Week thirteen - so close...

We are very, nearly, almost, not quite, getting there.  Almost.

The darned evil that is I**a (I cannot bring myself to type their name in full anymore) are still conspiring to make sure we are standing in the slum for ever more, but we will not be beaten and Rob is poised to buy a supply of swiss balls if they still won't deliver our sofas this side of 2015.  White swiss balls, obvs.

(I suspect this is a further hint from him that he'd really rather I had Jessica Ennis' abs, but nonetheless).

So.  The bike storage area is ready.  The bike racks have arrived.  The two have yet to be married together.

The LED light strips for under the kitchen cabinets have arrived, but have yet to be introduced to the kitchen units.

The beds have arrived, but are in the wrong room (hard to tell, I know, in the oasis of whiteness) and are still in pieces.

The mirrors have arrived.  But unfortunately Rob turned out not to have learnt from the dining room table experience and didn't measure the space they were intended to go into.  Instead, he  decided to act on his alpha male instincts and 'just bought the biggest ones I**a had'.

*sigh*

The bookshelves have arrived, but they are the wrong size for books.  (Don't ask).

But enough of the negatives.  (there's another white joke in there somewhere, I'm sure).

We have a health-and-safety-approved banister (which will also be perfect for our Stannah StairLift in 50 years time):

 The LED strip in the bathroom upstairs has been installed:

(feel free to go 'ooooooooh')

The bathroom cabinets are in:

('aaaaaaaaah, so shiny!)

The boiler has been boxed in, so the kitchen is complete:

And, and - VERY EXCITINGLY..........

Our light fitting for the library has arrived!

Behold the lovely artichoke light!

It is OBLIGATORY to ooooh and aaaaaah at this point.

Unfortunately Rob had another slight competence issue about the sizing of light bulbs, so we can't actually switch it on at the moment.

So we are nearly, nearly there.  I see this last push before Christmas has meant that builder's tea break time has taken on a carb-loading theme:

Almost there.  Very nearly complete.

Oh, we don't yet have a front door though.  Minor detail, yes?

Week twelve - Siobhan should go away more often

Sorry for the blog silence - it wasn't because the slum had been bought by a local millionaire after seeing our awesome progress with it, or because Kevin McCloud had finally realised that it was a big mistake not to feature us on Grand Designs and so I was bound by a secrecy contract, or because we finally lost our minds in Ikea and gave up on the whole project.  Except that Rob almost did.

No, the reason for the silence is because I've been backpacking round China for the last three weeks, and so 

1) I wasn't in Nunhead to see slum progress
2) I was behind the Great Chinese (Fire) Wall so couldn't access the blog even if I had wanted to
3) I left Rob in charge of blogging

and

4) Rob lost his mind in Ikea.

Oh dear.  

There were tears, tantrums, and I wasn't around to witness any of them.  Rob maintains that this was A Good Thing, but I suspect it was actually A Very Bad Thing and I really should have been there to help share the stress.  Or at least prevent Very Bad Things happening to the poor assistants in Ikea.

To summarise an extremely lengthy and frustrating story, it took Rob more than four hours, and multiple trips to two different branches of Ikea on opposite sides of London to order a few items of furniture.  It would have been quicker if I'd have popped into the Shanghai branch whilst I was there.  He is in fact still there as I type, picking up yet another light fitting.

In the grand scheme of things, this is annoying but will mean that, in the worst case, we will be sitting on cushions for the next few weeks.

Except that cushions are banned in Rob's minimalist flat so we may be standing.  

Anyway, my three week absence has meant that this week's blog will be as spectacular to you as the big reveal of all the recent work was to me today.  Here we go!

That's Rob, lost in a snowdrift demonstrating the new, very white, hallway.

Here's a close up of the newly painted stairs:

And at the top of those stairs, this is the brand new sliding door to the mezzanine bathroom.  Rob is VERY pleased it with, as you can tell by his smug, beardy expression (pining over me whilst I was away apparently resulted in some suspect facial hair):

Look!  It opens and everything!

This is the lovely new shower in that bathroom:

And the sink and bathroom cabinet (so shiny!):

And now, prepare yourselves - here is your first view of the new kitchen, all completed!  SQUEAL!

It is LOVELY.  LOVELY.  

Rob then proceeded to demonstrate just how much cooking I would be able to do for him, in this new lovely kitchen.  Which was lovely.

Here's the new sink, with that nice tap I chose:

Which, Rob reminds me, we won't be using, because that right hand unit is the dishwasher.

Here's a view of the very lovely quartz worktop.  It's very shiny, and very cold.  Which is ideal for making pastry, as Rob helpfully pointed out.  Lots of pastry items that I can then cook for him in the lovely oven.

Now, in Rob's Ikea-induced delirious rage, because he was unable to actually get hold of the things we need (sofas, beds - nothing really important or anything), he decided to buy other really important things, like laundry bins and mini step ladders.

Why a mini step ladder I hear you ask?

Because this is the shelf he has kindly provided for me to put my cookery books on:

Hard to see in our snowstorm-themed house, but trust me, that shelf is at least a foot above the top of my head.

Onwards to the study, where we find this mysterious item, left by the builders:

Goodness knows what they needed a tennis ball for.  Especially since this room is really more similar to a squash court.

