playing with piping…

Tags

apartment, diy, ikea udden, kitchen, painting, pipes

… and not the decorative kind!

… when I started renovating my apartment I thought the kitchen was passable, and I would wait a while until I would renovate it. Sure it didn’t have a cooker, but it had a sink; I splurged on my dream fridge; I had my camping stove and I could get a microwave for the year or so until I decided what I really wanted to do…

everything is temporary – except my dream fridge!

… when I moved in I quickly discovered that the plumbing had a few hiccups. Every time I washed anything in the sink I ended up standing in a puddle…

… one weekend mid October I decided I had had enough, and I went ahead and ripped out the old cabinets, the swollen, rotting work surface that made my skin crawl; the bent, dented drawers and the leaking plumbing. I cut back silicon, took apart Ikea cupboards, pulled them out from under the work surface, and managed to get it to all come crashing down! I took everything apart, sorted metal from wood, plastic in separate bags and took it all to the container park…

… when the guys redid the electricity here they really messed up the tiles, cutting channels in the tiles rather than removing a column, then patching their paths up with lumpy plaster (often mixed with brick dust, giving me “pretty” orange “features” in the walls. I knew I was going to have to replace the tiles along the way, but I thought until I decided which tiles I wanted, I could just place my kitchen cupboards in situ, and move them when it came to tiling. I had already decided I wanted the free standing Udden kitchen units from Ikea.

… when I removed the old kitchen cupboards I had a surprise… the last kitchen update had been done somewhat hastily (to be polite) – tiles on top of tiles (just like all my layers of wallpaper!), and a huge hole in the wall, down to bare brick! Plus, all the years of leaking plumbing had chronically rusted all the heating pipes.

not a pretty surprise!

… sometime in the autumn I put the Udden units together, and since then they have sat in the middle of the kitchen, semi-in use… though I haven’t had an operational kitchen sink since then. When I drew up a sketch of the kitchen I decided I wanted to move the sink, so I needed to move the taps. Not a big deal in itself, and I probably could have done it myself, but I also wanted to tidy up the piping, changing joints and making sure things ran parallel and I want to run a gas pipe to where I want to put a cooker. I don’t have to tools to cut thick old pipes, or the absolute certainty of what I am doing…

… mid-December I called the plumber I had used previously, he was about to head off on holidays, I waited a couple of weeks then called him again, his number seems to have been cut off… in the mean time a friend gave me the number of another plumber, he came round a few weeks ago, assessed the work, got down on his hands and knees, peered under the bath, told me he could do a good, tidy job… I haven’t heard from him since, he doesn’t answer his phone… this seems typical of workmen here. The painter who was doing the bulk of the work here last summer hasn’t been back since late September, he doesn’t answer my calls, he doesn’t seem to mind I have a load of his equipment still and unfinished work; the guy that came round last weekend and said begrudgingly he would finish off the one room that still needs the plaster finishing, and needs painting, the guy that said he would come back later in the week hung up on me when I called him mid-week…

… Saturday morning I decided that if I keep waiting for workmen I won’t ever have an operational kitchen… so I decided to start by attacking the rusty pipes myself. I sanded them down, brushed them down with a steel brush, then I degreased and washed them well. I switched the heating on to warm them, to ensure they dried well, and then painted them. First coat and they still looked terrible, second coat they are looking better…

… I will do a third coat during the week and try and find a plumber!

something pretty after all that ugliness!

early morning thrifting…

Tags

apartment, brocante, flea market, furniture, lights, thrifting

… soon after I moved to my new place I spotted signs for a “brocante”, a flea market, in my new neighbourhood one Sunday morning…

… I thought about booking a stall as I was trying to take advantage of the move to de-clutter, but decided I wasn’t going to be ready for that, and knew with the amount of work that needed doing in the apartment, sitting on the edge of the street all day watching people drift by eyeing my cast off possessions disdainfully was going to be more frustration than fun…

… the Sunday came and I was up early and off out dog walking. I remembered the flea market, so slipped some cash in my pocket along side my plastic bags…

… people were arriving, unloading cars, defining territory, not even thinking about selling as we walked by. I quickly spotted an orange pendant light fitting I liked. It didn’t belong to the girl guarding the pile of belongings, her friend was just looking for somewhere to park the car…

… as we waited I spotted a side lamp base I liked too… it was also his. We waited some more. Eventually car must have been parked and orange light owner arrived, told me his price, I offered him 40€ for the two pieces, he accepted, then I asked if I could come and pick them up on my way back from the forest…

… an hour or so later, walking back through the market, heading towards my lights, I noticed a wooden chair, cushion-less, in need of a little TLC, but with beautiful lines… 20€ later and it was mine. I asked the guy to look after it while I went and got my lights, left the dog at home and came back with 2 hands to pick it up!

… the lights had been packed into a box, they were taken home, then I rushed back out and went to pick up my chair, hoping he hadn’t sold it a second time to anyone else!

