HOW TO PAINT BEHIND YOUR RADIATOR

Why don't they sell these in B&Q? This is Thomas' oversized Danish toothbrush for painting behind radiators. I can hardly believe I reached the age of 38 before seeing one of these - they are a 'must' for any serious DIYer! (They also come in handy if you're quite short and you miss a bit high up!)

MURALS AGAIN

I was commissioned once again by the little ones to decorate their room with a mural, this time the theme was to be space. With Léon visiting his grandmother in France this week I actually had time to get it done. It is amazing how much more time you have on your hands when you only have a two year old and a newborn to look after when you are used to looking after five! As ordered by Anna, the space ships on her side of the room had to be pink, and those on Léon's side had to be blue! This was all her own idea! Who says sexual stereotyping isn't in-built?! I can't wait till Léon comes home now to see his face :-)

DEALING WITH TERRORISTS

One thing I have learned over the years is the way to deal with these angelic little terrorist trolls when they decide they'd rather you held them all day than spent time doing dishes, washing clothes and the likes. Although this little cherub is more than happy for me to break my back wearing her while doing chores around the house, I am still trying to work out exactly how to wear her in this carrier while helping Thomas floor the loft. Having her on my front and crawling around isn't ideal, and she gets in the way of both the hammer and the screw driver. I guess I need to stick to painting ceilings for the next few weeks!

DIY MARATHON

At the beginning of March we embarked upon a DIY marathon, hence slightly less blogging than usual - not only do I have less time to sit down, my brain is too tired to think. Although family and friends have been drafted in to help, we are the ones living in the highly stressful constant state of DIY hell. So far we've split the living room into a new dining room and coffee room, created a TV room in the old kitchen, moved our bedroom downstairs into the old dining room, finished (nearly) the new kitchen, refloored and decorated all these rooms, taken the fallout to the dump and dealt with some seriously dodgy electrics. (Next job on the list is to rebuild the hall ceiling)! It is a real achievement and I hardly recognize the place - unfortunately it has been so tiring I hardly recognize myself in the mirror either! Today Thomas started his new company, working from the bottom up... that is to say he put the nice new floor in the office. Tomorrow we'll wallpaper it and build the office furniture with the help of the kids.

DIY HELL

I went to bed last night with a simple DIY plan in my head.

• Get up early
• Paint the dining room door frames
• Paint the window surround
• Wallpaper with Thomas from midday
• Finish the room today

I should have known better. Anna got me up five times during the night - she's got a blocked nose so isn't eating as well as usual but seems to be in a bit of a growth spurt so is hungrier than normal. This wasn't the best start, but unperturbed I dragged myself downstairs around 9am and headed for the espresso machine to get me through. After breakfast I started painting the window surround. The blind was in the way so I tried to take it down. The whole window surround collapsed spilling dust, plaster all over the new real wood flooring leaving a gaping hole above the double glazing. The hole measured 2.5 metres long, 5cm back to front and another 5cm deep. I hunted the garage for some wire mesh and Thomas dug out the metal cutters. I packed the gaping hole with the mesh and decided that simple plastering would take a week so hunted the garage for the 'No More Big Gaps' spray foam. That worked well but of course given I was filling a hole above the window, it started to drip on my hands and arms and set. Have you ever had superglue stuck to your skin? No More Big Gaps makes Superglue feel like pritt stick. A full 12 hours on I still haven't managed to shift it and my whole hand is covered. Itch, itch, throb. This wasn't ideal given it got into the big cut I have on my left thumb from accidentally drilling a hole in it when fitting a door handle on Sunday. It is throbbing like mad. Then Thomas went back to bed. He's been fighting a horrible chest infection that landed him in the Victoria Infirmary on Easter Sunday, his wheezing so bad they sent him home with strong antibiotics and an asthma inhaler. He proceeded to collapse in bed for nearly 5 hours. I continued trying to plaster up my hole, moving onto proper plaster on top of my foam. I then painting my doors and frames with horrible, toxic smelling oil-based paint giving myself a headache in the process. Dad then showed up to check on my wallpapering progress but finding I had made none offered to carry some books through from my dining room to the coffee room. We'd been to Ikea last night to swap a damaged bookcase we bought last week for a pristine one so dad and I took two minutes out to finish assembling that. I instantly managed to destroy it by putting my hand through the back of it as I lifted it up, necessitating another trip to Ikea tomorrow (buggeration!) So book moving was put on hold again. I went back to my bucket of plaster to take up where I left off. The bloody plaster had only gone and set in the meantime. Never mind, I thought, I'll repaint the door frames - but of course they aren't dry yet, so I couldn't do that either. And of course I haven't even started the day's real work, so poor sick Thomas got dragged out of bed to babysit, while I went and wrote a dictionary. It is now bedtime. My plan when I get up tomorrow is:

• Get up early
• Paint the dining room door frames
• Paint the window surround
• Wallpaper with Thomas from midday
• Finish the room today

TAKING IT TOO LITERALLY

What's that? Pudge asked once we'd built the carousel for the pots. In retrospect, I should have said a pot shelf because it's never worked properly since he tried to ride on it... We went to Ikea for a new one only to find out the model has been discontinued - I wonder why? - so we now have the new version to install next time we can be bothered taking off the worktop.

TIME TO PANIC?

This is our old kitchen. It has come a fair way since we first started demolishing it in the summer. However, I am not sure it is as far along that path as I'd like it to be. I had imagined that by the time Thomas's parents came for Xmas it might have been decorated in the pale blue wallpaper we bought months ago and the beautiful solid wood flooring might be down. I had imagined a sofabed and some furniture. Realizing a few weeks ago that that was too ambitious I hoped the water and gas pipes might at least be boxed in. Now, with only 2 DIY days left before they arrive, I am pinning my hopes on it having walls, or even a floor... I blame it on 4 kids, 2 chest infections, 1 laryngitis and 10 years of DIY overload...

COWBOY KITCHEN -THE NEXT PHASE

We have about four weeks to take out the old kitchen, lay a wooden floor, wallpaper and move furniture in before our Xmas guests arrive. But of course, the cowboys are back with a vengeance. The latest? No doubt to save money, the old kitchen tiles have been stuck on with cement instead of tile adhesive. It's very robust - the wall comes off before the tiles! I fancied adding rebuilding four walls and replastering a room to my pre-Xmas remit. It isn't like I have anything else to do with my time at the moment. It'll save me twiddling my thumbs.

OUR NEW KITCHEN

When we went out looking for a new kitchen 6 months ago I was looking for a white one, and Thomas seemed to be looking for a wooden one but when we saw IKEA's high gloss red we decided it was time to be daring rather than boring. Having ordered it all we took colour samples for the walls and nothing seemed to go except the most boring of whites. Somehow in a moment of madness we convinced each other green would be unusual. After we started building it, I really really wasn't sure, and lay awake trying to work out how to paint white between the units. Last night I took this photo of Charlotte who had baked a Halloween cake all by herself. And do you know what? When I saw her against the green wall with the dark red in the background, I finally decided I actually like our wacky kitchen!

A WET BOTTOM

Sorry, I have no photo to upload with this plumbing update.
Come through and sit at the sink, he said, while I turn back on the water. Be prepared to shout very loudly if there are any leaks.
So I sat at the new sink and the water was duly turned back on, no leaks - how clever...
I'll just try the new tap, he said.
Does the water filter need to be attached before you use the tap? I asked
No, I doubt it, he said, turning it on.
The freezing water in the tube where the filter is still to be inserted of course shot straight out in between my legs soaking my not very dignified Little Miss Naughty pyjama bottoms in the process. It is a good job I only use the pyjama bottoms for sitting around the house and not for sleeping in because there is no way I could wear these tonight!

