doing the kitchen salsa ...

[percival]

It's back up!

The colour on three of the walls now actually MATCHES the nice cream coloured units the previous owners had put in. The fourth wall needs some extra TLC in the form of a plasterboard, because half the wall came down when my husband took off the superfluous tiles that adorned that wall, but that's a day's work.

The units are back on the walls, high enough to provide space for two IKEA rails on the walls. The IKEA rails store spices, kitchen roll, and kitchen implements. There's an extra rail on the window wall for sauces and condiments, and a nifty little set of storage containers, courtesy of IKEA (as always) over the cooker means that I now have rice, two types of lentils, porridge, and muesli immediately to hand.

All it took to polish this baby off was an extra trip by me to IKEA (roughly an hour door to door, involving five minutes' walk at both ends and a change of buses), plus three hours of dedicated working and a well-timed call to the pizza service. I'd neglected said call yesterday, and ended up the worse for wear.

What these past two days have shown me is how very important it is for me to be able to cook nutritious food for myself. I am much more sensitive to the artificiality of pizzas and processed food, and I really need to watch my protein intake now.

It's also important to restrain my husband from finishing things off "properly". My next priorities are:
a) get the bedroom refloored with acoustic flooring
b) get the bed out of the living room
c) redo the bedroom walls (strip off the wallpaper, replaster any shoddy handywork underneath, of which there will be plenty)
d) refloor the living room with acoustic underlay and laminate
e) redo the living room walls (that might actually be a mere paint job over the existing wall paper that's actually still quite decent)

Once all of that is done, we can focus on finishing things off nicely, because those leftover jobs are mostly weekend jobs.

Fortunately, my husband is VERY good at DIY. I'll do what I can to help, but my specialty is painting and stripping off wallpaper. There are a few jobs I can do myself, such as giving the rest of the hallway a quick lick of paint, painting the bath surround, etc.

But yeah, things are looking up and very much back on track. Let's hope we can make huge inroads into a)-c) in the first week of March when my husband has a week's holiday.

Comments

[actionreplay.livejournal.com]

Actually I would recommend not painting over the wallpaper, unless the paper you do remove shows that you need to reskim all the walls. This is because unless the wallpaper in textured, paint over wallpaper doesn't always last as well as it might otherwise... but yes the kitchen sounds like it's going along nicely. So I take it all the tiles with piccies of flowers, fruit and veg are gone?

[perceval.livejournal.com]

They're not, but the wall paper is down, and that is in itself a HUGE improvement. The tiles can wait ... they're actually not too bad anymore.