We’ve ordered a bunch of stuff – the boiler’s coming on Monday, taps for the shower and bathroom sink and a pump so we can have the laundry in the basement are coming on Thursday. And all this spending spree brought on a rather nasty realisation – with the bank having taken so insanely long to let us buy the house, we ended up spending about £6000-8000 more on rent than we’d figured on when we first did our calculations and budget. The bank also insisted on external render works which will cost us about £3000. And what with the bank withholding £2000 and needing to get the bathroom wall replaced, our budget is getting raaaather tight. We both want the windows replaced quite desperately – me because I feel trapped by the hideous picture windows and Djeli because they’re single-glazed and the house is going to be freezing & waste a whole lot of money on vanishing heating as soon as it turns chilly.

So we’ve made a bit of an about-face and come to a big decision: we’re not going to buy a kitchen, we’re going to make it ourselves. About 3 months ago when I had a bit of a book-buying frenzy, one of the books I bought was Terence Conran’s DIY By Design. I got it mostly because it had instructions for making your own bed because it looked like we wouldn’t be buying one for a while, but it also has a Conran-designed kitchen with full instructions to make it yourself. We figure that if we keep things simple, it should be entirely possible for us to make our own kitchen – after all, I never wanted head-height cupboards, our requirements are pretty basic for the most part and Djeli already has some experience making cabinets – he made a special shelf unit to slot into the bathroom cupboard here to hold loo rolls (one of the best things about this flat now!) and a clever pot stand to use some dead space in the kitchen here too.

I’m surprisingly happy about this decision. I expected I’d start to worry but I haven’t. I feel quite liberated, really – most of the prefab kitchens I’ve seen have left me severely underwhelmed by the design while gasping at the cost. The only ones I’ve really liked have been bespoke, which there was never room in the budget for, but I really like the simplicity of the Conran design. I also like that we can start out making it as open shelves and add cupboard doors later if (more likely ‘when’) we get fed up with the dust.

I’ve gone back to looking at range cookers, on the grounds that it’d be easier to install and then we wouldn’t need to worry about cutting holes in a worktop or ensuring there’s enough ventilation in a home-made cabinet for a fitted oven. And I think I may have already found what I want – it’s a tiny 60cm range by Smeg – pyrolitic cleaning, rotisserie, wok burner – everything we wanted, and cheaper than buying a separate oven and cooktop with these features too.

So it’s a big change from the original plan, but I think it’ll be for the best. Djeli seems to think so too, although as usual his brain is bounding ahead of the pack and dreaming of hand-chiselled wooden sinks – I’m all for it, but I think I’ll pick out a normal sink too, just in case

PS. I now also own a pair of heavy-duty gel kneepads – bring on the scrubbing! Nails, do your worst – you can’t reach my knees now!

Knees don’t enjoy kneeling on nails

Even though I’ve removed what feels like 10,000 nails from the floor of my study, it seems there’s still another 10,000 more that I couldn’t see because of the dirt. Scrubbing is proving to be both a satisfying – look how CLEAN this is!

- and a revolting experience – ewwww! look at the filth from one tiny corner! and most of it’s still on the floor waiting to be mopped up! ewwwwwww!

but it’s definitely a worthwhile one. Finally it feels like these rooms may be clean enough to live in when we move in in 3 weeks’ time. It’s also starting to feel like there may be a slim possibility of the bathroom being complete in time for moving in too, even if it’s still awaiting its window and we need to resort to heavy-duty plastic sheeting to keep us decent when showering.

All in all, finally there’s a feeling of it coming together and feeling like an actual home. We’ve made almost all the bathroom decisions now – today should see the boiler ordered, sometime this week we’ll go to Ikea and buy the sink and cabinet (OMG that just made me realise we haven’t even thought about taps!), and yesterday we identified the tiles we want for most of the bathroom so now I just need to find places that sell really stylish mosaics for the feature wall because the affordable-tile places only have tedious ones and I want this wall to be really nice. Fortunately it’s also going to be pretty small so we can afford something a bit pricier because we won’t need very much of it! The builder’s booked in to come and rebuild the far wall (which is supported by a rusty girder so it seemed better to replace it all now than wait until we drop out of the sky while showering), and the plumber’s booked to install the boiler & test the heating while the wall’s being built, then to move straight on to plumbing and tiling the bathroom once the builder’s done. Electrician still needs to be booked in, but I think that’ll happen either today or tomorrow – that one’s in Djeli’s hands.

