Heating and a beautiful hob!

It has been two weeks now since we joined the modern world of central heating.  When we moved in 6 months ago, the plumber came round to look at the boiler - which hasn't worked since we got here - and said "Well, at least it's mid-summer and not mid-winter"!  We laughed at the time, but I really should have pressed him further.  He left with a chuckle and said that he would look up the boiler, because no-one seemed to know what to do with this industrial-sized monster machine that we had in our boiler cupboard.

 Well, September and October rolled on and still no heating!  Other plumbers came and went, perplexed and defeated and eventually our own trusted plumber came back and gave us heating!  Meanwhile, we wore woolly hats and borrowed oiled-filled radiators for the duration of chilly autumn mornings.  No more grumpy grown-ups and we can peel off some of the many blankets we put on the kids' beds.  The saga is not completely over: as soon as we got heating, the element for our water-heater in the kitchen gave up; Leo put a plastic bag on a hot electric hob (curtains for the hob); and we got fed-up of using a weak top oven at 230c for all our food!

Now - apart from underfloor heating in the new section of the house, and hot water in the kitchen - we are fully equipped with boiling radiators and a very smart oven and hob - all ready for Christmas!



No need to visit an Ice Hotel in Iceland now, although it is one of my ambitions in life!  We did, however, go for a more local adventure over half-term to the eco-sustainability centre in the South Downs to stay in a yurt!  As one friend commented: at least you will have a wood-burning stove and some heat!  Little did she know...we were ignorant too of the fact that yurts are actually quite large and the wood burner was just not powerful enough.

So, we waited for the jacked potatoes to cook (which they never did), and shivering in sleeping bags while our dog helpfully barked every time he heard someone walk by outside!  That certainly made us appreciate our house made of bricks, even if without heat.

Bringing the sea into my home

As the weather begins to turn and we have more autumnal weather with crisp chilly mornings and falling leaves, I begin to think more of the sunshine and warmth that I was used to in my childhood home in Bahrain.

Where I grew up

Perhaps it is the bright blue skies and the occasional day of warm sunshine we have been lucky to have in September which reminds me of the little island in the Arabian Gulf.

There are small reminders of where I grew up in every home I have lived in and when we move, I guess it is natural for me to think about how I can incorporate a little bit of Arabic culture and design into my new home.

Our lovely Bahraini floor cushions

How this inspiration plays out partly depends on the structure and layout of the home.  I have already started that fusion in our open plan living/ dining room, where we have an area of floor cushions which have a typical Bahraini embroidered design on them.  Apart from the cushions and the little Arabic coffee-pot in the window that is as far as I have got so far, but there is more to come!  We have been concentrating on changing the doors at the moment to remove the feeling of living in an institution and transforming the house into our home.  Upstairs we now have warm pine wooden doors:

7 lovely doors, now the task of varnishing begins!

Downstairs will be the next step and in the old part of the house it will be fairly straightforward with more pine doors.  However, to keep the contemporary feel in the modern part of the house we have decided to have similar doors to the front door for rooms with single doorways:

Our front door - as inspiration for internal doors

That leaves us with the double doors leading into the open plan living area.  After much deliberation over various options, Chris came up with a brilliant idea of having a traditional Arabic door made in Bahrain to be shipped over.  This may sound expensive, but the prices of crafted items in Bahrain are much more reasonable than over here and I think the end result will be worth the effort.  It will look like one of these:

Institutional soon to be ethnic & contemporary:

  Another big feature for me is the sea:

Having being brought up by the sea, it feels that it is always with me and I am always most at home on a beach come sunshine, wind or rain.  Now, if I could I suppose my ideal home would be on a beach, but as that is not practical, I still like to have some reminders of my spiritual home around me.

Pictures, colours, and water are all ways I like to depict the sea in my home.  Paintings of water scenes and shades of blue on the wall are always around us, but I have also wondered about a water feature?!  Perhaps a little later on in the garden, we could find a quiet spot for a simple water fountain similar to that found in a an Arab courtyard or Japanese garden:

Our brand new driveway!

The finished product

Our first mini project is complete!  We now have a driveway and no longer need to park the cars on the road - perhaps not the most exciting project to organise and oversee, but we are so excited.  The condition of our purchase has now been completed, the japanese knotweed experts were happy with the work and we will no longer experience our wing mirrors being knocked off by inconsiderate drivers, who don't even stop!

Here are the pictures of the journey:

Before the work commenced

Chris - just trying out the digger!  Don't worry, I have put the keys away safely!

The real builders at work!

Before the fence was re-built!

Nearly there...

