Putty

We've arrived at the stage of discussing 'fine details.' Not that we've ever stopped thinking about the finer details of this renovation, agonising over doors and kitchen appliances has become part of our daily routine, like brushing teeth and picking up the children's dirty socks.

Our kitchen designer is waiting for decisions from us, not least a decision about what colour the kitchen will be. See, if you buy from Wickes or John Lewis then you don't get much choice; they'll lay out some cabinet doors and you choose from 'linen' or 'buttermilk' or else you'll go for a high gloss aubergine in some moment of hormonal madness and probably regret it a fortnight later. But a kitchen maker peson will give you free reign, or as Emile said to us, 'you can have any colour in the world you like.'

Now that's my idea of a nightmare; 'option paralysis' being a real threat to the progress of any extension where you're given an actual choice. Initially I wanted the kitchen painted in Farrow and Ball's 'Elephant's Breath' because I'd seen one in a magazine, but painting sample pots onto lining paper revealed 'Elephant's Breath' to be more reminiscent of the horrible grey tiles adorning the existing bathroom and pretty soon we'd settled for 'Cornforth White' and chosen the granite to match.

But then I saw this larder cupboard in Marks and Spencer, which hit me in the face as I glided up the escalator towards the bedding department and had me waxing lyrical to the sales assistant about the colour, which the label described as 'putty.'

Of course, Dr B. had to be consulted about this 'putty', so I took him along to visit the larder cupboard and he agreed it was all very suitable and advised we needed to go to B&Q to pick up some paint charts in an effort to match the colour. And not just B&Q but also Homebase (who stock Farrow and Ball) and then John Lewis too, because you can't discount that lovely understated Sanderson paint, can you?

John Lewis had whole walls of Sanderson paint charts, but none of them looked putty-ish to me, though some were out of stock. Typically, the paint charts that were out of stock turned out to be the ones we wanted, so we had to order them from head office and wait for them to come in the post. And when we laid them all out, we found some of them were obviously too brown or too pink or too grey, which left me with a handful of samples to take back to compare with the larder in Marks and Spencer.

I managed to narrow it down to four colours and bought the sample pots, though none seemed exactly right from the charts. Relaying the story of the elusive 'putty' to our friends Claire and James, James suggested I paint the samples onto wood rather than lining paper, explaining the wood might take up the colour more accurately than the paper and disappearing into his shed to saw off some old bits of knotted pine as the best match he could find for the oak doors that we'll have painted. 'And you'll need primer too', he shouted from the garage as I left, emerging with a half-empty tin of the stuff.

So I primed the wood and waited overight for that to dry before painting two to four coats of the four samples, depending on how much the wood showed through. Finally, I took the wood sample to Marks and Spencer to compare it to the larder cupboard, which lo and behold was an exact match to the colour you can see on the right hand side.

The colour is by Farrow and Ball. It's called Elephant's Breath.

Knock Out

Halfway through week six and I visited the house after the school run this morning. The decorators are due to arrive today, not because there's anything cosmetic to be done at this stage, but because they might as well get on with stripping the nasty old wallpaper from the rest of the house. Experience of stripping walls tells me this could add further expense to the job - they'll probably blow plaster and find mouldy bits and we'll end up pleading with the plasterer to help us out.

Yesterday the builders removed the back wall of the old kitchen, which has enabled them to place all that steel into the brickwork. The red joists you see in the bottom picture are the steel, and though they look like one piece, it's actually one piece over the bifold door opening (to support the pitched roof) and another one about 3.3 metres behind it, holding up the brickwork of the first floor since the back wall was removed. I'm sure it's all perfectly stable, but the fact remains that our first floor is being propped up with what look like a load of old table legs and it hardly inspires me to go jiggling about Alex's bedroom.

You'll see from the top photograph that we're close to the first floor brickwork being complete, in fact it ought to be finished before the end of this week. Next week we're due to get a roof, which throws up problems because we can't source roof tiles to match the originals in colour. We've trawled the builders' merchants and brought back samples and I've even been in touch with a salvage yard in West Sussex who are sending a sample tile via courier but the more time goes on, the more it looks like we can't match it up.