Progress! These are the tiles we’ve chosen:

Apart from the scrubbing, I have been continuing to remove the wallpaper in Djeli’s study. This weekend I’ve been focusing on the chimney breast area and I have to say, it’s like the labours of Hercules, but with less manure – there’s so many layers!!!!! From top to bottom there are:

1. Cream-painted woodchip wallpaper
2. Mint green-painted woodchip wallpaper
3. White paint
4. Green wallpaper with a light stripe
5. Kitchen design wallpaper similar to that on the wall by the light switch but in a different colourway
6. Lovely wallpaper of coloured patches with a network of raised fine white lines across it
7. Blue paint which may be original – certainly isn’t plastic paint anyway

I absolutely adore the lowest layer of wallpaper – I almost wish it extended over the whole wall so that we could keep it!

You can see more close-up details in the Flickr set for the house.

The mint green paint is hell. Pure plastic so the steam doesn’t penetrate it unless you rip it up a bit with the scraper to start with. The white paint is not so plasticky but just as determined to stay on the wall. So the cream woodchip comes away easily, then I battle my way through the green layer, then another battle through the white layer.

To add to the woes, the green paint woodchip doesn’t extend over the full wall – in places it’s just green paint directly on cement. And some damn fool has cement rendered directly over layers in places – it looks like they tried to remove the paper but gave up and just slapped the cement on top, so you get to a point where the paper’s been coming away beautifully and then it stops because you’ve just found the concrete.

In other places they’ve spackled cracks or gaps with God-knows-what. Something that hasn’t dried fully, at any rate – some of it’s white, some brown. The brown is cracked and they both scrape quite softly away if you even lightly touch them with the scraper. If you told me the white was toothpaste I would not be surprised. Suspect we’re going to have to dig this crap out and maybe even see if the layer of cement that’s gone over the paper can be removed so we can clean things back properly.

My big concern with this haphazard use of cement and other random materials is about paint. Originally the walls were all plastered using lime, which allows them to breathe and prevents damp. Modern materials like cement and normal plaster though won’t let the house breathe – they’re fine for modern houses which have damp-proof courses, but this one doesn’t so without breathable material on the walls, the damp can’t evaporate and starts to damage the building. And as some fool in the past covered the whole of the outside in concrete render, it really needs to be able to breathe inwardly.

Add to this the problem that modern plastic paints won’t let lime render breathe but many natural paints need a porous surface to be applied to and the problem compounds because to find a paint that will let the lime do its breathing thing while still sticking to the cement bits is going to be quite difficult!

I’m having a lovely time anyway with my new paints books that I showed last time – REALLY interesting. I think I’m leaning towards limewash with added linseed oil for the floors but need to read some more to be certain. I wanted to use casein (milk curds) because the combintion of the casein and lime creates a strong glue-like effect that would ensure the paint would stick to the floor and not just brush off, but being milk, casein paints can be affected by mould if they’re in a damp area, and given that we’re planning to put carpet down as soon as we can (prob October or November), I wouldn’t want to risk someone dropping a glass of water and the paint under the carpet going all mouldy.

However, I’m planning on having a play with casein paint – traditional Shaker milk paints – to repaint the cupboard in the temporary kitchen. It’s a really well made cupboard – solidly build right into the wall, so I’m going to strip back the filthy and chipped plastic paint that’s on it now and repaint it using natural paints. It’s already got battens fixed inside so we’re going to make some shelves from some leftover floorboards and I’ll paint those too.

So that’s where we’re up to. Once I’ve bought some heavy-duty kneepads, I’ll be heading back out there later this week to do some more scrubbing and wallpaper steaming and possibly some paint-removing too. I’m also planning a trip to the wonderful Cornelissen’s to buy pigments for the paints – REALLY looking forward to that one – can’t wait!!!

And I got a fair bit done too, if I may say so – my original plan was just to get some more mopping done and see what happened. The mopping ended up involving removing a bunch of nails left over from when the boards under the carpet were taken up, so was a lot more strenuous and time-consuming than it sounds – as I swiped the the mop over the floor it would catch on any protruding nail – some I could remove, others I just had to bash down with a hammer so they were level with the floor instead of sticking up. Some of the nails I pulled up were actually screws – screws that had evidently been used as nails for some bizarre unknown reason.

As planned, I took a photo of how the floor had dried after the last mopping – still quite light (I suspect I mostly was just pushing mud around by the time I washed this patch) but there’s a visible difference between the mopped and unmopped part.