Precarious lifting to remove bags of contaminated waste

So now, we can focus on the inside of the house.  The dropped kerb of course is a separate matter, and I learnt to my detriment that driving up a steep kerb would do no good for the underside of my car as I heard it scrape the pavement each time.  So there was more waiting to be done and as ever, nothing was straightforward.  More bureaucracy and complications of moving BT boxes and mains water taps - but we got there in the end!

Settling in

It is starting to feel like home now.  Despite building work and decorating remaining to be done, we have managed to make Highfield House feel very homely with our furniture, pictures, rugs etc. They all make a big difference.

A generous "welcome" hamper from our mortgage lenders!

Our "lived-in" family room!

Exhausted but very settled and content dog!

Now we start the waiting game again while we show builders, electricians, plumbers etc. around the property and they tell us that quotes will be forthcoming... but we are still waiting!  It brings back memories of me sitting in our old house with Leo (8 weeks old at the time) after just buying the property and arranging to meet workmen there for quotations before we moved in.  Often I was there left waiting with no furniture and no heating, and more often than not they would not turn up! That hasn't happened as much this time, but the enthusiasm wanes when after 4 weeks we are still waiting for prices!

I guess every cloud has a silver lining though - it has allowed us to change our minds while we wait and prepare thoroughly to deal with Japanese Knotweed!

 For those of you who are not acquainted with this weed, a brief description would be a plant that was accidentally imported from Japan in a pot with another plant and since then has been contaminating our soil with its indestructible roots which can potentially pull down a brick wall!  This deceptively pretty and delicate tall plant is in our garden!  However, it's not something we panicked about as we had been well briefed by the council from the beginning of our negotiations to purchase the property.  All the required treatment and monitoring programmes were put into place to satisfy our mortgage lender, together with guarantees, so we thought we could relax!  When we eventually moved in, and had time to speak to the Japanese knotweed experts, we discovered that you have to treat this plant with extreme care when removing it, so as not to spread it further!! Useful knowledge!!

Dead Japanese Knotweed in the corner - prior to our transformed driveway...

Therefore plans had to be adapted.  The same goes for inside the house - having time to think as we live there day to day, we can work out how best to change and adapt the house to suit our needs - so no need to rush into knocking walls down!

Results

Now the exciting part starts - the transformation of Highfield House into the Armstrongs' home!

Stripping back the paint by the stairs

We seem to be multi-tasking, but in a manageable way!  Chris enjoys stripping away the layers of paint, both inside and out - the sash windows seem to be a particular favourite of his. My role seems to be sourcing furniture and painting and then we call for help - hiring people for jobs beyond our skills, such as removing all the remnants of the various alarms and electrical equipment that were needed when it was a residential home. Here's an indication of what has been coming out of the walls...

Wires, wires and more wires!

Little steps, but it all makes such a difference, especially painting first the bathroom to take away the sickly lilac and now slowly extending to the bedrooms one by one:

Our bathroom before...

After a lick of paint

And other homely finishing touches!

Phase 2: Painting!!!

Boxes unpacked, and a good number of Angels smiling as a result of their removal from our home.  Now we move on to the slightly more exciting part of painting.  You are probably thinking: hang on a minute, what about the building work??!!  Yes, that will come, but as you will see in the next post we are doing yet more waiting (this time on quotes).  Meanwhile, our feet are itching to do something in our new home and we have daily pleas from our children along the lines of: "Are the boxes unpacked yet?" and "When can we start painting?"

So yesterday we took the first step by deciding which room to paint first.  This is not as simple as it sounds.  We thought that we would be able to paint the children's rooms fairly soon as there is no major work to be done on them.  However, there is then the question of fairness and equality!  Often a big issue in our house, especially with their Dad being a Professor of Politics specialising in ideas of equality and a Mum teaching and writing about equality in the criminal justice system. I guess it's inevitable that our children are growing up to feel quite strongly about their rights, and having firm ideas about what is fair!  Chris and I came up with what we thought was a democratic way to decide the order of painting: names in a hat.  Ha! There will always be at least one dissenter!  Felix went off being very enthusiastic about this idea and put his creative hands to work to produce not scrap pieces of paper with their names on, but neatly drawn out squares - two pieces for each child, plus some blank pieces to fill up the hat a little which quickly became known as "fake snakes"  (don't ask me why)!  Yasmin (aged 3) was asked her opinion and seemed happy enough with the lucky-dip system, but Leo was not.  He announced that we should paint all of them simultaneously, even if it meant getting a man in to paint the third room !  This seemed logistically very difficult and expensive too!!!  But he was placated a little by the thought that they can have sleep overs in each other's rooms while they're waiting for the paint to dry...




Today I started the process of putting sample squares of paint in all three of the children's bedrooms for their final approval.  The outcome of the lucky dip was that Felix will have his room painted first, followed by Yasmin and then Leo (the dissent became before the result, interestingly enough!)  Now to PAINT!

