Beautiful kitchen taking shape

Adrian's week 'off work' has been incredibly productive, even including packing for our holiday!  The extension flooring has made a huge difference to the space.

Won't be too long before we can put furniture in and start filling the kitchen cupboards!

Skills in the kitchen ...

There has been a huge amount of diverse skilled (high risk!) tasks for Adrian to do in order to fit the kitchen ...

Tiling the cooker surround and fitting the extractor hood.

 Sanding and shaping the acrylic worktop, which came in two long lengths.

 Cutting out the sink space and routering draining board grooves.  (The white 'snow' is all the acrylic shavings - which attached themselves to everything!)

Plumbing in the new tap.

Biscuit-jointing together two huge pieces of oak worktop to form the kitchen island

 

 Routering a smooth curve to form the final island ('butternut squash' shape!) .

Moving everything out of the extension and kitchen ready to lay the flooring - including a big sweep. 

 

Boxes of flooring stacked up in the hallway awaiting action!

Next steps

Over the past few weeks I've spent quite a bit of time clearing up brambles and stinging nettles which had become a bit hazardous.

We've not been idle. All of the storage boxes from this downstairs room have been transferred either up into the loft, or into the adjoining 'furniture & kitchen boxes' storage room, to create space for a temporary 'shed' and decorating equipment storage.

This is an example of the amount of cardboard we recycle on a weekly basis, taking trailer-loads to the tip.

These boxes of salvaged parquet flooring, together with all our old kitchen cupboards, have been cleared out of the Rectory garage which is now completely empty of our stuff.

This is a selection of the oak flooring samples we've requested - almost enough to do the whole extension!  Such an array of choices.

The girls are now on their school summer holiday so it's nice not to have the usual daily routine.  And they are both enjoying spending time in their own new bedrooms.  (Emma's the first of us to get an actual wardrobe which she's very pleased about.)  We've enjoyed welcoming several family and friends to visit over the past few weeks which has made a nice change from the chores we're supposed to be getting on with! I've also managed to step back a bit from my responsibilities at Findon Village Pool (thanks to a number of fantastic new volunteers) but am still doing weekly supervisor sessions, instead of getting on with house painting.  The pool supervising gives you a better tan - weather permitting!

One Year On

No blog for a long while.  Partly because progress has been very gradual, and partly because I've been feeling a bit fed up.  Having paced myself to cope with the situation for up to a year, we now find ourselves looking at months before completing the whole project.  Yes, I know, it will be worth it.

Adrian's dad helped us with the kitchen plumbing (routing the drainage pipes through the utility room) ...

This is where we were up to at the end of July.... lovely outside lights installed, kitchen cupboards in, and the extension very much a workshop space ...

So, for those who were expecting my next blog to be a finished house ... NOT QUITE YET!  Adrian now has a week off work to stay at home working on the house, before we go on a well-earned family holiday to France for a bit of a break.  Adrian has promised me I won't still be cooking in the caravan by the time we get back ...