I guess I kind of felt inspired, being there alone and working to make the house nice, so after I mopped the whole of the top floor, I set about stripping the wallpaper from one of the walls in Djeli’s study with my steam wallpaper stripping tool. It seemed a good point to start – there’s only half the wall left because so much plaster fell away when we were trying to remove the tiles that had been stuck directly onto it for the bathroom in that room. And it had two layers of the dreaded woodchip wallpaper. We’d heard that that stuff is an absolute cow to remove but the steamer made it really easy. I’m not sure how much that was helped by the pretty intact paint layer underneath, but it’s off now (except for the bits I couldn’t reach because of my wonky post-injury ankles not being happy up ladders) and Djelibeybi has a green wall, which is a vast improvement over the nasty woodchip:

And then I cleaned up all the mess (why didn’t I think to deal with the wallpaper BEFORE I started cleaning the floor???) and mopped it again. So that room has now had 3 moppings and the landing and my room 1 each. This is going to take a while!

The other thing I did yesterday was that we’ve revised our bathroom plan due to finding a picture in Grand Designs magazine of a bathroom, similar in size to ours (it’s a little wider though) and beautifully done, which is making us rethink both tiling and – more critically – what we want to do with the window. So we need to play about with some ideas, and I figured the easiest way would be to have a rough drawing of what the bathroom will look like so we can experiment, so I drew this rather approximate perspective drawing of what we plan to do. The wall straight ahead will be the feature wall with the window, in the shower area, the loo sits back in a small alcove created where the second doorway was, and above the basin are a couple of plate mirrors, similar to those in the picture.

Djelibeybi and I also discussed the question of employment monsters. He’s been taken – he started his new contract this week – but while I’ve been on the brink of sending my CV out for about 3 weeks now, there’s always been something getting in the way – dental trauma, client jobs to be finished, new client jobs turning up, house stuff – and we’ve agreed now that I should focus on these other things until after the move – we’ve got a tight enough timeline as it is and a mere 3 weekends is not going to be nearly enough to get everything clean and nice, even in only 3 or 4 rooms, as well as packing if we’re both working full-time. So that’s that. No employment monster for me just yet.

But the house is progressing! This weekend I finally moved on from the endless sweep-and-vacuum routine I’ve been in for about the past two weeks and moved on to MOPPING. Yes, mopping. I went out and bought a £2 old-fashioned rope mop and after a last sweep-and-vacuum I started mopping the top floor.

I think from these photos it should be clear that I have not over-exaggerated the extent of the dust (and remember, this is after about 4 rounds of sweeping and vacuuming already!):

Observe, in particular, in the first picture, the colour of the mop (the mop was brand new out of the packet when I started mopping that room) and the colour of the water in the bucket (it was that colour basically after two dips of the mop!).

It’s great that the floor looks so dark after mopping, actually – it’s confirmed for both of us that we want to seriously consider dark floors throughout the house – it really does make the room feel much wider than the pale floor. The ceiling feels a little lower though, than with the light colour, so I don’t think I’ll be painting the skirting boards dark now but I really think it’ll look great when it’s a dark grey.

Unfortunately it’s also highlighted just how careless previous painters have been, especially in Djelibeybi’s study – blops all over the place, so I think I’m going to have to get in there with paint stripper or something before the Great Limewash Experiment commences.

Speaking of which, the course I was going to do filled up faster than anticipated so I’ve had to scrap that plan. To be honest, I’m not that sorry – I’ve been absolutely exhausted with everything I’ve been trying to fit in the past couple of weeks – work at the house, client work, preparing my renewed portfolio so I can apply for a real contract soon, not to mention dealing with having to get the half-crown installed on my tooth that was root-canalled over a year ago. So not having to go to Chichester, with all the attendant finding accommodation and working out travel, has actually been quite welcome.

Instead, today I made use of the Amazon gift voucher my lovely mama gave me for my birthday and bought two books which I think will help me with the Great Limewashing Experiment:

They both include recipes for natural paints, but while the first one looks immensely practical, including tips on what might have caused various problems, the second one looks like it might have some more creative ideas and just generally looked interesting.