In the sitting room, some of the lighting has been installed, including this up-lighter that Rob is again, very proud of:

The light for this end of the sitting room is arriving from Italy, at some point between now and next year - the Italians are delightfully laissez faire about the delivery schedule (or whatever the Italian equivalent is).

Builder's tea break update time: I still can't see where the vinegar has gone, but the biscuit of choice this week is a dark chocolate digestive:

Moving upstairs (here's the view of the hallway):

The upstairs bathroom is looking very shiny, and almost finished:

Luckily Rob fits in the shower cubicle, and is demonstrating here his amazing ability to open shower cubicle doors using only the power of his mind:

The hanging rail has been installed in the bedrooms:

Back downstairs, the scary asbestos electrical situation still hasn't been sorted out, and neither have the library shelves.  That big cardboard box contains the light fitting for the hall though - you'll have to wait for the reveal!  

PS - isn't the window lovely.

Finally, Rob was showing me the light bulbs he has bought when I spotted this on the upper shelf in the kitchen:

That's dishwasher tablets.  Rob has made sure we have our priorities right.  Who needs sofas if you can do the washing up.

And look how sweet our builders are.  They are walking around in plastic shoe covers to make sure they don't ruin our lovely new floors.  We are currently considering whether we will ask all our visitors to do the same...

Week eight - the white goods have landed

How exciting.  How exciting.  Exciting!  

This week is the beginning of the interior.  Things are starting to go into our used-to-be-horrible completely white box.

Exciting!

First, we now have some (white) shelves in our (white) cupboards in the (white) bedrooms!

Now, these shelves might not look terrifically interesting to you, but their configuration was the subject of several arguments between me and Rob, so you'd better appreciate them.

The other half of the cupboards will have hanging rails:

They were less controversial, so you are free to think what you like about them.

Continuing with the excitement upstairs, we now have a bath and toilet!  

Now then, an important lesson folks.

I have learnt on this epic Grand Designs style journey, that several things in houses that you thought you knew the name of, you actually don't.  Or rather, if you use the names that you thought were the normal ones to use, you will be instantly exposed as a Kevin McCloud stalking fake, a DIY disaster zone, an interior design faker.

We don't have a bath and toilet, we have sanitaryware.

And, more excitingly for the poor builders than us, the toilet sanitaryware is fully functional.

(Don't think too hard about what they have been doing for the past eight weeks.  I'm trying not to).

Moving downstairs, and surpassing the sanitaryware in excitement levels from me, is the arrival of the kitchen units:

Don't worry, those ones above that look like the square white cousins of the daleks, convening an evil world-takeover plotting meeting, are actually upside down.   

Here are their brothers, confusingly stationed in the sitting room (presumably not permanently, although the builders might be forgiven for some confusion as the kitchen was delivered without a plan for putting it together, making the construction rather like the Ikea version of the Krypton Factor).

And here's the fridge, freezer, and washing machine.  In the library.  With the candlestick.

I have a feeling that the lack of a design plan and the delivery of several incorrect units is only the beginning of a long kitchen-installation saga, because we've also discovered that, just to make things even more tricky, one of the walls is wonky.  Of course.

Demonstrated here by the whacking great gap at the back of this cabinet.

Brilliant.

No builder's tea break news this week, so instead I will share with you my discovery of this:  

Nope, I haven't a clue either.

Week seven - Dante arrives in Nunhead

We were away again this weekend, so this week's blog is not only a bit late, but was also researched in the dark, so apologies for some of the off-kilter photos.

Rob had been to see the slum late last week, and so was keen to show me the major progress with the floor.  Here's our nice new sanded floor downstairs:

And here are the newly sanded stairs:

And here's the banister.

Don't panic anyone - it will all be washed white in due course.

Now, I won't bore you here with our tales of sanitary ware woe - lets focus on the positives, which are currently (limited to) this toilet:

And the bath:

Two things to explain here.

Firstly, we haven't gone crazy and ordered a cardboard bath, in some fit of over-zealous anti-consumerism recycling.

Secondly, I'm really hoping that Iliyan hasn't lost that vital bathroom plan, and hasn't accidentally installed the bath in the sitting room, because it's currently obstructing the space for the new dining table.

In other odd news, we started to wonder whether the builders were staging a protest against our plans for pretentiously arty light fittings, because they seem to have installed their own suggestions instead:

It was at about this point that we started to feel rather warm.  Not just warm, but properly toasty.  Really, really roasting.  

Turns out the underfloor heating definitely, definitely works.

Definitely.

Here it is.

It got progressively hotter as we moved upstairs, where we discovered the heat was so intense it had melted one of the builders:

It was honestly too hot to stick around for much longer, so I'll leave you with two final things.

An update on the tea break situation - the tea room has moved, and you will be interested to learn that, flying gently and delicately in the face of outdated builder stereotypes, your average builder in 2012 prefers a cup of raspberry, strawberry, and loganberry infusion to fuel him through the day:

And, perhaps due to the overwhelming heat haze, Rob seemed to go through the rabbit hole.  Has he shrunk?  Grown?  Or is it all an optical illusion?  And where is the vinegar?!