Digitalquill

Currently our kitchen at Hillcrest is almost unworkable. It is fairly narrow, lacks storage space and lacks any flow and any usable work surface space. We have decided that something has to be done about it, however, a simple ‘new kitchen’ will not rectify the problems we have with the kitchen.

While changing the kitchen tap I found a newspaper packing the kitchen unit, after taking this out I found it was printed in 1986, making the kitchen 24 years old! It is not as bad as it sounds, the units have dated well and are in very good condition for 24 year old units so they must have been good quality, however, that confirmed that it was time to start a fresh.

I mentioned in an earlier post that we are having problems with our boiler. These were going to be solved in the kitchen plans, currently the boiler is on the kitchen wall, which does not make any sense when we are struggling for storage space. Although we have not decided that we will have to do the boiler sooner than our kitchen plans allow, we are still taking the decision that it should be moved out of the kitchen to provide the extra space for an additional wall unit.

As I mentioned, simply replacing old units for new units just will not provide us with any significant advantage, so we decided to look at taking a wall out between the kitchen and dining room to open it up into a kitchen diner, and then extending the conservatory ac cross the whole of the back of the house and opening up the wall into the conservatory so that it was all effectively a single room. We had plans drawn up for this and we feel that this really does work well. It will give the kitchen dining room (which we hardly use currently) and conservatory a new lease of life and effectively make them the centre of the home.

In addition we love to entertain and have dinner parties. Currently I am cut off from guests while cooking, in this new scenario guests could be seated in the conservatory or dining area while I was cooking meaning we could all talk and relax in the better living space.

This is all very well in theory, however, in practice there are several problems to overcome. In my experience (although limited in terms of building, I do have quite allot of experience in house renovation and development) I do not this this is a big job. The wall that is to be removed is not load bearing, a couple of walls will need to be built and as such footings put in place and we would like a large opening door system on the conservatory, the roof on the kitchen will be removed and replaced with a sloping roof with sky lights in it. In terms of the building that will be it. In my opinion this is something in the region of 3-4 weeks work, however, a builder has quoted 12-16 weeks and £60k which is simply not practice for us, nor can we afford such a figure, especially bearing in mind that this was simply for the building work, no electrical, plumbing, internal finishing or kitchen units.

Once we add on the extras, and any inevitable slippage or things that we have not considered I would expect that figure to be around the £100k mark. Although this will put a great deal of value onto the property, I doubt that it will put £100k onto it.

We are therefore at rather a standstill on the project, unsure where to go and how to proceed. The only solution I can think of is that I do much of the work myself, or find a builder who does not think that I was born yesterday.

I maybe of course underestimating the scale of the work involved, however, I would have to be drastically underestimating it to get to where the builders think it is.

This is all very frustrating as I wanted to get on with these plans this summer, and as such need to get rolling with the planning department and building reg applications.

We have been having problems with out boiler for some time now, the problems have come to a head with us only have a partly working boiler which does nothing very well at all, giving us lukewarm water and a heating system that continually requires top-ups of water to keep it going.

Although we have long term plans for the kitchen we have put those on hold for the moment due to money grabbing builders who seem to think we are made of money and want a gold lined extension building! We were going to replace the boiler when we did the kitchen but with things as they are we have had to re-think. I will post more about what our plans are regarding the kitchen in the near future.

Currently the boiler is on the kitchen wall, and as we are struggling for space in the kitchen it makes sense to try and fine another location for it. The downstairs toilet seems to be the obvious solution.

The downstairs toilet is very dated and showing its age, however, for not much cost I will be able to replace it and update it, however, in order to get the boiler in as well I will be blocking up the window, which we never use anyway keeping the blind down all the time. This being so it will be a larger job than it should be, something that I will have to do over several weekends. I intend to get the window bricked up next weekend, this will mean having the window out, maybe even the toilet and sink out to give me access.

I will also be taking down the ceiling, firstly because it is artexed and I hate artex and also because I am hoping that I can grab an inch or so to allow extra room for the boiler.

The first problem I have is finding a compact cloakroom suite, maybe even corner basin and corner toilet.

At one of our properties we have experienced a mouse problem. After catching several we called in the COuncil Pest control who suggested a simple method to stop the pests getting into the house in the first place.

The main two wasy in which mice enter a propertyare firstly through holes and gaps round pipes whcih can simply be filled with expanding foam, and secondly through air bricks. Covering the air bricks with fine meshing is a very simple solution.

You can see below a picture of how I covered the ones on our property. I bought some fencing mesh from Homebase and cut it into strips with tin snips. Then secured this over the air bricks using 6 screws, into drilled and plugged holes.

I put a washer behind each screw so that the head was larger than the mesh, thus trapping it tightly against the wall.