Kitchen Refurb #2

The kitchen, laundry, and WC are so interconnected that working on one impacts the others.  We had taken up some porcelain tile at the entrance to the laundry revealing 1908 quarry tiles in good shape under a layer of cement render.  The next step was to pull up the rest of the kitchen tiles to assess what really lies beneath.

They looked awful but we were determined to see them close to original.  Some muriatic acid was recommended to etch away the stains and loosen the larger blobs (note, this was a couple of months before the brute force method I employed on the dining room quarry tiles).

Still, there is much to do (cabinets; plaster walls and ceiling; put in an access hatch to the ceiling crawlspace; level the subfloor; and, install underfloor heating, sink, stove, dishwasher) but it is all on hold until we finish the wood flooring, built in closets, and subfloor heating in the dining room.  Baby steps.

Cloakroom and laundry part 2

We’ve piddled about, working on the WC/laundry throughout the lock down (the initial gutting of the room was covered in April, here).  It was long overdue but, like the upstairs bath, we saved thousands of quid by doing it ourselves.

The tub left a section of floor 1.2 cm lower than the tiled bits and, as we are just going to use heavy-traffic floor paint on it anyways, I levelled it up with a polymer enhanced screed (dating the work near the basin taps).

We eventually painted the floors after levelling the grout lines.

At the existing doorway, we knew we were going to transition into the kitchen with a different floor covering and decided to go ahead with removal of the existing tiles from that point on.

Beneath ½” of concrete render, the original quarry tiles started to emerge.  This door didn’t exist in the original house plan.  To get to the toilet, you would walk outside and enter from the garden (the toilet was a separate room out there).  The tiling comes to a halt here in what would have been the chimney breast of the old scullery:

This featured in a Neighbourhood Beer Tour post when I poured a bit of floor-levelling cement into this interstitial area:

We left the wall tile for the cloakroom as a border on which to affix a pocket door mechanism.  The rest would eventually get plasterboard to leave a vapour gap and to hide the pipe and cable.

Not wishing to paint over the floor tiles directly and thereby leaving the groutlines as features thereon, we covered these with a layer of thinset tile adhesive to level things up.  Once this was set and sanded, the painting could commence:

Hard wearing paint for cement flooring is kind of limited in colour.

The pocket door was Jackie’s idea.  Or rather, it’s a commercial product, but she knew about them and pointed out the space savings over a pivot door.  It came as a flat pack item.

Initial framing up and one side covered with drywall:

Plasterboarding continued off-and-on for a couple of weeks.

Eventually, the plasterboard had to meet plaster:

The old double glazing will eventually get replaced with something clear and untainted by fungus between the panes.  For now, though, at least there’s some natural light coming in.

For the wall tile, we primed with a stain blocker.  This provides a key for the real paint and protects against any fungi and mould we didn’t destroy with bleach when we cleaned the grout beforehand.  The plaster and board got primed using a couple of mist coats (4 parts cheap matt emulsion to 1 part water).

To contrast the grey flooring and to bring warmth to the room, we went with a yellow kitchen paint.

We cleaned up and cut down the size of an old door once separating the living and dining rooms and installed it to silence the laundry equipment from the rest of the house.  Here it is before painting:

We had a half box of metro tile leftover from the upstairs bath which we used to make a window sill.

This brightened things up a bit but not as much as replacing the cloudy double glazing with some fresh window cartridges (had these custom made to fit with minimal shimming compared to the standard sizes).

The eventual cost (not including things we either salvaged or had leftover from other projects) was:

grey floor paint: £20
lumber to box in the sewage/vent pipe: £10
1/4 bucket cheap matt emulsion: £4
wall paint: £21
plumbing bits: £35
electrical bits: £30
plaster board: £20
stacking mechanism for washer/dryer: £40
door for pocket door: £22
wall for pocket door:£235
tile adhesive/grout: £7
bullnose for tile: £3
miscellaneous hardware (magnets, trim, hinges for door to kitchen, etc): £37
____________________
Total outlay: £484 (£597 including the glass which we would have done anyway but was spurred by this room project; neither total includes the new washer and dryer, which we were getting whether or not this room ever got finished).
Builders’ estimates: £3-6K … and none of them seemed to understand what we wanted.

We still have some touching up to do but the main transformation is complete.  From the toilet:

To the sink through the pocket door:

To the new laundry room:

The finishing touch, though, was mounting the salvaged door, which separates this pair of rooms from the kitchen (the door is seen in the top photo of this post).

What next?

 

Cloakroom and laundry part 1

The bath upstairs has been used, exclusively, for the last month and a half, our washing machine is failing, and we needed something to occupy our idle hands.  Time to convert the old bath.

We already investgated it a bit and decided to keep the toilet and sink but shift the sink to where the head of bath was and to turn the toilet 90° then wall in the resulting cloakroom with a pocket door to save space (we have the bits for this part of the project but it will still be down the road a bit).

The other half of the room is to be a laundry and I started to recover tiles to shift to the bare wall in the cloakroom half that was uncovered by the tub removal.  The tiles were over plaster board which was laid over tiles over more plaster and plasterboard.

The command decision was made to buy back as much space as stripping to bare brick would allow.

It was a metal tub but not as heavy as I expected.

The new supply pipes were sweated in and, later, the waste pipe rerouted to the soil stack.

The mains water cutoff was held by a compression fitting with a rubber o-ring.  This was tenuous at best and, when I attached the new cold supply, the fitting popped right off.  The outside cutoff was under ½ metre of mud so I had to reset the fitting with the full flow rate of South Staffordshire Water system fighting against my efforts.  We put the dehumidifier in the room for the next couple of days after the flood was cleared.

Returning to the walls a couple days later, conductors were strung to the washer and dryer power.  You can see the arch of the original door to the loo from the outside split by the new transition from laundry to shithouse.

Time to tidy up.  The washer and dryer arrive tomorrow.  We’ll get to the decorating when the DIY places start delivering plaster once more (which is in even shorter supply than bog roll, right now).