So the plan now is: washing and scrubbing for the moment, then steam-cleaning (probably not till Djeli’s done whatever needs to happen with the ceilings – either patching or replacing). I’ll see how much of the paint splotches come off with the steaming and if need be then I’ll move on to paint-removing. Once that’s done and I feel the floors are as clean as can be, I’ll start the limewashing. Have to get onto the intense cleaning pretty quickly though – each thin coat of limewash needs to dry for about 24 hours, and if the employment monster takes me, the time to get 3 or 4 coats done (or preferably 5) before we move on 8 June is going to be very tight indeed!

I’m still plotting a day for people to come and join in the cleanup fun – unfortunately it seems the new weekend I’d planned (2 June) is the Jubilee weekend when some people will be joining in the festivities (and I’m hoping to be one of them ) and others will have fled in terror. So I need a new plan and I’m not sure what it will be.

But first for more cleaning!

Today I’ve read a couple of truly fascinating posts on the blog of Patrick Baty, an authority on architectural paint and colour. The first article, The Heirarchy of Colour in Eighteenth Century Decoration, yielded useful information about which bits to paint what colours – it seems that in the 18th century, the panelling and mouldings on the walls were an interpretation of classical columns (see the diagram in the article) so the wall paint should go all the way up to the top of the cornice – not to the bottom as we were thinking. I would imagine this would also have the effect of making the room seem taller.

The colours Baty shows in this article as “The Common Colours”, interestingly enough, reflect the colours I was thinking of – something like his Pearl Colour on the walls, and Lead Colour on the floors, with white ceilings. I found it interesting to discover that these Common Colours were the cheapest paint colours, and so would have most likely been used in modest homes such as ours. Also interesting to note is that Georgians usually painted the whole house the same colour – no different colours for different rooms, which is comforting for me because that was my original plan, but then I’d been a little concerned that it might feel a little overwhelming. Or boring. But hopefully this means it’ll be OK.

Of course, our house isn’t Eighteenth Century – from what we’ve been able to find out, it was probably built around 1850, officially early Victorian – so it’s Georgian outside, but really more Victorian inside, which kind of poses a conundrum about how to deal with the interiors. The one room (our bedroom) which seems to have original skirting boards and cornices also has picture rails which seem to be genuinely old picture rails, not modern ones that someone’s stuck on afterwards. The thing with this is that – as I understand it – picture rails were a Victorian invention and didn’t exist in the Georgian period. But as it’s there – and from our own experience as tenants, and bearing in mind that we will most likely need to rent the house out at some point, picture rails are fantastic because they allow for easy personalisation of a space without putting holes in the walls. But do we then paint them to match the walls (Georgian approach) or to match the ceiling (Victorian approach, I think)?

Of course, having then read Baty’s article on Lime Plaster and Subsequent Decoration and given the plaster disaster in Djeli’s study:

it would seem that after re-rendering – if we do it properly to allow the house to breathe – we may not be able to paint the walls properly for 2 years. But I guess that gives us LOTS of time to really think about what colours to use!

My first step before anything happens is to take casts of all these mouldings & cornices and so on, so that we have a record of what seems to be original so we can make the other rooms match that.

And then there’s the floors. We still seem to have the original boards, but they are FILTHY and bashed around, especially in the loungeroom where some moron decided to saw out a patch instead of just lifting them. It seems that in the Georgian period, where floors were made of cheaper woods such as pine, they would have been painted, possibly with a trompe l’oeil sort of pattern to make it look like it was actually a stone or marble floor. This is more faff than we’re prepared to go into, given the future carpeting – our original plan was to clean and paint the floorboards in the same colour as we’re planning to do the carpet. This will let us test out the colour and make the rooms feel cleaner and more finished until the carpet goes in – plus it will mean we can still have access to lift the floorboards as we build in various forms of cabling, including the home automation stuff that Djeli wants to play with.

However, we seem to have lucked out with the exterior colours. Our original plan was to make the outside of our house match that of our (joined) neighbour, which seems to be the right thing to do. And by a happy chance, the colour that the neighbour has fits with the recommendations in Baty’s Painting of Georgian Buildings post which says that rendered facades should use stone colours. Unfortunately the ironwork on the front of the house is painted black (should be some sort of grey – black came in much later, apparently) and the window frames are white (should be pale stone or off-white) but at least the overall colour will be correct, and it’s a colour we like, and the overall effect is very handsome, if not terribly historically accurate.

The one thing we haven’t really settled on yet is the colour for the front door. Baty’s table says the front door should use “Bronze Greens, Brunswick Greens, Invisible Greens, Red-Browns, Olive Browns”, which rather kills off both our ideas – Djeli had wanted black, and as I grew up in a house with a red door, I always feel a red-door house feels more like home but from this list, I’m thinking a nice green might work. Now to run it past Djeli… and get back to work!

