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.

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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Taps!

We got a parcel yesterday!

We ordered these taps online, sight unseen. Perhaps a little risky, but it has worked out! I was very picky in this matter and we had a limited budget, so we had to dig a lot in order to find what we wanted at a price we could afford.

I wanted raw, unprotected brass, since I've grown very, very tired of chrome, and I don't think it ages gracefully. In general, efforts to ward off aging altogether rarely do. Plus I crave the warmth of brass, and I love materials that appear to live and change like we do. 

We found an Italian brand that had great styles and an incredible finish choice, Nicolazzi, and the prices were more than fair, especially for brass finish (same price as chrome, on the price range marked blue below). I find it a little outrageous how many brands charge more (a whole lot more) for a brass finish, when if you think about it all taps are brass, and the chroming is an additional step in the process.

We ordered the taps through Italian online retailer Bathroom39.com, and so far are very happy with the service.

I had only this chart as a guide to choose the finish:

Nicolazzi finishes.

I doubted between raw brass and shiny brass, and by just looking at the chart raw brass looked most like what I wanted (a satin brass), and shiny looked like it'd be... well, too shiny. It turned out that I'd have less finishing work to do if I had taken the shiny, since the raw is a little too textured:

My desired finish vs the original raw brass.

On the left, the washbasin tap that I've already refinished (1200 grit emery paper followed by soft brass brush with fine pumice powder) against a tap that's still untouched. Since it has just been resurfaced, the one on the left looks colder, but it will soon darken and warm up.

So yes, I was sanding away yesterday evening while we watched a series on TV ;P

How cool is that?
Still with original finish.
Model 1401 OG.

Bathtub hardware.

Bathtub hardware.

Washbasin tap.
Here is was at emery paper stage.
Model 1408 OG.

Washbasin tap.
Emery paper stage.

Refinished washbasin tap
and hand shower wall mount.

Refinished washbasin tap.

The raw brass finish does look a little fake in the tight spots,
where a shinier finish is still visible.

Bonus picture:

The camera bag is too small for you, Loki.