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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Moving and stuff

I haven’t been posting in a while… we moved in! that took all our time and energy, and then some.

Everything is still a mess… but some things also advanced since I last posted. I should have taken a picture of the attic before we filled it with stuff, but alas that did not happen. I think. Will check the camera. I think I could not catch it with daylight, which is often a concern in winter at this latitude.

This is the best I could find, when I was painting the front rooms' mouldings

So the attic got finished (paint on the walls and beams, floor placing and finishing, including baseboard), well, sorta, still have to install a wall lamp on the corner.

Living rooms #1 and #2* (AKA front rooms) got painted, the floor scrubbed (and scrubbed again). We have not installed the mouldings yet (see photo above), we bought them and I painted them a cream colour, and they’re back in the box. We will probably wait until things have settled a bit to put more cables along the edge, like speakers and such, which we are not sure where to put yet. Once the furniture is in place it’ll be easier to decide. We hope.

Moving big furniture in through the window

The “kitchen”, which will eventually be living room #3 (you could say it is just one long, narrow living room*) is sorta cleaned up and the ceiling is still opened up with all the cabling visible. Not finished up with this so it’ll stay like that for a bit. Now the entire surface is full of boxes, homeless kitchen stuff and the dining room table!

Big mess in... not so little kitchen

Now every single room is filled with partially mounted furniture and boxes upon boxes of stuff (SO MUCH stuff! I have way too many hobbies and... probably plan to add more).

* #1 is street-side and has a nice arched window. It still has a mantlepiece and we plan to install a gas fireplace in the future. Here comes nice art-deco furniture and probably my antique desk and the treadle sewing machine. And some seats. Right now it is stuffed with two huge-ass sofas, the TV, the art deco furniture and three coffee tables (two small ones under the TV). It will stay so until we make a new kitchen in the back building.

Mid-move, it is even more stuffed now

#2 is separated from #1 by an arch (formerly with double or triple glass doors, now partially disappeared, we found some remnants in the attic). It is narrower than #1 (the hall adjacent widens for the staircase). Here we will put lots of large cupboards and bookshelves. We toyed with calling it library but it is too pretentious. Not much more will fit. Now you can barely pass through.

Started to put up cupboards

#3, originally, and still now, a kitchen, is separated from #2 by double glass doors. Very damaged by a dog in the past. I half-heartedly fixed them a bit some time ago, still work to do and unfortunately due to the heavy damage they will have to be painted (on the #3 side). I will use black. The door that goes to the back building, future laundry and kitchen, will also need to be fixed and painted on the #3 side. The floor in all three livings is coloured terrazzo tiles with motifs, the motif in the kitchen is quite nice.

We still have to put up some kitchen cabinets we had temporarily taken down.
They were already here when we bought the house, and look like they have
been recycled from elsewhere at least once.

This temporary kitchen is still better than the “kitchen” we previously had in our apartment (one story another house from the 30’s, larger -our story was 100 square metres- but barely fixed, let’s not talk about the “bathroom”).

We have started putting stuff together, I will try to take some better pictures tomorrow (Saturday) with daylight. We also have to finish cleaning up our old apartment so we may not have much time left.

Inherited oil painting, I love it

Loki