Conversation Pieces

On the 17th of July, two bright-eyed , bushy-tailed shiny little souls started building a kitchen.

Like all adventurers setting off on a voyage of discovery, they were nervous but hopeful.

Little did they realise that a month from that fateful date they still wouldn’t be finished. This is their story…

Ok, so that’s a tad dramatic… but a month! It’s been a month already? Oh bugger!

I guess we’ve made lots of progress for people who’ve been fitting this in around work, a holiday, more work, getting another flat ready for selling and whatever else we’e been up.

First of all, we’ve made and put up all the cabinets. We’ve installed (with a bit of help from an electrician friend) the oven and induction hob. We have lights were there were none before. There’s new plugs, a new extractor fan, a new fridge and a new freezer. And a heck of a lot of dust!

(This is our new oven… I like how he looks like he’s smiling. But I like that he cooks our food even more!)

BUT… the worktop isn’t arriving until the middle of September so we can’t put the flooring down until after then. Bummer.

And we’ve had to enlist help building our kitchen island. We were pretty confident we could build this ourselves… until we realised that as a kitchen island is a non-standard thing, you don’t get any instructions for it. At all. Ikea just give you some huge lengths of end panels and that’s it. Try as we might we’ve not been able to make sense of how those end panels are meant to translate into an island. So we’ve got a joiner round to quote for it but he can’t do the work until 2 weeks from now. Drat.

There’s also a 30cm wide space on one side that we can’t decide what to do with. Ikea don’t have a wall cabinet in that size with our door. We had thought of getting a corner type shelf thing but went off the idea.

So any suggestions for what to do with the space would be gratefully received. I’ve been thinking of using it for something statementy but I’ve no idea what yet.

Other things we haven’t decided what to do with yet include our Superman splashback that we had for the sink… He’s about 120cm wide but the wall space on the sink side is now 210cm so he doesn’t quite work anymore – but we’ve got used to him moodily staring at our dirty dishes so if we can figure out a way to keep him, we will.

However there have been some rather joyful discoveries of having a proper kitchen (or at least proper kitchen cabinets) for the first time in nearly 2 years… I now have a little drawer just for my tea!

Yes, it’s a bit indulgent but by god I do love my tea! It’s also been great to put all our things on shelves again. Strange how something so simple can feel like such a huge step! The heart mugs are ones the OH made me as a present back in 2004, while the happy rainbow cup was one I found for him in a charity shop. (Yes, his real name isn’t actually OH!)

It’s also been so nice to rediscover some things that have been packed away for aaaaaaaaages… like my babycham glasses. (Can you tell I have a habit of collecting things?)

Of course our diy hasn’t been limited to just the kitchen (because we’re crazy like that)… we also put up our Mini Moderns wallpaper in the hall.

It’s now one of the first things you see when you come into our flat… and it just makes me feel ridiculously happy. (Badgers to do that to me for some reason!)

However two members of our household have not been such fans of the month-long diy-athon…

Grey ninja suit cat has been giving us this look a lot… we translate this as I command you to stop drilling, hammering, painting etc and pay attention to me!

While our owl-fox cat – who has a more nervous disposition (she freaks out and hides when anyone rings the doorbell) – has taken to her bed.

Wait, did I say her bed? I meant, our bed. (Why do cats act like they own everything and somehow convince you that they do too?)

We expect a full recovery from her sometime mid-September… around the same time we think we’ll have a finished kitchen.

If it’s not finished by then, I may take to my bed too!

Yay! There’s 100 bits of a kitchen in my kitchen! Currently I’m just staring at all the boxes, thinking ‘eeeek where do we start?’! Thankfully, we have a good friend who’s an electrician and the OH’s Dad is coming through at the weekend to help with some of the boy stuff, like putting up the wall cabinets – I’ll admit it, I’m not so good at that bit!

I’m so looking forward to it all being done… it’s going to be a million times better than how it was last September

So we went to Ikea tonight. We were going to buy our kitchen but as with all these things, it took longer to put it all together on the system than we thought it would. So by the time we were finished, Ikea was closing.

We left empty-handed. But we didn’t come home empty-handed.