There are a few options - we can have a roof that doesn't match the original (is that really an option?) or we can can remove the tiles from the back of the existing house and place them on the front of the extension so at least it looks the same across the width of the house. This will cost us an additional £1750 in purchasing new tiles to replace the old ones on the existing house, though I'm still trying to compute that because if we provide the tiles for the extension and also pay for the tiles for the new roof, I'm pretty sure that means we've paid twice.

The alternative is to have new tiles on the existing roof. I'd love a new roof, a grey one - but finding that sort of money in our budget is tricky, especially since the bathrooms and kitchen have worked out more expensive than we thought and we've spent £2,500 on extra steelwork. I'm going over the budget with a fine toothcomb, but at this rate we'll be looking down the back of the sofa for twenty pences.

Utility Room week 5

And this will be the utility room with the backdoor/window frame visible straight ahead (this actually opens to the side of the house so I suppose not strictly a 'back' door). The door opening you can see on the right hand side will be a fire door connecting the house with the garage and allowing us to vacate the car and come straight into the house without getting wet/cold (or messing up our hair) in the winter. After the last two winters, I'm quite giddy at the prospect of a remote control garage door and driving right into the house.

Already I'm seeing a belfast sink with one of those stretchy hose-type taps for washing muddy wellington boots. I'm seeing labelled boxes stacked neatly into cupboards. Stain removers, light bulbs, batteries. If you're reading, Philippa McFarlane, this is all your fault.

Playroom week 5

This will be the little playroom - I say 'little' because it's smaller that I thought it would be, though until the roof's on, it's hard to tell. The back wall and return have been constructed from block and brick because that wall will support quite a bit of steelwork which holds up our new bedroom.

We've been wrangling over window frames with the window fitter, who tells us not only do we have to have those ugly trickle vents (building regulations for all newly built property) but the window is too tall for conventional openers and will require top lights (those small windows at the top which open to vent the room). Eventually he conceeds we could have tilt and turn instead. The battle of the top lights is won!

Kitchen No More

Our kitchen has now been removed by the builders, which was a teeny bit of a mistake, since we need more money from the bank in about three weeks time and the bank won't lend money on a house without a kitchen because a house without a kitchen is 'unmortgagable.' Note the attractive boarding up of that sixties serving hatch (I'll miss it in a funny 'Crossroads' sort of way).

So now we have to knock this kitchen down and install some sort of drains and a sink/draining board and cupboard, which apparently constitutes the minimum 'kitchen' which will allow us to obtain an advance on the mortgage. Our brickie's still got the sink, he says - so all's not lost. It's hard to picture how all of this is going to look except to say that the new kitchen is about four times bigger. And it doesn't have a serving hatch.

Progress - week five

Photographs taken at the weekend show the progress to the end of week five. Steelwork lies on the driveway waiting to be lifted, all ground floor brick work is complete and some first floor joists are in place. Lawn hasn't been mowed for weeks and is beginning to take on shagpile carpets proportions. Hardly a priority, I know, but having spent all spring/summer scarifying the bugger of moss, I have a vested interest in it's continued upkeep.

Back Online

Since the disaster with the drains and the plumbing and the rapid house move (or should that be 'bungalow move'?) we've been without internet connection for over three weeks, during which time the renovation has moved on considerably and I've driven myself to distraction trying to look for bathroom taps on Dr B's i-Phone (no, I don't have an i-Phone, I have an old fashioned version that only rings 2.5 times before cutting off and not even the shop can figure out why).

We're now at the beginning of week 6 and the ground floor brick and blockwork was finished about a week ago, though things were then held up due to the late delivery of the steelwork (which cost us an extra £2,500 since the structural engineer has apparently over-engineered the building such that it can now take the weight of a multi-storey car park - reassuring I suppose, but I'd already mentally spent that money on a Multi-York sofa).

And then they waited for the scaffolding and as of last Friday, we were waiting for 'more scaffolding' to help them reach the highest brickwork and to provide access for the roofer. You'll see from the photograph that the front of the build now proudly displays two new window openings (bathroom to the left, en-suite to the right) as well as new windows to the existing building, which completes the replacement of all windows on the front elevation and marks the beginning of that horrible cedarwood cladding being ripped off (hurrah!).