happiness is a warm hot-air gun

this is coming down

exploratory hole

Last week we got planning permission for the new kitchen & bathroom, so here's some 'before' pictures. The current kitchen extension is coming down because there wasn't enough foundation to allow us to build a bathroom on top. We could have under-pinned but is was just as easy to pull it down, build new founds and build up anew.



you can see next door's upstairs bathroom which ours will but up against

Our new kitchen will be higher and longer, with a utility room at the end, and even a wood shed. Above will be the bathroom with a sloping ceiling and lots of windows and skylights.


Tony isolating the kitchen electrics

We isolated the wiring in the kitchen ahead of the demolition. As usual, it wasn't straight forward, but Tony figured it out and made it safe. So this week it's coming down. The neighbours have been warned. They're a friendly bunch, both of which took us into their own homes & showed us around, then came into ours, eager to see what we were up to.








Unfortunately, the demolition didn't start on Monday as planned, as Brewie the builder was finishing off another job. So Tony fetched me a hot air gun, and I made a start on the staircase; my aim is to have the handrail stripped and varnished, and all the rest painted white, with a striped runner. However, all of the stairs is currently covered in the lumpiest white paint you ever did see. Honestly, it's a mess. So my job is to strip the worst of the paint, sand down and undercoat. The stair rails are coming up a treat, and so is the under side of the handrail. But I'll use Nitromors on the rail, not the hot-air gun, as there's only a thin layer of paint on that and I don't want to go gung-ho and ruin it. I got seven posts done in just over an hour, and I was sweating buckets.