Old Gatehouse - Build Log

[Martynt74]

Have ordered one for the en-suite as that's fairly urgent. Looking forward to having a play. Have luckily just found out that my car needs a £150 repair as opposed to a £1700 repair as the garage initially thought so that's a nice surprise. Gives me more to play with.

Annoyingly it seems that being a knob and wanting special worktops means a 4 week lead time because they order the materials from Italy, so we'll be worktopless for about a month.

Kitchen gets started on Monday

Here are some more pics

Finally picked up some garden furniture

This is about as much as i can open the door without banging the fridge. Need to buy a folding door i think. Likely have to go white as i doubt we'll find a match for the existing doors. Magnet about mid way up is strategically placed to hide a big scratch i've already made in the door!

Appliances starting to be delivered

Current kitchen

Lounge area. Might need to re-think our sofas/furniture and change things as it doesn't work great. We'll be getting rid of the fire as it's stupid.

Mmmmm ashfelt flooring in the bedroom. Just what you want in the morning!

 

[Martynt74]

Had the wife make a bit of a list of jobs and then assign a priority to it. Pretty much everything was a 1 according to her. No help whatsoever!

Also new kitchen has arrived and the old one has been removed. Christ, whilst i knew granite would be heavy, i never realised just how much!

(Apologies for the sore necks some of this might cause, Imgur is being stupid and has rotated my images and won't let me adjust!)

Also have re-purposed an old bedside table into my router/home server cabinet!

 

[Martynt74]

No idea what's going on. Tried a few other hosting sites and they all rotate my pictures. They're showing the right way on my pc though!

 

[Martynt74]

Also, i had to plane a couple of doors after the carpets were fitted. It's laughable how uneven the floors are. I wish i'd had more time/less family so i could've took all the floorboards up and leveled and laid ply.

Downstairs is the same, you feel drunk when walking from one end of the room to the other. One door has a 25mm gap when it's closed, yet it still catches the floor when opening it. It's ridiculous!

 

[Martynt74]

Also to add to the ridulousness of this house. The previous owners have battened and plasterboarded some walls rather than plaster the brick work. Issue being that there's no rhyme nor reason as to where this has been done so even though some walls sound solid i don't always know what i'm drilling into until i've drilled the hole. Putting a TV up the other day i had a combination of brick, wood and plasterboard to contend with all for the same mount!

I do own a stud detector but it's a cheap one from Claas Ohlson. Does anyone know if the better Bosch ones would be useful here?

 

[Martynt74]

Also for some hilarity for you all. When we pulled the kitchen out i asked my wifes uncle to replumb things in as the water feed comes in at the kitchen.

About an hour later someone mentioned that there was no hot water. I played around with the boiler and everything looked as expected. Took about an hour to work out that he's connected the hot and cold feeds together!

 

[Martynt74]

We have a hole!

Mad how that big bit above the fire was just a surround. It would've been much nicer to just keep at this size!

 

[Martynt74]

Haha he is not a plumber. In his defense one of my friends had disconnected everything without marking up which was which. Luckily it all works again now!

Yeah, in the future i might look at opening up the rooms as it seems there's a lot of regular plaster and it should be lime plaster really. There's just no reason as to why t's there in some places but not others.

One bedroom wall will be plasterboarded, but then you go into the bedroom next to it and drill into the same external wall and you hit brick! I might have to invest in some of those drill bits what work in a variety of materials!

Also shout out to the guy in Screwfix who when i asked him to just get me a 10mm masonry bit, he asked what drill i had. I assumed he wanted to check the shank size but nope, he just thought you had to use a Dewalt bit in a dewalt drill!

 

[Martynt74]

Went to get my tools out of my dads garage on Saturday and the key broke in the lock. Not helpful at all! Any ideas before i ring a locksmith?

Kitchen is coming along nicely. However the corner larder cupboard door won't close because the oven handles stick out too much. The fitter is going to look at whether he can rip the door down (it's solid ash) or whether we need to look at removing some units and fitting a filler panel. I'm VERY relieved i didn't try and tackle this myself.

No idea why the previous owners put in this many spotlights!

Also removed the fire and have moved the TV centrally. Made much harder work than i should've to mode the sockets!

 

[Martynt74]

Kitchen worktop guys were out to template it all up today. I’m expecting around a 3 week wait for the actual install though.

Good news is that the larder cupboard door got ripped down. Only needed to remove 8mm and it looks good.

 

[Martynt74]

Holes plastered up

Also here's the sink, absolutely love the quality of this!