… a not bad haul for before breakfast!

a long list…

Tags

apartment, diy, photos, sewing, update

… of things I have been up to, of things to share, of things I need to photograph, of things still in progress, of things I need to do…

… I have been keeping busy at home, out and about, at work, travelling…

… last week I drafted my first post in forever, but somehow I blinked and missed the daylight this weekend, so I didn’t get the photos to accompany it… it will have to wait until next weekend…

… in the meantime, here are a few fragments from instagram of some of the things I have been up to in the past months…

sunny steps…

Tags

diy, ikea, ikea bekvam, paint, painting, steps, stool, yellow

… its not like I have nothing to do at the minute…

• there are still a few remnants of wallpaper to be wrestled from the closed balcony, the plasterers are approaching steadily…
• I want to take the planks out the hall cupboard and sand and repaint them…
• I have various light fitting projects flitting through my mind…
• I need to refinish a vintage cupboard I bought at the beginning of the year and that has been sitting in the corner of my bedroom since then, but I can’t lift it outside on my own to paint it, or back inside once it is painted, so I need to wait until I can rope someone into helping me move it (and make my mind up on how I want to paint it)…
• I am half way through making a new dog bed…
• I have a bunch of other sewing projects whirling through my mind, using fabric from the bloggers meet last month and earlier acquisitions…
• I need to pack up this apartment, and call the movers to fix a moving date, and then start worrying about all the other bureaucratic stuff that a move involves: services, insurance, parking permits, etc, etc…
• I need to trim the hedges as every time the landlord appears with more potential tenants he makes a point of telling me I let the hedges get out of hand…
• I need to make real progress on this consultancy contract I am working on…

… so it seemed perfectly logical I to decide to paint my classic Ikea BEKVAM stool a couple of weeks ago! I was in the DIY shop looking at doorbell covers, and came home with a pot of sunshine “lego yellow” paint…

… I deliberated painting as is, but a few of the screws were coming loose, I have had these steps for years, I bought them in Madrid when I was living in Lisbon, and before we had IKEA in Portugal, they moved from apartment to apartment there, went into storage, got shipped to Scotland and are now in Belgium, so I decided to take them apart and paint each piece individually and then put them back together. I am not sure that was the best idea as some of the pieces were really fiddly to paint and each coat took me 2 sessions with adequate drying time between…

… I ended up doing 3 coats, with about 2 weeks break between coats, life kept getting in the way, finally I finished them today. I hope the paint will last, these steps get used a lot. Maybe I should have varnished them too…

… I can’t wait to see them in my new sunny kitchen…

fly on the wall…

Tags

apartment, design, fire alarm, fly, jalo helsinki, wish list

… today I finally stripped the last of the wallpaper…

… the plasterers are in, finishing off the walls, patching them up, priming and painting faster than I ever could do by myself. They let me have a go at plastering one day, and quickly went back over my attempt, smoothing my fumbling, lumpy strokes…

… this week they should bring the sanding machines in and start work on the floors too… things are moving, but there is still so much to do and I hope to move mid-September!

… we need to work out whether we can remove the radiators to fix the walls behind them (and probably paint them while we have them out) and I hope an electrician will come and sort out the random cables the other electricians (who are now on holiday) left behind, television, telephone and doorbells, inter-phones and who knows what!

… somehow searching for not too ugly doorbells, I ended up looking at fire alarms… it is early days yet, I don’t have a finished ceiling to attach one to, but I think I am decided, when I do have to buy my fire alarm, this is the one I am going to get, by Jalo Helsinki…

the art of wallpaper removal…

Tags

apartment, fabric softener, renovation, wallpaper, wallpaper removal

… close to 300 m2 of wallpaper, over 80 years of decorating history…

… not just one layer, but three to five layers, sometimes painted between layers, everything painted over the final layer…

…initially I thought I could just paint over the paper, and make do until I decided to redecorate, one room at a time, but the electricians cut deep channels in each wall, often taking entire sections of wallpaper with them. Other places you touched the wallpaper and could feel the decades of wallpaper paste crumbling behind the armour of paint and paper…

… I started peeling off corners here and there, then became more systematic, working one room at a time, hiding in the small bedroom as the electricians were cutting open walls and you couldn’t see across the living room for the billowing dust. I have found endless “treasures” hidden behind the paper, the inevitable sums and calculations, a quick sketch of a street map, a child’s drawing of a face, I think it might have been a bear… that was between layers, impossible to salvage or even photograph in it’s entirety. The biggest mystery has been two dates – was the apartment first decorated over the Christmas of 1930, is it dates of birth, or heaven forbid the life span of a lost infant… I will never know.