PLUMBING

Plumbing
Originally uploaded by PhylB

Thomas was showing me today how easy plumbing is. Anyone who knows me, knows I am a reasonably capable DIYer between my murals, my plastering and my tiling skills but plumbing is something I have never tried. Given my old Gramps was a plumber, I just used to invite him for a cup of tea if I had any plumbing requirements in my first flat. After he died I always used professional plumbers till I met Thomas. He explained to me that plumbing really is just lego for adults (that you eventually make water go through). I don't know why I was surprised it was easy, given my old Gramps wasn't the most sober of people and still managed his job fairly successfully!
So today we've been moving pipes from the old kitchen, soon to be TV room, into the new kitchen soon to be functioning kitchen. How exciting! Thomas has assembled a very fancy tap with built-in water filter, and moved the complete drainage system into the new room. I've been going around at his back with expandable foam filling in the old holes to the outside to stop the local mice from moving into our nice dry old kitchen. Expandable foam is fun!
Apart from it not being too difficult, I am quite alarmed at the time it is taking. At nearly 11pm on Sunday we now have all the drainage working in kitchen number two but no water coming into kitchen two. We also have water in kitchen one but no drain so we can't use the sink, the dishwasher or the washing machine. I have to conclude that we are likely to be starting the week with two kitchens but no water... how do I keep six people clean, and six sets of dishes per meal clean with no working water?

KITCHEN CHAOS!

Kitchen chaos
Originally uploaded by PhylB

We've been living in kitchen chaos now since we moved here in January.
Within the first few days of getting the keys last September, we realized the built-in fridge was running at 12 degrees turning milk sour within hours, the built-in freezer wasn't much better - defrosting and refreezing at will, but of course the built-in oven had to be our favourite - it wasn't wired in and there was no cooker socket to wire it to, so the only possible explanation for its used-looking state was that the previous owner - one Mr Haq, whom we never met, had found it in a skip and thought it'd look authentic. Of course we complained to our lawyer within the requisite 7 days but he's still trying to track the infamous Mr Haq down in deepest Pakistan...
We decided to build a new kitchen in a big empty room at the back of the house. We got kitchen quotes that were ridiculously expensive but decided eventually the only thing for it was a DIY job.
Now with electrics moved and a new waste pipe installed Thomas, dad, the kids and I have been slowly building and putting up cupboards.
At the halfway mark in dismantling kitchen one and installing kitchen two, I feel demented - I want it done now, today, this minute - I can't carry on cooking meals for 6 on 4 gas rings without slowly losing my marbles!
We've got 13 coming for Christmas this year... if it isn't in by then, I'll have moved out!

HYACINTH, NOT SMURF, NOT DUCK EGG!

Our kids' bathroom is a bit of a state. The wall tiles are ok, but the floor is a bit scabby and the walls have hurriedly been painted an unmatching creamy colour.
Last week Thomas and I were in B&Q. I decided with the kids away this week and me no doubt moping about the house, what better time to paint the kids' bathroom wall the same colour as the tiles and freshen it up, while distracting me. So I checked the Dulux colour samples and found the exact shade of hyacinth to match the tiles. I had them mix it and I took it home.
Today I opened my tin of hyacinth paint to start on my wall to be confronted by a hideous smurf-shade of blue nothing like the colour on the colour sample chart...Bizarre! I took it back to B&Q and complained. I showed them the colour it was meant to be on their chart, and the colour in the tin. Patently they'd pressed the wrong button. The offered to remix me 2.5l. The guy double-checked the shade and put it in his little machine. It shoogled it a couple of minutes and he opened it, to find again it was nothing like hyacinth, not much like smurf either, second time round. This time it was duck egg - another shade that would clash horribly with my hyacinth tiles. The machine was broken or having an off-day.
I swapped it for an off-the-shelf Dulux, which I am not quite sure will match, however, when they scanned the 3rd pot after me waiting a second ten minutes in the returns queue, the item went unfound so they gave me the 3rd pot free and a credit note for £18. So if this one doesn't match I can always try getting the hyacinth at a different B&Q.
Now I know it was meant to distract me from missing the kids but I didn't mean it to turn into a week-long saga.

