This Old House

Thanks to an online suggestion, the refurbishment of our flat is now being driven forward by comparison with the "Welsh Wizard", the one and only Shakin' Stevens. There's a strong Welsh link with this blog, but this might be the first time I've had the pleasure of featuring someone from Ely. Or "Lower St. Fagans", as a taxi driver once told us the locals call it (Cardiff in-joke).

I'm not sure if there's a lot of blog mileage in "before & after" photos of house renovations, but feck it, Channel Four have made a pretty good living from this theme for the past decade, so onto the bandwagon I goes.

To be fair, they're not even "after" photos, but seeing as I inflicted the "bombsite" photos on you a while ago, here's the update. The bathroom used to look like this:

"During"

Now with a little bit of effort from the builders, it looks like this:

"Still during, not quite after"

Previously, the kitchen looked like this:

"Before"

Now it looks like this:

Definitely still "during"

The noteworthy thing about the above photo is that they knocked out what was effectively the chimney breast on the right hand wall, a protrusion that carried the three flues up from the kitchens in the flats below. As the bottom two flats have moved their kitchens, we only had to relocate the flue from the cooker hood of the third floor flat, bury it in the wall, and hey presto, we get a straight wall and flush kitchen units (at some distant point in the future).

The joy of all this is tempered somewhat by the fact that we still haven't managed to reach agreement with out beloved neighbours, and so the flat roof hasn't been weatherproofed, and all the hard work that the builders have done to replaster on the inside is in imminent danger of being wasted if the rains arrive before the agreement with the neighbours. Given that we've been trying to sort out a plan of action with them since January, there's a good chance the polar ice caps will have completely melted before we get an agreement.