Aseo baptism

Dazzleloo.

Yes.

It got a curtain and is now ready for guests.

Done/to-do lists, aseo and laundry room

Aseo

This tiny little room was a huge amount of work, which took forever. Small rooms simply means the same amount of work but in cramped working conditions.
In this once completely bare little corner we (mostly Pim):

• Decided on all Important Items (toilet, washbasin, taps, lamps, tiles) and ordered them. 
• Partly broke down and built walls out of brick, wood and plasterboard. 
• Added all utilities (water pipes, drains, electricity outlets and switches). 
• Tiled the floors and wall (partially) with gres mosaic tile (remaking the tile sheets into checker and stripes, which was lots of work). 
• Grouted the floor (checkerboard) with black (since black recedes, white would have been more noticeable). 
• Grouted the wall (stripes) in white horizontally between the white tiles, then grouted black horizontally between the black tiles, and vertically between all tiles (this was a huge detail work and I was super pregnant, so kudos go to Pim for going to this depth of craziness for my sake) a little piece of sheet rubber was key.
•  Installed the toilet. We love this toilet, it has no crannies that can collect dust. His official name is Monolito, but we call him Manolito. (It is from Globo)
• Made close-to-the-ceiling mouldings out of wood (out of lengths of wood glued together), primed them, installed them. 
• Made a pine framework as support for the counter and sink & storage, roughly, but nonetheless, mortise and tenoned! Made curtains for the door and storage (sliding doors planned in the long term). 
• Cut a mirror, had it break when installing it, cut another mirror, installed it, breathed. 
• Made mouldings for the mirror. 
• Designed a marble surface and backsplash, had it cut by the marble guy, realised he simplified the shape, realised there was a design miscalculation, realised this way there is a bit of an awkward bit but there is more useable counter space, dealt with it to the point of liking it again. 
• Installed taps & sink, towel rack and toilet roll holder (easier said than done when the tiles are super hard gres, some diamonds perished in the process) 
• Installed lamps and led strip over the moulding. 
• Painted Many Things Many Times. 
• Refurbished a partly rotted and generally mistreated door found in the house (previously part of once upon a time living room division), added a mortise hole for the door mechanism, installed a vintage doorknob. 
• Made a frame for the door (this is a lot of more difficult work than it seems) in a very narrow and awkward space (and a very wide wall). This frame is sui-generis but it works, it is level and square, and we are proud. 
• Hanged the door! 
• Filled in many crannies and nooks with different kinds of plasters and putties. 
• Painted Many Things Many Times Again. 
• Bought towels, washbasin accessories & picture frames, found art, printed art. 

Still to do:

• Sand up various putties and Paint Again. 
• Hang picture frames & curtains. 
• Clean up.

Laundry room 

This room has contained our laundry machine and dishwasher for years now. It has been used as a laundry room in the past.
We found its drain just drained into the soil under the court concrete (!!!) at some point and Pim had to break it all up and find the drain and re-drain everything. That was an UGH.

Now we had to temporarily move the machines to the kitchen-to-be, in which Pim has already placed drains, in order to work here. I suppose the dishwasher will also need to move back once we have to start working on the kitchen.
In this room, again mostly Pim:

• Placed water distribution points for this part of the building. 
• Placed drains and water pipes, electricity outlets, switches. 
• Decided on all Important Items (through, taps) and ordered them. 
• Ordered counter marble and blue stone steps. 
• Made one too high step into two steps which go up to the kitchen straight-ahead and the aseo to the left (some new drains also fit under these steps). 
• Covered the thrown-together walls with plasterboard, covered with cement the low parts of the wall that suck in humidity from the soil outside (at this level the floor is higher outside), painted the plasterboard with tiling primer. 
• Installed aluminium corner edging to finish tiled walls. 

In progress:

• Tiling of the walls. We're doing a basket-weave with 1:2 white bezel metro tiles (same tiles we used in the bathroom upstairs). Grout will be white. We're keeping the vintage terrazzo floor (this is a checker pattern made with leftovers from three other lower-story rooms, original from the 30’s). Windowsill will be made with some marble strips we bought for the bathroom and never used. 
• Making a pine framework as support for the counter and sink & storage. 

Still to do:

• Install the lamp (which will come from the attic which now has a replacement). Install an additional electric water heater to have warm water quick in this part of the house (the main heater is in the attic). 
• Make a cabinet to cover the water distributions and heater. 
• Make a folding drying rack.

Little bathroom

I'm hopelessly behind on updates here. Little baby, no time!

The little bathroom is very close to "finished". Here we stand:

More, perhaps, another time!

Small bathroom progress

It's been a while since I posted about this, and there has been a lot of progress.

The galleries I managed to "make work" here in terrible, terrible Blogger look like they're actually getting worse every day! I have added some captions to the images but they only show over the thumbnails in ALL CAPS now, wtf?