IKEA KITCHENS

As I twittered the other day, we've been having fun with IKEA's kitchens. It all came about by accident. Thomas and I went to IKEA last week and were looking predominantly at wooden and white kitchens. One of us, I am no longer sure which, suggested that the high gloss coloured kitchen doors we had seen would be daring but given they didn't have an in-store model it'd be a bit too brave to opt for it in the dark. I googled IKEA to see if they had a picture on their website and realized the prices were in dollars, oops, I was in IKEA USA. I switched and immediately noticed the examples of kitchens and decor in the UK were different. Excellent! That meant that by hopping from IKEA USA to UK to Sweden to Japan to Canada etc I'd get lots of decor ideas.
Above are 3 kitchens as advertised on Canada, Russia and UK respectively. Trawling the 3 sites I found IKEA assumes Canadians won't buy wide drawers, Russians prefer black to green, they don't seem to sell green doors in Russia at all. Looking in detail at all the kitchen ranges worldwide, I became fascinated by the job of IKEA kitchen brochure photographer! Often whole cabinet fronts are changed, the cooker hood is swapped over but the vegetables on the work surface remain untouched. Sometimes a full glass of juice in one photo becomes a half glass in another - I guess whoever changed the fronts got thirsty! Looks fun, though - maybe I'll apply for that kind of photography job just for the fun of seeing how it is done!
Of course another thing occurred to me while I was trotting the globe - a price comparison. I was gobsmacked to find, for example, that IKEA Sweden, the mothership itself, charges exactly twice as much as IKEA Denmark for several of their identical models, despite similar taxes. Naughty - I suppose they are counting on home-grown loyalty. I, for one, would be driving to Copenhagen if I happened to live in Malmö. And even in the EURO zone they don't hide this fact. I found a kitchen being sold for around 1900 Euros in both Italy and Spain retailing at a mere 700 Euros in Belgium! (Dad says there has to be some incentive to move to Belgium!)
All in all I had a fun day surfing my kitchen-to-be!
Oh, and I wonder if I am becoming too frequent a visitor to IKEA... as I turned into the car park yesterday my parents had to laugh when a little voice from the back seat exclaimed: Yeah! Léon's havin' meatballs!

PREPARING FOR KITCHENS

We have exactly one week left to prepare two whole rooms in the house for demolition, more or less. So we got up this morning ready to rock. Spurred on by Vista collapsing on my computer for the 2nd time this year, I needed to look for my recovery disc anyway, so I started by bagging all sorts of paperwork and unopened letters left over from the flat days. Marcel and Charlotte negotiated treats for work and then actually contributed nearly 3 hours each. Lots went through old toy boxes throwing stuff out and Marcel packed carloads of rubbish to take to the dump, tidied and even asked if we could point out weeds in the garden so he could help with that. (Did aliens abduct the real Marcel?) Thomas moved the tumble drier and some other boxes amongst other things. We worked from we got up till 5pm... so why does the house look worse now than when we started? We are still knee-deep in rubbish... I decided at one point to tidy the garage a bit as it is next on the list. When tidying one corner, I was a bit perturbed by the fact that it seemed to buzz every time I moved anything. After several minutes observing it, I noticed a line of bees (not wasps - phew) entering and leaving by the door. I doubt they'll be overly pleased when they find out it is scheduled for demolition in about a month's time...
Anyway, time for bed, if tomorrow is to be another hard day... Poor Pudge and Anna are getting a bit bored with all this already.

RETURN OF THE COWBOYS

cowboy gang
Originally uploaded by sibhusky2

I guess John Wayne and his gang have struck again. We're still trying to get to the bottom of the missing cooker socket in our kitchen. On saturday we had an electrician friend round. We asked him if he knew what the problem was. He went into the cupboard to look at the fuse box and returned, never having been upstairs in our house and asked, knowingly, 'You have an electric power shower somewhere in the house, don't you?' 'How did you guess?' we asked, only to be told that they'd wired the power shower through the cooker switch on our circuit board. Don't you just love our cowboy house?

MURAL

Léon and Anna's bedroom is finally finished
Originally uploaded by PhylB

As my flickr friends may have noticed, I have been working on a 360 degree dinosaur mural in the babies' room for the last few weeks.
I guess all in all there is no more than four or five days work involved but when you can only start it every day at 9pm once Léon is in bed, and you have to do it in 1 hour chunks so you can feed Anna, do homework with Charlotte and talk to Marcel, and you are generally in bed by 11pm, then a week's task suddenly stretches to an eternity. Anyway, my bit is now complete. So all I need is to convince Thomas to take some time off his gardening schedule to stick down the laminate and we can move in Léon's bed straight away, and ultimately Anna's cot much later.
I wish I had the time to do some more murals. I did them for all the kids in my old house too.