We were driving through the streets of Edinburgh, dodging the tourists who aimlessly wander out into the road at this time of year, when we clocked two people putting this velvet chair into the street.

The guy must have seen our expressions as he shouted to us “Would you guys like it?”

15 minutes later and the chair was sitting in our living room – already a firm favourite with our owl-fox-cat.

We think he makes a good brother to our Cowboy Parker Knoll…

And all because we took a fruitless trip to Ikea!

Serendipity or what?

Happy longest day of the year everyone xx

My kitchen obsession? I had a revelation about it the other day.

I bought my first kitchen at 22 – it had blue doors with a wooden worktop.

It was basic but I adored it.

But it wasn’t really my first kitchen…

My first was a Bluebird A La Carte Kitchen.

It stands as a testament to how much I loved this kitchen that I was vaguely jealous when my little sis acquired it many years later.

For those who you remember this kitchen – and for those of you who don’t – here’s the original TV ad:

Please note I never tried to cook actual food with my A La Carte kitchen – only ever sweetie fried eggs!

Image via Rainbow Mermaid

God I love this kitchen… the integrated handles, the little cubbyholes, the shiny, bright whiteness…

Yup along with my ‘slight’ wedding obsession, I have a ‘getting a new kitchen’ obsession again.

It’s pretty much the last thing to do in our dusty old flat (other than putting a fireplace in the living room) and then we’re done.

Up until recently we couldn’t face having workmen etc back in the flat and having life disrupted again… so we’ve made do with some freestanding bits and bobs from Ikea and Habitat… but after planning a wedding and looking at the costs involved (eeek!) suddenly putting in a new kitchen seems really easy!

So here’s a few of my favourite kitchen references of the moment… I don’t think our kitchen will end up as ‘interesting’ as these but who cares, I’ll finally have a kitchen!

How fab are the round hole door handles… also crushing on the green table just a bit!

Love love love the yellow… not sure it’s that sanitary to have your cat on the worktop though!

Ooooh… I think that’s all I have to say on this one!

This one is maybe more ‘normal’ than the others but if I woke up tomorrow to discover the kitchen fairies had put this in my flat, I’d be pretty happy!

All yummy kitchens found via one of my fav blogs: The Seventy Tree

It’s been a weird old week.

After all the rushing and stressing of the past few weeks, which included a whole weekend of helping out with a music video shoot at the Barrowlands…

…I was all ready for some serious relaxing.

And then the heavens opened up.

Yup, it’s been foul this week in Scotland.

But thankfully it’s not been all doom and gloom.

This week, we’ve got wallpaper up in the living room, wallpaper up in the kitchen and started to reupholster another chair.

So here’s our week in pictures…

The April showers may have started early… but we now have our sunshiney Miss Print wallpaper up in the living room – and some cheery daffies too.

And as much as we love that wallpaper (it’s so happy), we are completely besotted with our kitchen wallpaper.

Regulars might remember my previous post on wallpaper… it inspired me to buy the Thornback and Peel wallpaper I’d had my eye on for ages. Doesn’t come out too well on the iphone but I’ll do better pics once the kitchen is done. (Promise.)

After all this diy fun (which has included a week’s worth of stressing over flooring for the kitchen and the hall… why is it so hard to find a rubber or vinyl that looks nice, doesn’t scratch and isn’t a ridiculous price?) we got cracking on another of our chair projects.

The last Parker Knoll we needed a bit of help on so we were determined to do this one all ourselves. Thankfully, our lastest freecycle/freegle Parker Knoll acquirement has no broken springs or internal problems so that’s been a big help!

But of course we forgot to take a proper ‘before’ pic… so here’s the midway pic:

And here’s is the prepped chair, ready for its new fabric… looks rather smart already I think.

And here’s the fabric… a rather budget-friendly, Japan-inspired one from Ikea. (As you might have guessed I’m loving all their Japan-themed fabrics at the moment… especially the one with Godzilla attacking Stockholm!)

Can’t wait to see how the final thing looks – hopefully we’ll get that done this weekend (inbetween munching Easter eggs of course!).

Happy Friday everyone – and hope you all have a lovely Easter weekend xx

P.S. A belated thanks to This Girl for the happy blog award – I’ll get round to passing it on soon.

