do the same.
Now that we’ve opened up the stairs to the kitchen, we could carry that black wall down so that one kitchen wall is black (the wall in the image above). I’m wavering, because I think very dark grey would work as well, like this Slate (left) from Wickes, but Barry’s set on black. I bought a tester pot of Dulux Midnight Kiss (below), and painted a splodge on the wall (and a bit on the carpet for good measure).
Either colour would also match the potential slate flooring. I think some hard decision-making is in order, but we’re committed to painting it in some way to cover up the black!
To counteract the darkness of the floor and the wall, Barry thinks that brilliant white on the ceiling and all other walls is the way to go, but I don’t know if it will be too much with the white high gloss cabinets…any thoughts?
On a completely separate issue, I have to have a mini-rant about the plastering in our house. Where we’ve removed walls, there are obviously big vertical holes, about three inches apart. However, in two places, the plaster on either side of the hole won’t meet with a flat, straight line of plaster because one side comes out further than the other. On one of them, the walls are about perfect at the top, but it comes out about an inch further at the bottom. These things are hard to explain, but it’s infuriating, and it’s going to be a problem in particular for one of them, because we’re putting the kitchen cabinets in front of it. At the moment, we’re wondering whether the worktop and upstand can be cut in a curve to accommodate it, but we’ll have to see when they arrive. Rant over.