In any case, what Pim has been working on (I am really not doing anything of this anymore, I am due to give birth any day now):

• Put up electricity for aseo, laundry & kitchen
• Pipes for aseo & kitchen
• Tap fittings for aseo
• Drains for aseo, laundry & kitchen (lots of cutting and digging into the floors here!)
• Plasterboards for aseo, laundry & kitchen
• Self-levelling screed / compound / mortar for aseo floor which was very uneven 
• And he's also been re-setting the tiles on the mesh since I couldn't bend over anymore!

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Taps

The taps have arrived one month before we expected them to!

They look fantastic. Here's a taste, some handles in the three different finishes we chose:

Brushed nickel, Tuscan brass and opaque black

We've chosen brushed nickel for the kitchen and the laundry room, opaque black for the small bathroom and Tuscan brass for the workshop. The latter is an unprotected patina, so it will change with use, same as our raw brass taps in the bathroom.

All the taps in our house are Nicolazzi.

Small bathroom tile I

We picked up the tiles for the small bathroom, which I call aseo. Both the bathroom and the tiles are small ;)

They come attached to mesh backing, all tiles on a mesh the same colour, of course. So in order to have checkerboard and stripes, we either have to remove them all and place them one by one (bit of a pain in the ass since they're 5x5 cm) or rearrange the tiles on the mesh.

I've begun working on rearranging them. The white tile sheets are separated from each other by a waxed paper, which comes in handy, but the black ones do not have it.

First I remove alternating tiles from the mesh, they come off easily, while trying to not distort the mesh. I then I lay the sheet over the waxed paper, apply a little PVA glue (white wood glue) to the back of the tile (of the opposite colour), and lay it carefully. I guide myself by eye and also some 3mm (the given grout line in the mesh) layout crosses. The tiles are not perfect and even, so some eyeballing is always necessary. I lay a sheet on top of another so that the weight will help them set and not shift.

I think it took me about two hours to do one square metre. I have the impression the stripes are gonna be more time consuming ;) it is also a lot more surface.

Plans for the back building

We've been mostly planning the next renovation phase: the "powder room*", laundry room, kitchen and dining room.

*What a stupidly euphemistic name. In Spanish we call this aseo:  a small room with a WC and a washbasin, literally a place where you tidy up yourself. I guess powdering might be considered "tidying up", but, really? anyway.

Planning is incredibly important, we've found. We go over things over, and over, and over, and over again and we always find something we were mistaken about, or we had forgotten. It also happens that you change your mind 3 or 4 times, I think, mostly for the better.

We've been mainly focusing on the aseo and the laundry. These are immediately adjacent the main house building (the living room which is a temporary kitchen at the moment), and, with a baby on the way, will come in very handy as you can imagine. The kitchen and dining room can wait since we have functioning ones, temporary and super messy, but functional. The laundry is also functional at the moment, with the laundry machine and also the dishwasher connected there.

So we have been planning the distribution of the aseo, which is no easy task since it is a tiny 1 x 1,2 m room, and we are recycling a door found in the house (72 cm wide). And I did not want the door to swing outwards into the narrow passage/laundry, particularly since you'll have to go up a couple of steps to go into the aseo, and that seems very awkward to me.

We finally chose and ordered a WC (I love how easy it must be to clean this one! all stupid crannies hidden in a smooth ceramic column :)), a vessel sink (with overflow, many vessel sinks do not have one! dangerous...), the tiles (going for Winckelmans gres again, which we're loving), the taps and hardware (also very happy with our choice in the bathroom), and the lamps (going for a bit of a fancy-design thing this time). We'll build the counter for the sink ourselves, of ebonised oak and carrara marble. A wall to wall mirror and possibly some led strip lightning over the moulding on the ceiling and that's all that's necessary. We have also ordered the laundry sink, but I'll talk about that later.

• WC: Globo Paestum Monolito with an ebonised oak seat
• Sink: Scarabeo In-Out drop-in
• Tiles: Winckelmans 5x5 cm black and white square
• Hardware: Nicolazzi 1477NO70 nero opaco half dome wall mounted + paper holder / towel bar
• Lamps: Karboxx Escape cube

Obligatory crap-collage
The hardware finish is all wrong! and also wrong tap handles

The colour scheme of the room will be very strictly black and white. I'm quite inspired by razzle dazzle camouflage paint from WWI for this! Really looking forward to it ;)

So far we have received the WC, we will pick up the tiles tomorrow, and we got a dispatch notice for both sinks. Both lamps and taps (bit of a special order) are due in February.

Structural work has already begun, and, as I'm getting large and clumsy, I am not helping with this hard, dusty as fuck work at the moment. Pim's been cutting at the walls with the angle grinder, in all the places where electricity switches & ducts, and pipes of all types have to be built into the wall. No insulation/plasterboard in this building, so lots and lots of cutting!