I may have mentioned already but I’m feeling rather Christmassy this year… so I thought I would share some pics of our festive efforts before I disappear from blogland for the year.

Here’s our 7ft tree that the other half carried home himself! I’m only 5’3 so decorating was a little bit trickier this year…

And because I’m technically about to show you the full living room, I thought I’d give you a wee reminder as to what it looked like when we first bought the place… so this is our living room in October 2008…

And this is it December 2009…

As well as putting up the decorations, we also got round to putting up some of my vintage art deco mirrors (I own over 20 of them so they’ve been piled up in the spare room for a while now). This one is perhaps the most Christmassy of them all…

But I also like my little cloud one’s reflection too… you can see my pile of presents I’ve been wrapping on the fireplace hearth.

This is the fireplace in all it’s (rather gloomy due to my flash not working) glory… I got the Victorian mirror from a junk shop in Glasgow for £2! (Perhaps my best bargain ever!)

Also we’re loving our paper snowflakes this year… these are our smallest ones (all the others are in the hall) and they weren’t meant to go here at all… I just stuck them here originally to stop the cats from sitting on them!

And since I haven’t shared this already… here’s the Alexander Girard UO cushion we got for our Parker Knoll. It says ‘love’ in lots of different languages.

And these are the other UO cushions my friend grabbed for me while she was in New York. I adore the Where The Wild Things Are cushion…

Of course, no homey post would be complete without a cat pic… and here she is… our half pedigree, half feral cat looking vaguely festive!

We also sprayed some snowflakes onto the windows (told you we were feeling festive!)

And these little Paperchase owls are this year’s addition to our Xmas decs…

Of which my favourite decoration of all is our Xmas star that my little sis made for me about 12 years. It takes pride of place at the top of the tree every year.

Anyway, I think that’s more than enough Xmas stuff from me… I’m going to take a wee blogging break for the holidays. So have a lovely lovely Xmas everyone and will see you all in 2010 if not before!

Merry Xmas! xx

Kitchens? Yup, you read that right. Kitchens. We haven’t even finished the bathroom and already I’m dreaming about the new kitchen. I think it’s a side effect of having the bathroom nearly done – one room has gone from being pretty grim to, well, pretty… and by comparison our kitchen looks even crappier. (Plus our tolerance levels of lack of storage, lack of proper oven etc are wearing pretty thin.)

Right now we’re hoping to either have a kitchen by my birthday or by Christmas (we just need to work out our sums a bit more)… But here are some of the beautiful kitchens we wouldn’t mind Santa bringing (or the birthday fairy…)

Regular readers will know how crazy I am about yellow and black right now… I also am not a big fan of handles and I love glossy doors so this should be my dream kitchen…

Except it’s not… this currently is… God, I’m loving that green!

Then again… how cheerful would it be to wake up in the morning and come through to this room for my morning cup of green tea (and there’s no handles in this one either)

This one is also relentlessly cheery… however I think I’m being sucked in by the bunting here (don’t you hate when bunting does that to you?). Actually when I analyse it – this isn’t too far off what we have now. No storage, no oven to be seen and a sink… stick a George Foreman in there and that’s us (just minus the bunting). So maybe not…

I’m also half tempted by this kitchen but I think that might mainly be because of the yellow chair (and those drawers)…

This is a little closer to what we have planned… in no way other than we like the idea of having double wall cabinets to give us extra storage. We have a rather odd shaped kitchen with an alcove bit so we want to put cabinets pretty much all the way up to the ceiling – the other half thinks that will make us look like a deli?

Oh bother… all this looking at kitchens is getting me too excited and impatient. At least whatever we end up with it won’t look like this!

P.S. The kitchen is in a slightly better state than this now… the walls have been papered, the floor sheeted, we have shade on that bare bulb… getting there slowly but surely! Make that very slowly but very surely!

P.P.S. Have a lovely weekend everyone. Hope you’re up to something fun? xx

1. Via Living Etc
2 and 3. Retro Kitchen designed by Eliana Tomas
4 and 5. Via Living Etc
6. Via Door Sixteen
7. Via The Seventy Tree