Work has been continuing apace, in spite of my not blogging it for a while and now the house is basically gutted, which is a great step forward. Today it even smelled less dusty than usual, which feels like a huge leap forward.

Since I last wrote, we have dismantled the last of the awful bedsit bathrooms. This one I got to destroy myself in large part

I also uncovered some more of the mid-century kitchen wallpaper in the same room:

(There are more photos if you click through to Flickr)

Today’s chat with our neighbour revealed that this house has been bedsits for far longer than we’d thought – which probably explains why there would be kitchen wallpaper in a room right at the top of the house, and only on one wall of that room…

The ‘special’ find of that day was the discovery of a (damp and smelly) bird’s nest in the framework under the shower tray. Djeli found bird’s nests under the main bathroom too – guess those Kentish birds like damp conditions??

Today was a bit less exciting – we dismantled the bathroom frame, I spent a lot of time removing screws from bits of wood and also a lot of time pulling tiles off the walls. This last activity was more stressful than it would seem. The morons who made the bathroom stuck the tiles directly to the (probably original) lime render. Given that that render was probably put on about 160 years ago, and lime render has a tendency towards crumbliness, removing the tiles generally meant a large clump of render came adrift at the same time, exposing the bricks. There’s a whole sequence of the process on Flickr: start here if you’d like to see.

So the work is progressing well, really. A few more days should see us starting to do constructive – instead of destructive – work and I can’t wait for that to happen. On Thursday we’ll be pulling down the ceiling in the kitchen, which will firstly have the benefit of allowing the Rentokil inspector to check the beams and floorboards of the room above for woodworm and rot (we’re using the room above as our basecamp at the moment, so it still has kitchen cabinets and so on in it, which makes it difficult to take up the floor-covering for the inspection), and secondly allow us to put in a new ceiling that doesn’t have holes in it.

Oh, and since I received my new Zoom H1 recorder on Friday, I took it along today and recorded this in the garden

Finally, I got to use tools! I am now quite confident in the use of the electric screwdriver, a pair of sort of pliers with a wonk (don’t know the real name of it but the handles are on an angle to the head – you grip a recalcitrant screw with the head and use the long handles as a lever to turn it when a screwdriver won’t work, plus an assortment of implements for bashing at concrete and chipping tiles off walls. Much fun was had, and much achieved. Everything is now out of the bathroom, so we’re down to removing the rest of the layered flooring (discoveries: 1950s or 60s lino, a blob of furry blue carpet under the loo – ew!) and then it’ll be onto getting rid of the damn Artex. Who came up with the idea for that stuff anyway? There is no excuse for it!

We had a skip delivered yesterday too, and even though we weren’t really even trying to fill it, it’s now half full. Suspect we may go through quite a few of these, especially in the next few weeks!

The exciting discovery for the day was a patch of ancient wallpaper which was revealed when we peeled away some of the hanging Artex (a lot of it has been very badly applied, so where there’s a gap you can just grab it and pull it away) in the hall outside the bathroom. It looks like it could be made of leather and has a beautiful design – hoping I can gently remove some of the surroundings and see more of it. It’s on an original wall so could be any age back to 1830 or thereabouts.

The huge achievement for the day was getting rid of the whole of the bathroom that was in the ground-floor back room (to be the kitchen) – so much space now! We unscrewed stuff, ripped off panelling, chipped tiles off walls and Djeli manfully stepped in and dealt with the absolutely disgusting toilet. SO glad we bought a steam cleaner – it’s just wonderful to know that every inch of the house will be sterilised before we do anything on top of it! So the kitchen space is now basically clear and my job over Friday and Saturday will most likely be to get it as clean as possible – removing Artex and normal wallpaper from walls, replacing nails in floorboards and scrubbing like a demon, probably. It’ll be great to see it looking like a proper room.

We’ve also come to a conclusion on the bathroom – the shower will indeed be by the window looking out over the garden. I polled the hive brain that is Twitter because I was concerned that a window inside the shower cubicle could be offputting for those of a more modest disposition, but out of 13 responses, not a single one said a categorical no and the majority (6) voted “Love it!”, with 4 opting for “Meh. Don’t really care” and 3 for “Depends”. So now we know where we’re putting the shower, we just need to work out where to position the window for maximum light & air vs maximum privacy. That’s Friday’s challenge.

