Kitchen Remodeling — Week 15

I managed to get a plumber, who was working on another project, to come over to do a day’s work. We wanted him to move two radiators to their new location and remove one from the kitchen. The work itself took him 3-4 hours, the other 4 hours of the day were spent on tea-breaks and telling stories. This is normal with British builders - in fact, most of them don’t even do a decent job or they tell you that certain things can’t be done (because they don’t want to do them!) and / or charge a fortune. At least this plumber did a good job and didn’t charge an arm & a leg! On the other hand he very efficiently consumed an entire week’s worth of our organic biscuits. Anyway, he also helped to uninstall the sink - and we temporarily reinstalled the washing machine. I do need to do some washing at some point. But we now have no kitchen sink..

We created a stud-partition frame to block off the old kitchen door, then covered it with plasterboard. This is ready to plaster. I’ve organised a plasterer to come this weekend. By then everything that needs to be plastered has to be ready for him, namely:- the walls, where removing the old tiles ripped off the plasterboard, have to be re-covered with new pieces of plasterboard; between the kitchen and the living room (where the ends and the top of the partition wall used to be); all the remaining dado-rails have to be removed from around the house; the boxed-in utility conduit has to be re-constructed etc… There is a lot to do  - although the plasterer guy came over yesterday, to price up the work, and he said the walls don’t need a complete overall skim - only over the damaged areas. I was worried that the dado-rail marks will not disappear, but he assured me that just a skim of plaster over those areas will hide the marks and I won’t see a thing! Anyway, at least the whole of the walls don’t need to be plastered - that would have been rather expensive I should imagine.

Below I have put a couple of photos. The first one shows how the kitchen looked when we opened up the space and what it looks like now. It feels like it’s a long in the future before we will have a fully functioning kitchen. The whole first floor is a complete mess and there is dust everywhere, despite my covering up and sealing everything with plastic sheets. Bust dust just gets through all my carefully taped enclosures… it’s very irritating.