… initially the whole place was wrapped in a delicate flowery print, when that got too filthy and too subtle it was replaced with metallic golden swirls, impressive, but probably very oppressive. Typical Belgian architecture has the three main rooms in a row, “en enfilade”, meaning I have a 17m long main room, but the middle section doesn’t get any direct natural light. With all those gold swirls it most have been so dark! Later years the swirls were papered over with a more subtle beige textured paper, and then later the final layer was added, in some rooms this has embossed flowers, in others it is plainer. We will never know what the colour schemes were.

… real decorating risks were taken in the small bedroom, and this was where I had most layers to contend with, there was also a period of navy blue and green tartan, and a yellow paper (with the child’s drawing)…

… other finds under the paper included unwanted electric sockets. It seems if you no longer wanted a socket, you just papered over it, usually removing the metal plate from the outside, never disconnecting wires or removing the “innards”. That explains why my electricians found a number of wires in the walls that no amount of pulling would budge!

… before starting paper removal I did my research, spending more than an evening with the inexhaustible sources of knowledge and wisdom: google and youtube… I read and assessed the pros and cons of steam vs. fabric softener, mechanical vs. physical effort, and concluded for my walls the best approach was:

• remove as much of the painted outer layer of paper as possible dry, sometimes other layers came off too this way.
• once I had the “waterproof” painted layer off, wet the walls with a water and fabric softener mix and wait a while – this is the hardest part, but the waiting really makes a difference!

… initially I followed the recommendation to use hot water and a 1:3 ratio of softener to water, applied with a paint roller to small areas at time… the first rooms took me almost a day/wall.

… I quickly dropped the hot water as I didn’t have a hot water source, or electricity, so I was heating a pan of water at a time on my camping stove… I decided “to hell with this” and switched to cold water and saw no noticeable difference.

… then I spoke to the plasterer who is going to fix up all my walls and he told me to go out and buy a cheap garden spray pump… he told me I could use the cheapest washing up detergent I could find if I wanted, but I already had 2 bottles of (hypo-allergic!) fabric softener, so I have stuck with that, but at a much lower ratio than 1:3. He told me just to spray the whole wall, and get it nice and wet, and wait… and he was right! Less fabric softener water splattering me in the face than with the roller and I have been “zooming” through the place ripping wallpaper off walls at the rate of almost a room per day…

… only the two small entrance halls left to go…

switching light switches…

Tags

1930s, apartment, berker, electricity, light switches, renovation, replica

… hardly anything had been changed from the original 1930s design…

… the person who owned my new apartment prior to me lived there from the mid 1960s until 2010, when she died, leaving an empty apartment and no one to inherit it. In her time there she had probably added to the countless layers of paint on wallpaper and wallpaper on paint on wallpaper, she had unfortunately relatively recently updated the kitchen and bathroom, but she hadn’t done much else.

… all the doors are original, the windows are original, the wooden floors and granite floors are original, the three fireplaces are original (although sadly not working), and I suspect much of the electrics were original!

… prior to selling in an auction, the solicitor has to carry out all the usual structural and infrastructural surveys. I bought the place knowing full well the electrical survey had a big red “FAIL” stamped across it. That is the first thing I have been tackling – or rather I contracted out. The electricians have been working for a week already, my heart is bleeding as the whole apartment is thick in dust, the walls have gaping gashes that are being patched over, and holes are ready to receive new sockets and light switches…

… when I went back to the apartment after buying it, the second visit after my first 10 minute visit with about 20 other people there, I took the time to look at the details a bit more closely, and I realised it was going to need a bit more than a lick of paint to make it liveable…

… light switches… the place was a concise history in light switches of the 20th century, from the original brass 2 button options, to chunky Bakelite external switches, to inset Bakelite switches, to sleeker square 80s designs (installed with inter-phone wiring, my electricians were “impressed”)… I didn’t actually get round to photographing them all before they were swiftly removed and relegated to the depths of a plastic bag, to be reviewed and assessed at a later date!

… I loved the original brass switches. I am trying to maintain as much original character as I can, while at the same time making it a practical and energy efficient home for the 21st century. I googled and searched ebay and found similar switches for sale, and thought about it, but then realised I didn’t feel 100% comfortable with them, that I actually wanted something more technologically advanced – I have a lot of respect for electricity!

… then I stumbled upon something that caught my eye… their website stated:

“Modern and classic – the Berker Serie 1930 in the style of the functional Bauhaus design creates a special ambience. The most modern technology concealed behind a timeless classic façade. A perfect combination for those who appreciate that special touch.”

… that ticked all my boxes. I started looking for suppliers, I found one in the Netherlands, I visited a wholesaler here, “no they couldn’t get them for me”, I called the importer “your electrician should be able to get them at the wholesaler”, I sent my electrician back to the wholesaler, “no they couldn’t get them”, I called the suppliers in the Netherlands, “of course we can send them to Belgium”… I ordered my light switches 2 days ago, they arrived today.

… I was like a kid at Christmas as I opened the box, each switch beautifully packaged, my electrician thinks I am mad not taking the cheap basic model, there are some things that can’t be explained…

… now I am thinking I should have ordered the wall sockets too!