Week 118-120 - Moving in to the Residential Accommodation

Who’s got two thumbs and has finally moved in to their self-build home!?!? --- This Guy, BOOM!! [Drops mic and pulls 90’s rap pose]

[Sheepishly retrieves mic from ground when I remember I claimed it was going to take approx. 18 months to achieve and here we are three and half years later]

O well, better late than never

In my defense, if you look at the week listing of this blog you can see that we are only actually on week 120 for working ‘on’ the building. But that’s still over 2 years…. So I don’t really know why I bought that up!

Lets look at some more pictures…

The main living space has come together really nicely, it’s a lovely open plan space to spend time and as you can see the fluff balls seem to give it their seal of approval.

It’s very satisfying to have all our furniture out of storage and other belongings that we haven’t seen in nearly 4 years, with the addition of a few new items:

Penny: Soph’s new (over 100 year old) piano, that was a super steal on Ebay. Although we did have to drive to Aberdeen to collect the thing and then carry it up 3 flights of stairs. So it was paid for in sweat, sore muscles and diesel. 

New sofa and armchair: This has been Sophie and my first official collaboration – I made the frames and Sophie upholstered them. 

The angled bookcase in the corner next to the 3 seater is actually the first piece of furniture I ever made as ‘MOS Bespoke Furniture’. So what we have here is Sophie’s first piece of furniture, next to my first piece of furniture – I think that counts as romance!! 

Sleeping under the roof windows in the bedroom listening to the rain at night has been amazing. 

Again we already had our bedroom furniture but it’s been great getting to use it again.

All in all having finally moved into our new flat has been an absolute dream, and worth the wait – despite it being over double originally advertised. To be honest the first few weeks being here were a little surreal. I struggled to shake the filling it was a temporary thing, like we were on holiday or something. But we have been here a month now and it well and truly feels like home – I cant ever imagine wanting to live anywhere else. 

Week 115-117 - Making and Fitting the Kitchen

Right, this is it: the last major job to do before we can move in to the flat.

I’ve actually had the kitchen designed since very early on in the build (over 3 years!), problem is, being the last thing to be done in this phase of the build, we don’t actually have the budget or (more importantly) the time left for me to make it. Dammit.

Being a stubborn git though, I am in no way willing to give up on my design, so ive decided we are going to go ahead with the final carcasses work and all the appliances etc, so the kitchen will ‘work’ in the same way as originally designed, but for now we will have some temporary doors, worktops and some other details to be upgraded later

So all in all this basically leaves me with design brief of: Design a kitchen that still looks cool and works well, but spend as little money as possible on the parts that will change in a couple of years. Plus it needs to be made, fitted and finished within two weeks.

(Obviously a terrible/unrealistic idea, but) Here we go!

I decided to make the carcasses out of a fairly new product to the market, it is called ‘High density coloured MDF’ and is exactly that to be honest. The wood fibres are dyed before being formed into the board, so the colour is all the way though the sheet, not just the surface.

As a side note I would like to mention that ‘MDF’ stands for ‘Medium Density Fibreboard’ so they have essentially called it ‘High Density - Medium Density Fibreboard’ Good work guys!

As you can see above it comes in huge great sheets. I decided to use the black for carcass work with oak detailing. Picture above shows the base cabinets machined and sprayed in the drying rack, ready for assemble. 

I won’t bore you with endless pictures of making cupboards in the workshop, so we’ll get on with the fitting. Above shows all the base cabinets fitted.

Before doing this I have also made an enclosure for a nice powerful extractor above where the hob will go (between windows) and had it plastered in to the walls and ceiling. It’s important this thing has a lot of suck (!) as it is an open plan flat that we don’t want it to smell the same as whatever is being cooked.

Full height cabinets fitted. These will house integrated fridge/freezer, ovens and have a pull out larder for food storage.

All carcasses and appliances now fitted. Everything you see in this picture is fully permanent. Everything you see added to the kitchen from now on is semi temporary (about 2 years) until I get a chance to do the much cooler design work I want to.

Gluing up the curved end (oak) of the breakfast bar in the workshop

Making a light out of a colander for above the breakfast bar, I’ll be honest; I stole this idea from ‘That 70’s Show’ – although they used a cheese greater

Flocking the handles for the doors – those of you that know me or my work will know I’m a little obsessed with flock. I thought this would be a good opportunity to put some in a high wear environment and see how it coped.

Finished kitchen before doors

Finished kitchen  

I’ll admit that this did take close to three weeks to completely finish rather than two, but still pretty good going. It’s not as cool as it will one day be, but I think it looks great for now and if nothing else its infinitely better than any kitchen we’ve had in rental places before.

That’s it then…. It’s time for us to move in! who knew this day would actually ever come……

Week 112-114 - Residential Bathroom

It’s time to do the bathroom for the flat and full discloser: I have never designed, plumbed or fitted a bathroom before. So if you think this turns out terrible, that’s why, (and if you think it good…. double credit?)

Its actually a quite large room as bathrooms go, so we have room for a bath and separate shower etc. Ive always liked bathrooms where the shower is behind a wall and enclosed, rather than a glass cubical, so as you can see above I started with some stud walling.

The bath was a bit of an Ebay bargain, it is brand new but the overflow does not work, so we just need to make sure we don’t overfill (its huge – we wont) and we’ve got a bath for about 20% of it full price – win!

After doing all the first fix plumbing for the concealed shower controls and waste in floor I ply lined the shower area rather than plasterboard. My logic being, if there are any small leaks around the enclose in the future the ply will stand up to this perfectly fine

First fix pipework and plaster boarded out for toilet and sink. The room is an odd shape and there is a void behind the toilet, so it made sense to get a concealed toilet cistern to go in there.

Now to start the fit out:

This room has no windows as it is in the centre of the building, not a big problem, but it does mean no natural light. The normal rule of thumb in the interior design world for this situation is to use bright and airy colours to give the illusion of light – im going to do the opposite!  We’re going to have ourselves a dark and moody bathroom: yea! ‘High end grunge’ is the look im going for.

To that end I made the bold decision of going for dark grey/black walls…

What we’re actually using is a product called ‘Microcrete’. It goes on similar to a skim coat of plaster (but 2 coats rather than 1) and once finished is supposed to look like poured or cast concrete.

Picture above shows the ceiling with first coat applied and picture below shows with second coat and a PU sealer applied.

Next comes the tiling around the toilet and sink area

I ‘shower boarded’ the shower area out rather than tiles. This seems to be the thing to do now: easier to clean and more hardwearing (waterproof) than tiles and grouting.

Turns out no one makes black or dark grey bathroom extractors, who knew? So I sprayed a white one black with an aerosol can from Halfords: jobs a good un. 

Right finished shots then:

(Above) View from door towards toilet and basin

(Above) Bath with wall mounted tap and small oak shelves (for wine!)

(Above) 3/4 high dividing wall for shower

(Above) Shower area

(Above) Basin/sink area on floating Oak worktop