Home Improvements

Believe it or not, enquiring minds want to know (via email and comments) what’s happening with the improvements that were being made to the kitchen and bathroom.

There have been lots of blunders by the workmen, lots of inconveniences too like them not showing up at all on days when I was expecting them and them turning up on days when I wasn’t expecting them. But an intolerable amount of swearing later (theirs out loud and on occassion mine, under my breath) the whole 3 (nearly 4) week venture is at last almost done.

There’s still stuff that’s unfinished. A new back door is going on on Tuesday, a dryer vent has to be put into the wall sometime too so that i don’t have to keep lugging the dryer to the back door when I need to use it

In the above pic it looks like a dry and sunny day but it’s showering periodically here and I have too much to do to keep running in and out every 5 minutes to take it off the line and put it back on!

So we have gone from the kitchen looking like this:

To the new kitchen being fitted and the (almost) end result looking like this…..

Bit of a difference huh?

The rewire on the house was supposed to be done at the same time as all this work but the department responsible for the rewire have not bothered to get back to me on when that will now happen.

I had to have an asbestos check done on the house before they were prepared to start work on the walls of the rooms with the horrid artex I inherited when I moved in here, the asbo check was done 3 weeks ago now and I’m presuming the house doesn’t have an asbestos problem since no one has got back to me with bad results…having said that, no one has got back to me with a start date either so who knows what’ll happen about that.

At least I have the comfort of knowing the whole kitchen has now had new electrics fitted so I have one place to retreat to while the rest of the work is being done on the house….i know the elctricians will have to come in and out of the kitchen as that is where the fuse box is and they need to rewires the downstairs loo that is next to the kitchen, but the bulk of the work will be done elsewhere in the house. Which is a huge relief!

I also had a new bathroom suite fitted during the last few weeks.

It looks sparkling clean and shiny at the moment….you’d never normally get me publishing pics of my bathroom online and that’s the only reason you’re getting a sneaky peek at ‘em now!

I don’t have any ‘before’ pics of the bathroom but take my word for it it’s a one hundred percent improvement on the old bathroom suite.

This last month of having workmen in my home has not been an experience I would want to repeat…..the hassle, the lack of privacy, the huge inconvenience of having to stay home or to arrange for other people to be here when I’ve had to go out has been a nightmare… but I have to say, I am very pleased with the end result.

We may not own this place but while we live here it’s certainly a benefit to our family to be able to make use of these improvements to our home.

I have to tell you though….these workers….

I once had to go outside in my pj’s early in the morning before he workmen came, so I could raid the near-empty paint cans they’d left in the front garden so I could scrape some paint out to paint over all the bits of wall in the kitchen and bathroom that the painter neglected to paint.

As you can see in the pic below…the old loo is still in the garden too….

I suppose it could be handy for passers by who are desperately in need of relieving themselves?

I haven’t been brave enough to lift the lid up.

It’s been there all week, who knows what’s in there now?