I also finally got to meet our neighbour of 3 doors up – she’s been doing up another house that was owned by the same guy who desecrated our place and she’s nearly finished it. And WOW. It’s gorgeous! She’s got a wonderful carpenter in who managed to duplicate the original newelposts (?) and handrail to restore the stairway. He’s also built absolutely lovely bookcases in her sitting room and I think we may need to steal him once he’s done redecorating the house she’s living in at the moment (apparently her plan is to move into the house she’s doing up once it’s done then redecorate and rent out her current house). Really interesting to see some of the changes she’s made too – in particular, she’s put the kitchen in the basement, and extended the basement out to make a beautiful dining area, with a skylight and big french doors out to a little patio with a couple of steps up to the garden proper. It’s going to be gorgeous and I am SO jealous! Also jealous that while cleaning up the place, she discovered that most of the fireplaces in her house were intact. I suspect they’re not in ours as only one room had a fireplace boarded over – the rest seem to be proper plaster, which is a shame because her fireplaces are fascinating – all quite different and the basement even has the original kitchen fireplace! It was really interesting to see that it was quite as plain as I’d expected it to be, while upstairs has slightly more decorative mantelpieces, mostly with very ornate Victorian grates (probably updated later, although it’s hard to tell as these houses were built right on the Regency/Victorian cusp. It’s possible her house is a little younger than ours though as it has more exterior decoration whereas ours is plain as plain can be on the outside).

The biggest problem at the moment is the lack of working loos in the place. Obviously, this is mostly a problem for me as to use my Granny’s oh-so-elegant phrase, Djelibeybi (being a boy) is “built for a picnic”. While there are public loos about, they’re a decent walk away, and while the good people of the town are just lovely and helpful when it comes to letting grubby individuals use their facilities (the security guy at the Civic Centre on Sunday even cheerily unlocked the loos for me to use them!) I don’t want to abuse their kindness. Yesterday, finishing quite late, I walked the 7-8 minutes down to the station, only to find those loos were shut. Walked another 5 minutes to the shopping centre and down the stairs – those ones were shut too. Our estate agents had long since left for the day, and I ended up having to head back via McDonalds, but the whole thing took about half an hour’s walking and totally finished me off, which is just insane. So I’m petitioning Djeli to get the plumber to reconnect the outside loo so it flushes and once that’s done I will Domestos it to within an inch of its life so I can actually use it (although it has to be said that that loo is less repellent than the ones inside the house were – I guess it didn’t get used that much with the garden being all full of triffid). So that’s my new campaign – loos for workers!

Today I’m home to get some client work done and recover a little – back to the house on Friday and Saturday!

Yes, at last the house is ours. Only took 6 months, but we’ve now exchanged (last Thursday) and are now beavering away on the renovation, trying to get some part of it at least liveable-in in 2 months’ time. We spent all of yesterday out at the house and, frankly, I’m a little scared by our timeline, and all the more so as Djelibeybi may be starting a new job next week which would see him spending 4 hours a day commuting (which will be less once we’re moved in, at least, but first we have to get to that point!).

Now that some of the flooring has been taken up and the bathroom ripped out (Djeli did that yesterday), the full extent of the work is visible, and a fine layer of terror has settled over me. Far from what we first talked about and my conditions being that the bathroom would be finished when we moved in, and no building work needing to be done after I start studying, it feels like neither of these are going to happen. I’ve expected for a couple of months now – as the bank’s delays piled up our London rent and ate into our renovation budget (£8000 they’ve cost us in delays, based on when we had [reasonably] expected to move)  - that we wouldn’t have a kitchen when we moved in. Now it seems that the bathroom may be only half-done, or half-temporarily done, and now that Djeli’s ripped out the fittings that were there, we can really see that our bathroom is indeed only about 2/3 the length of the petite bathroom our neighbours have in the same spot, which sets another cat among the pigeons: do we do the bathroom now in the expectation of ripping it all out in a year or two and rebuilding that room to make a more intelligent use of the space and extending it? Or do we accept that it’s just going to be an insanely small bathroom (well, shower-room – seeing the space now, there’s no way in the world a bathtub would fit in there) for a 5-bedroom house and focus on getting the changes made (adjusting the staircase, eating into the top two rooms) to fit a more decently sized bathroom at the top of the house?

