This week has flown by.
One minute it was Monday and I was thinking f**k snow and then this
morning I woke up thinking thank goodness its Friday. Bizarre. Monday was gym, veggie chilli for lunch,
followed by tea with Sue and then soaps in the evening. Not terribly exciting but such is life. I was glad the snow had melted because on
Tuesday morning I was up early to pack a bag and drive down to Suffolk. The purpose of my visit to Nacton was to
visit step dad’s girlfriend Marie and give her a hand with some painting
following her new kitchen refurbishment project. The project began at the end of November and
unfortunately is still on-going so I decided to go down to give her some help.
Step dad brought a second hand caravan and drove to La Manga
last September to spend the winter but Marie she didn’t want to go. She sold her motor home and decided to spend
some of the money on replacing the kitchen in their park home. Marie did ask me for some advice because
Phil & I have done a few kitchens (actually 8 in total in the last 6 years)
but I’m afraid she didn’t take it. That
is her prerogative of course but I do feel that she could have saved herself a
few thousand pounds.
Marie chose a builder to take out the old kitchen, install
the new kitchen and replace the boiler.
The builder told Marie that ‘off the shelf’ kitchens were crap and persuaded
her to choose a more expensive kitchen which she could only order though him as
he had a trade account. This made me
suspicious. For a start,’ off the shelf
kitchens’ are not crap, and in fact, are really good value for money. By ordering the kitchen from the builder, the
actual costs were not transparent, also the units came already made up which
obviously saved the builder no end of time.
I did voice these issues with Marie but she’d made up her mind.
The new boiler was installed, the old kitchen was taken out
along with the gas fire and the new units were in by mid-December. There were a few issues with appliances but
all was going to plan when Sue and I went to visit before Christmas. Things had progressed when I went down on
Tuesday but alas, not as much as I would have expected. The main problem Marie has is that she did
things back to front. When we do a
kitchen, we first of all rip out the old one.
We then prep, fill and sand and make good surfaces before
decorating. Our next step is the
flooring, Phil prefers to tile or laminate under the units. If we are tiling then we sometimes use
plywood to keep the level especially if we are laying expensive tiles. The last
bit is fitting the new units and worktops and then you have just got the
finishing bits to sort which is the nice part.
I think because Marie was using a builder perhaps she didn’t
have an option to rip out and then have time to do work before the new
installation which was a shame because now it makes it twice as difficult to
sort out her walls. John & Marie live
in a park home which is different from traditional bricks and mortar. Unfortunately Marie hadn’t stripped off the
wallpaper before the new wall units were put up so this had to be done
afterwards. Marie told me she had
stripped, applied PVA, filled and sanded before putting up lining paper on all
walls. It does look much better than it
did 6 weeks ago but the walls are still very bumpy. Marie has chosen a pattern wall paper to go
over the lining paper and is hoping that this will cover the bumps but I’m not
so sure. I hope so for her sake because
she has spent an awful lot of money and time on her new kitchen and it would be
a shame if she wasn’t happy with the finish.
I don’t mean to be negative; I think the new layout really opens up the
space making it appear almost twice as big.
I really loved the black sink and funky tap and I am going to use this type
of sink in the future because stainless still scratches very easily.
I drove back from Suffolk late afternoon on Wednesday. I’d painted 2 coats on Marie’s windows and
doors; I did 4 coats on her radiator but she wasn’t very happy with the colour
and to be honest there was no way I was doing a 5th coat so I left
her to sort this herself. Really I didn’t
feel that I’d achieved much. Hopefully I
gave her some ideas for the final finishes and offered some words of
encouragement but who knows?
Phil seem to be pleased to see me when I finally got home
but I actually secretly think that he’d enjoyed having the flat all to himself,
giving him time to write his book. He’d
had Harriet round for lunch on Tuesday and had made her a shed load of pancakes
which I gather she wolfed down. I had to
laugh when I opened the fridge to see that Phil had gone food shopping whilst I’d
been away. He’d filled the fridge with
comfort foods, dairy milk, crunchies, macaroons and sausages! So much for the diet!
Steve kindly drove on Wednesday night; he dropped off Jan
and him and Phil met up with the Wednesday night boys at The Nags Head in Great
Linford. Jim wasn’t there because him
and Shirley went off on their 2 week cruise.
Sue came over and we had a girl’s night in with a Chinese takeaway. It was lazy I know but I was tired from
painting and the drive home. It was good
to see Jan and also Jan hadn’t seen Sue since before Christmas so it was an
ideal chance for these 2 to catch up.
Phil was home early for a Wednesday night and so it wasn’t a late
night.
Phil and me don’t really do
Valentines so I was really surprised to see a parcel on my pillow when I took
my mug of tea back to bed. Bless, Phil
had got me a lovely big card in which he’d written me a poem and he’d brought
me purple cover for my new Kindle. I
felt a little bad; all I’d got him was a funny rather than lovey-dovey card and
a big bar of Toblerone. However romance
wasn’t really in the air because Phil was too hung-over. He did however offer to make me a sausage
sandwich which was touching I suppose.
Love and all that stuff didn’t
happy yesterday. I went to the gym in
the morning and the plan was that we’d drive over to Overstone to pick up the
post and then have lunch in a country pub somewhere. But Phil was still in his PJ’ when I got back
from DW so we decided to stay home and eat leftovers. This made sense really; we had a mountain of Chinese
take-away left over, cheese, desserts and a stack of chocolate. After lunch we ended up watching a film and
generally having a duvet day with naughty nibbles on the sofa. Who says romance is dead !!!!
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