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?!