Plus on top of that, it’s so small that the lovely handbasin we found at Ikea – 80cm wide – is most likely too big for the wall space we have and we might have to get the 60cm version. And the Ikea website – unlike what seemed to be implied in-store – only has that basin as part of a freestanding washstand configuration, not as a separate component that we could build cabinetry around.

And the nice Twyford Rimfree loo we wanted isn’t available in a build-in version till October, which means we either need to get it freestanding or start the hunt for a loo all over again.

And we still haven’t settled on a colour scheme, although seeing how very, very, very tiny the room is now, I’m inclined to go for white all over, with maybe a pale contrast (wood??) for the cabinets and glass for any additional shelves we decide on. Must install the software Djeli bought which allows you to create 3D drawings of rooms & apply different finishes, etc.

So the whole bathroom issue is a mess but nevertheless needs to be sorted out – and installed and working in about 6 weeks so that we can move in.

For the rest of the house, while structurally sound, it is FILTHY, with a capital FILTH. I spent most of yesterday sweeping/vacuuming, which helped, but was hindered by there still being stuff everywhere (old carpet, carpet underlay, crappy furniture left behind, bits of wallpaper that have peeled off the walls) because we haven’t had time yet to get a skip in. SO glad we bought a steam-cleaning-wallpaper-removing kit thingy the other day – sterilised cleaning FTW.

In happier news, the garden is coming along well – I spent an entire afternoon the other day doing battle with the stinging-nettle-triffid and went back to work on it yesterday for a couple of hours and basically nearly a quarter of the garden has now been cleared – on the surface, anyway – I still need to get in there with a hefty fork and/or mattock to remove roots, but it’s accessible at least now and many roots have been pulled up in the course of the clearing, so all in all it’s a huge improvement. Compare:

with

Interesting discoveries along the way have included: a massive, well-preserved ladder, a single man’s shoe, 7 tennis balls in very good condition and a 25kg rock salt bag, which rather freaked me out until I realised it had been entirely engulfed by nettles and therefore the ground was unlikely to be salted. I suspect it doesn’t have any salt in it now, but it definitely has something in it so we are exercising caution and waiting to move it until we have a nice sturdy shovel and a wheelbarrow (actually, there’s a rusting wheelbarrow further along the garden. And a shopping trolley. Might excavate down that way to extract the wheelbarrow and see if it’s usable). Oh! And I found a healthy borage plant! So far the only thing in the garden that’s actually worth keeping. I am taking it a pot and some fresh potting mix on Wednesday when I shall dig it up to make sure it doesn’t get destroyed along with the weeds.

So there’s good and bad, which is to be expected. Our plumber came up with a fantastic idea (which we probably should have thought of) for the no-kitchen period: get a barbecue! I think we may go with this, which would be awesome – I’ve been wanting to have a go at smoking some beetroot ever since I got Jamie At Home a few years back wherein he has a recipe for steak with smoked beets. OMG that would be AWESOME! And of course as we’ll be moving in in June, it’s the perfect time for barbecues too

Our next big idea is to attempt to organise a house party – see if any of our friends (we love you all! we need your help! please come!) are willing to act as builder’s labourers for a day to clear the dross out of the house & into the skip, scrub floorboards, remove wallpaper, tackle the triffid and other tedious tasks in exchange for baked goods, immense gratitude and a warm glow. Just need to set a date and put out the call…

On the music front, however, all is quiet. Barely even listening to anything, although a lovely friend gave me Gidon Kremer & Martha Argerich’s recording of the complete Prokofiev violin sonatas for my birthday (yes, I had a birthday) and I accidentally bought myself a CD of Rautavaara orchestral works from the Oxfam Sound and Vision shop (mantra: “It’s all for a good cause”). I desperately need to get back in touch with Trinity Laban and book in a couple of trial composition lessons so I can work out who to study with – don’t want to end up with just a random teacher, but my brain’s so out of the loop with dayjob stuff I’m having trouble thinking about it. I don’t mean to be ungrateful – it’s fantastic that my business has taken off in the past couple of months, but it does rather do my head in for composing. Really need to find a way to force myself back into it. Might try to plan something over the weekend.