A BIGGER JOB THAN I THOUGHT

Goodbye to the scabby old trees
Originally uploaded by PhylB

When we moved into the house we decided this row of scabby old trees had to go. They were so tall they blocked all light in the garden, they were so thin at the bottom that Léon could easily walk out the garden on to a main road and they were plain ugly evergreens whose roots would eventually up-end the house.
Our tree cowboy friend happened to be passing this morning and given the weather was nice, asked if I wanted him to fell the trees I had asked him to come back and fell in the spring. Why not?
As I watched them for the next 3 or 4 hours, I suddenly realized quite how big a job it was and was glad Thomas and I had not attempted it with our chainsaw and my car as we had originally planned. Surprisingly, it wasn't the felling that was the big job - that took them about 15 minutes a tree, it was the cutting up and disposing of the trees that took hours, as they chopped and heaved bits of them into their van and disappeared off to the dump twice for every tree.
Now we have a scabby, bare, open back garden, so we need to get the planned fence asap. Then Pudge will be safe and Thomas can finally start planting his shrubs and bushes as planned.

NEW KITCHEN

We need a new kitchen desperately. Our oven doesn't work. Our gas hob has 4 tiny burners. The extractor is next to useless. The new replacement fridge and freezer are standing in the middle of the room blocking cupboard access and removing use of the work surfaces for a whole wall. The hideous doors are hanging off too. And the tumble dryer is in a different room from the washing machine. Derek told us about a Kitchens Direct and how he'd negotiated them down to nearly half their original quote when they'd installed his kitchen. I went onto their website and found they'd a half price sale. Perfect! I even arranged Derek to come round and use his legal skills to negotiate down the ridiculous price we would no doubt be offered, to one we were prepared to pay.
A salesman drove through from Edinburgh and started badly. Thomas and Derek showed him our new long extension room saying it was perfect for a kitchen, and he started explaining why the current small kitchen would be a better choice. They stuck to their guns and I even, at one point, heard him more or less suggest 2 kitchens - the current one with the washing machine, sink, dishwasher and tumble drier - a kind of wet room, and the new one full of cupboards - not quite my idea of the optimum kitchen triangle. Eventually they beat him into submission - we could choose how many kitchens we needed and which room to use. Result!
Two hours of measuring ensued culminating in an announcement that our kitchen would cost £13k...in their January sale. Wow, a £26k kitchen! I only paid £28k for a 2 storey extension of 4-5 rooms in my old house 3 years ago - even allowing for inflation, kitchens, to my mind, should always cost less than house extensions (especially when the house extension actually included an Ikea kitchen and all the plumbing and gas for it!) Derek then explained how much he expected us to have to pay, given the price of his own kitchen from the same company last year. Miraculously the kitchen fell from £13k to £10.9k to £9.2k over the next 10 minutes and our reply, of course... on your bike, we can get a kitchen in Ikea for £3k and there is no one in the west of Scotland who'd dare to suggest it'd cost £6k to fit it. All in all a disappointing evening.
I'm away to compare Ikea kitchens and B&Q kitchens with MFI kitchens now!
Having checked these now I feel invigorated, and sure I can soon have a perfect new kitchen for much less than nine grand :-)

New Kitchen
Originally uploaded by Thorin

A HOPELESS ATTEMPT AT DYEING

Given we have minus no money, I thought a cheaper way to end up with curtains that fitted Marcel's bedroom was to dye the hideous brown things left by the previous owner, since they definitely don't go with the red walls, rather than to splash out on new curtains. Dye itself was a tenner but still better than curtains. On Sunday I read all the instructions carefully and put curtain number one and box of dye number one in my washing machine. As the cycle started, I could see almost nothing for black dye - great - just the effect I was looking for. When we returned, however, from a trip to the flat on Sunday evening all the dye had beautifully coloured the cream lining black, leaving the American tan curtains completely unchanged :-\ I now have two tan curtains, one with a cream lining, one with a greyish black lining and they still don't go in the room. Ho hum.