He's already built the threshold (recycled steel railroad beam + concrete) for the aseo door (this was simply a solid wall before), and begun building the wall that is missing at the moment, between the aseo and the kitchen. He also cut off a chunk of wall between the laundry and the kitchen, because the passage was unnecessarily narrow:

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Next beam + bathroom closet

While Pim and his father were placing the next beam for a window in the back building, I took everything out of the bathroom closet, we took it apart, and then I cut a bit off the back legs. The floor in this room slopes towards the center and so the closet was leaning forward a lot. I guess I must have take a picture of that at some point, but I don't find it now. The top of the closet was 10 or 15 cm away from the wall when the bottom was close to the wall.

I also glued back a decorative leg piece that had fallen off, and some other parts where the hide glue had fractured a long time ago. I softened the glue with wet (warm water) kitchen paper towels, then scraped the excess off, and reglued with Titebond liquid hide glue. I think I am a convert now ;)

We put the closet back together, which is a delicate operation since the three door are caught by the top, and have to all be placed at once. It is a three man job.

This is how "level" it was

Knife wall

Chunks off

Scraping old glue off

Re-gluing

Quality control

Straight up 

Nice and close to the wall :)

On the beam front, Pim and his father encountered more difficulties than last time.

The beam that the roof guys placed over the entire length, on top of the wall, was anchored to the wall with large bolts. This made removing the old beam over the door a little difficult. This opening had to become much wider than the door so the beam had to be replaced. Pim had to drill around the bolts, concrete will later be placed around the bolts to anchor them again.

The beam was again placed over to flat and level pieces of concrete

Another recycled railway track serving as beam

Lamps

I haven't been posting much. Three main reasons:

1. Most importantly, since the move our productivity has decreased, due to being a bit saturated, sense of urgency gone, it being winter (I think last winter the same happened, I thought it was the cold, but the house is now cozy, so perhaps the darkness), and it's actually difficult to do things when it's already full of furniture and stuff.

2. Even what we do, I don't take many pictures (re: darkness).

3. Lamest of all, blogger app stopped working so there wasn't a straightforward way for me to post pictures from my phone. I just installed Blogaway, let's see how that goes. Edit: great!






It took us a long time to decide which wall  lamps to get for the bedroom and bathroom.

We finally decided, ordered them, received them and installed them today.

The bedroom lamps are dimmable and the led light bulbs are awesome, particularly when dim. They have this crown of prisms thing going on.






The first floor is getting closer and closer to completion!

An intermezzo

Because everyone loves before and after pictures, right? I didn't get the angle exactly right, both sets were taken with different phones. The old pictures were taken on our first visit to the house (with the real estate agent).

I forgot a cleaning rag in the washbasin, let's say it looks lived-in ;)

9 February 2013

6 March 2015

9 February 2013

6 March 2015

Some things are in store. More soon.

PS: the bathroom is not finished, but it is indeed the most finished room in the house.

6 bathroom pictures

It's sunny and it snowed, and it stayed, so there is enough light for even phone pictures.
The bathroom is not finished, but it is the most finished room in the house at the moment.

Lots of progress

I've so much to post about, I might have to split the posts today!

Lately, when I want to post here, I can't even recall what we've done, I just go to the camera and see what I've been taking pictures of.

I'll start with the oldest stuff I haven't posted about:

More shellac layers to the bedroom floor.
I mentioned this on the previous entry.

We started laying down the attic floor! We actually installed all of it in about 5 hours. Much faster than the bedroom floor! 

We got lucky though, we barely had to cut any boards. Three boards fit almost perfectly along the length, missing a little bit at the end.

Since this ends up at the very edge of what is going to be a built in closet, we did not waste huge amounts of boards just to fit these tiny bits, that are barely going to be visible and never stepped on, in the groove of the boards already placed. So we just cut pieces from two boards to fit the gaps, fitted them into each other's grooves and nailed them. The join to the main body of boards was then less than perfect, but I filled it with wood paste and sanded it down, and it looks great now :) I mean it doesn't really look like anything!

I did also lightly sand (120 grit) down the entire floor, and gave it one layer of oil. I am using the same oil I used for the dyed boards (V33 waterproof). Since the boards in this room are not to be dyed, I decided to treat them when already laid down. The dye is water based and it really did raise the grain of the wood, the wood was rough after one layer of oil over the dye. However it looks very nice and feels very smooth on the natural boards!

Left, oiled, right, bare

Brings out the figure

All oiled. At this stage it really reminds me of olive wood :)

After this, I will give two or three layers of shellac, then we install the baseboard and the room is finished!

Next: washbasin.

We realised we also needed to make an inset for the drain hardware to fit on the marble.

Pipes

Due to the location of the vessel sink (covering a large rust stain in the marble),
the drawer could not be made to still work, with an inset or so. We took it
apart, and nailed/glued the front of the drawer in place. We didn't destroy
any parts, and I've kept them for now. I am sentimental. And cautious.

Uncomfortable to work inside a cabinet, but hopefully worth it.

Bonus:

A cat looking for the other cat behind the mirror