Oh, and today I made a batch of brownies for D who is moving out to his student accommodation tomorrow. I used the Hummingbird Bakery’s recipe and I think I do very much prefer it to the Nigella, which is amazing but rather too rich. The Hummingbird one is rich and fudgy but somehow less overwhelming. Possibly because it’s thinner so there’s a better crust-to-goop ratio…

I know I’ve learnt an incredible lot this month. Just look at all the new things I’ve tried: improvisation, extended techniques (blowing into the flute, multiphonics, flutter-tonguing, finger vibrato on the recorder), I’ve used trills for the first time (I think) ever, pushed the range of dynamics I usually use, used quarter-tones, written for guitar, created a graphic score (that I actually intended to make, as opposed to Carrion Comfort, which was an accidental graphic score), set a poem that rhymes, written for a solo brass instrument – and got up the courage to ask for muting (and very glad I did). I suspect I’ll be experiencing the aftershocks of this project for weeks and possibly months to come.

And I can’t say how much I think it’s done for my brain, to have to work so quickly, come up with ideas and just work with them. Twice I started with ideas I initially thought were rubbish and was either able to salvage them, or discovered that they worked, but not until I got them onto the instrument for which they were intended.

Of course, until now, too, I could count the usable recordings I had of my music (meaning well-performed, well-recorded, and that I have permission to do anything with) on one hand. Now I need both hands and a foot! This means so, SO much to me. It’s one thing to write music, but quite another to have someone bring it to life for you, and let you hear it. The performers have all been amazing, and I hope I get to write for them again in the future.

But enough burbling. I’m sure I’ll write a blog post over at caitlinrowley.com sometime soon about specific lessons learned, but here is for the present, so I should run through today.

Of course the big news today was receiving the last 2 tracks. Jennifer Mackerras’ Triptych for One is in three movements, and she sent me an assortment of takes so I had a lot of fun wading through them and working out which takes to use of which movement. And they came together quite well in Logic too – a bit of crossfading helped the transitions and a little DeNoiser helped with background hiss on the first two movements. This one’s an odd piece. It still takes me by surprise. I think it only revels itself properly after a few listens. Maybe the movements should have been a little longer, perhaps. I might explore that idea in another piece. I love the multiphonics on the treble recorder – they have so much character! Definitely going to have to use those in the piece I’m writing for Jen’s recorder quartet, Pink Noise.

The other piece which went up today was Francis Western-Smith’s Egg the Eleventh. I’m delighted that the whole corrupted fugue thing worked with this one. It could have gone so very wrong, but I like the crunchiness of the harmonies and to me (I don’t know about anyone else) it’s channelling a lot of Satie, especially at the end. Or possibly I’m just thinking that because the style of this piece is a complete throwback to my uni days and the first few piano eggs I wrote, The Four-Egg Omelette. I always loved those pieces – they’re still some of my favourites – and it’s nice to know that I haven’t moved impossibly far away from that style.

I decided on the track order too today, which is mostly based on the order the pieces were completed in, but I switched I Want It To Kill Them and Triptych for One around, so the recorder piece comes directly after the slide-guitar-and-crunchy-tape one, which seems an odd positioning, but it actually seems to work. Once I had the pieces in order, I discovered that the reverb I’d added to Nest and Solitary Fanfare was a little excessive – the rest of the album, while the spaciousness of the recordings varies, sounds like it was recorded in small rooms, while those two tracks seemed to have moved into a concert hall and it just sounded odd. So I dialled it back on both of them & “rehoused” them in a room rather than a hall, albeit one with a bit of space to it. I think this improves those tracks within the set. Hopefully the performers agree…

I still haven’t got to the lever harp piece for Shana, but I will. It’s on my list for this month (although probably later this month as I have the brass quintet and a piece for Carla Rees and her quarter-tone alto flute to complete ASAP). And it’s the only piece I didn’t get to write. I’m glad that I thought to finish off the Pieces of Eight arrangement for her while I was concussed though – it fits well with the other tiny pieces, and it meant that nobody missed out entirely. Every performer got something to play that was made especially for them. Even with the concussion, so I’m feeling rather pleased with myself.

Tomorrow, then, is CD-burning-and-posting time. I guess I don’t really have to, but it’s just going to really symbolise the end of a project that started out on a whim, ended up bigger than Ben Hur and which I think I have to add to my list of most-amazing-musical-experiences-of-my-life-so-far. So it’ll be sent. And then I’ll look at posting the whole thing to BandCamp. It’s going to be a bit of a package – all the album tracks, plus all the scores, plus this diary. I saw that Chrissie Caulfield included her RPM diary in the download and I think it’s a great idea because it gives a real picture of how the work was created, for those who are interested. Hopefully someone will be…