Finally started to make use of the kitchen over the weekend after a clean so could move boxes from all over the place and put things away. The corner larder cupboard is amazing. So much space inside for stuff and nothing gets "lost" at the back as it's all so accessible.

Can see the bare wood from where the door got ripped down. Have got paint on the way from DIY Kitchens.

I will be changing the clocks on the oven don't worry! Just haven't seen the point as i keep turning the power off for little jobs.


Worktop guys come to fit the worktop today. My wife was laughing at me because i said i was jealous she'd get to see it before me!

 

[Martynt74]

Woooo, the worktops are fitted and looking superb from the pictures the wife has sent. Ignore her ropey looking sandwich!

@glitch i know you love a good worktop discussion (and no-one else is posting in here )

 

[Martynt74]

A couple reasons really.

1 - My wife dislikes gas (main reason!)
2 - Ease of cleaning
3 - I prefer the clean lines/neatness
4 - I’ve never really cooked on gas and only used induction so don’t know any better!

I would’ve probably liked one of the Neff ones which is part induction and part gas. But I’m happy with this

 

[Martynt74]

To be fair, most of the worktop discussions were in the other thread ("Critique my Kitchen Design")

But it's called Silestone Eternal Charcoal Soapstone

https://www.silestone.co.uk/colour/charcoal-soapstone/

If you've had any quotes for the non "Eternal" ranges, then prepare to fall off your chair. What you see there was £3300 and i tried about 15 places, battling them against each other to get the best price!

Oh and it's in the "Suede" finish. The standard finish is polished but this gives it more of a matte look/feel.

Pictures really don't do it justice though. It's incredible.

The benefit with the "Eternal" range, is that they do it in a jumbo slab which is 3.2m which means less joins. I think the standard range only comes in at 2.7m lengths so we wouldn't have been able to have the sink/induction length as one piece.

 

[Martynt74]

Tap is in and the hob is finally powered in. Also tiled the splashback area. The tiles we went for are pretty much the opposite of the worktop and contrasts it superbly. White with a grey vein look.

Hot water tap is great to use. We decided against a waste disposal in the end due to space limits in the cupboard. Only way would've been to get a Franke tap where the tank fits behind the plinths.

Just needs painting in there now

Also ordered and fitted some "Perfect Fit" blinds from Blinds 2 Go for the 2 sets of patio doors and side windows. They clip into the frame of the window and have their own rails so you can have the blinds anyway you want them. They also don't bang around when the doors are open. I'd highly recommend them

 

[Martynt74]

Yeah the controls are pretty much instant. It works on a sliding scale from 1-14. It's hugely better than our old Bosch which was probably a similar age to yours. Can still be a bit awkward when it's wet though, but not as bad. What i do like is i can press my finger on any setting between 1 and 14 to activate it. On the old one i had a +/- button and could only move in increments.

It still has 4 "rings" but you can combine the 2 left ones and 2 right ones to make one big section. I need to buy something like a Le Crueset lasagne dish type thing to take advantage of that. The ones which let you put a pan anywhere were another bracket up.

As for pans, we generally just use Ikea ones. Although we got a set of AEG ones with the hob which feel lovely.

 

[Martynt74]

Yes to both of your questions

I'm not sure you can still register for the 3D planning tool, but if you want to drop me a trust i can give you my login details.

Our kitchen fitter has been really impressed by the quality. He usually fits on behalf of a local shop who use "Omega" kitchens and he was shocked when he saw the order printout of just how cheap the units were in comparison. Said he's recommended them to 4 other people now.

 

[Martynt74]

Fair enough.

To give you an idea, all the cabinets/doors we have came to £2.9k delivered. So the actual cabinets weren't *that* expensive

 

[Martynt74]

The wall to the architrave is 2.02m and the long length is around 4.6m

The units along that back wall measure

100cm pantry unit
60cm oven unit
40cm tall larder
20cm for the end panel


Some pantry units are a little bigger at 120cm i think.

To be fair, on the plan it does look substantial. I have a thread on here called "Critique my Kitchen Design", in there is the top view which makes the pantry unit look much bigger!

@The_Craig - Yep, painting will be a pain, but we needed to get the old kitchen out before we could paint as the plasterer needed to do some stuff and we couldn't wait so long with no kitchen!

@gam3r - The extractor goes out the side wall, taking it through the ceiling would've been a pain, and even though there's a bit of a gap between the vent and the chimney it looks ok.

 

[Martynt74]

I guess depending on the width of your architrave you could cut some of it off to squeeze both bits in, but could be pretty tight!