Curtains and blinds

Well, the Angels continue to smile as more boxes are dismantled, but most progress this week has been made on window coverings.

We initially thought we were very fortunate in moving into a house that had blinds on all the windows, meaning that we did not have to rush the process of buying curtains.  However, we did not appreciate how oppressive metal Venetian blinds can make a room feel.  So it quickly became a priority to re-cover the windows in softer materials.  It has made an amazing difference: more light is let into the room during the day, and at night the light is properly blocked out leading to more restful sleep!

Our hallway blind - soon to be replaced!

The top floor bedrooms - featuring small gable windows - were the first to look more homely with simple, colourful roller-blinds.  On the first floor, Leo opted for some black-out dinosaur curtains and I took the decision to buy Yasmin some plain off-white ('oyster') curtains.  Felix helpfully pointed out that they were boring, but bearing in mind that she already had a stripy, multi-coloured Roman blind underneath and fuchsia pink curtain poles, I thought that was enough colour in a space of 160cms by 185cms!

Yasmin's fuchsia pink curtain poles! 

Our bedroom and the downstairs reception rooms took a little more thought.  We wanted Roman blinds but decided (for now, at least) that we could use some perfectly good curtains from our old house.  My former neighbour, who is a whizz on the sewing-machine, split our sitting room curtains in half to make two pairs for the downstairs snug and study.  They were tailor-made for our old sitting room that had a large bay window, but it was really nice to be able to re-use them.

So now, having resolved the natural light issues, we are beginning to consider the artificial lighting throughout the house - what to keep and what to replace... I'll keep you all posted!

Priorities for sorting out a new home!

It must not be over-looked that both Chris and I are Librans and so quite obsessed with decor and aesthetically pleasing designs!  Rather than directing removal men as they unloaded the lorry, Chris was busy taking all the "fire escape" signs off the doors and walls, desperately trying to make our new house more like our home.  Ten days into the move and the nesting bug has caught me too - although the logical side of my brain still says unpack boxes first, then decorate etc, I had to put a few pictures up and what a difference it made to make our house feel more like home!

So although most of our time so far has been taken up by unpacking boxes, working out the boiler and oven and trying to stop the fire alarm from going off by accident, we still have time to dream about wallpapers and wet-rooms!  Our latest idea is cracking on with the hallway as soon as our boxes are unpacked.  It makes a big impact in terms of making this place feel more like a family home, because there is so much hallway space, but in some ways it is fairly straightforward - painting, perhaps some wall papering and eventually a change of carpet.

Meanwhile as decorating is still a little way ahead in our journey, there is a new motto in our house that is relevant to our unpacking frenzy: "Another Angel is smiling!" - this came from Chris who piped up while dismantling yet another box: "An Angel smiles each time a box is killed!" - I like that image that these Angels are looking down on us while we beaver away at making our new house our home and watch over us, encouraging us to keep going with all the work that needs to be done.

Moving Day!

Finally, we did it!  Moving day was a week today, so all packed up and ready to go - full of excitement and ideas:  One morning, a few days before moving, the entire family were all sat on our bed with paint samples discussing what colours our children will choose for their bedrooms.  A week later and we have already visited Homebase, and the kids have their colours and are now just waiting for Mummy and Daddy to hurry up and get painting!  Last time we moved house, our eldest was 2, so we didn't have the same situation where now everyone has their own opinion!  Felix at that stage was happy with blue and so it was - the boy's bedroom was painted a light blue colour.  Now on the other hand, they are growing up and have their own rooms for the first time and so more diplomacy was required on our part.

In theory, both Chris and I agreed that the children can choose their own colours.  The only veto was that Felix could not have BLACK - as was his first suggestion!  So we went through all sorts of elaborate plans of different walls being painted different colours and different combinations, but when we got to the shop, Chris found it harder than expected to accept his children's choices.  Not that they had chosen anything outrageous but simply that they do not have the design experience that adults have and were perhaps not choosing the best options for their room.  For example, Felix has a small attic room and wanted a blue/ purple colour called Lupin which was lovely but would end up making the room feel very closed in.  Yasmin wanted pink and purple and so far we have just bought pink, but she is not letting up!  So this is a learning process for us parent's too - letting go and allowing our children to make their own decisions and learn from their own mistakes.  Leo was "conned" dare I say into choosing a painted wooden curtain pole rather than the brash metal pole that first took his fancy as Chris persuaded him that it was an elven stick!  So Felix has come round to a paler blue and cream, Leo is happy with his green and Yasmin is still campaigning for her purple - I am sure it will all turn out ok in the end.  And this is only the beginning of our design adventure!

I promise some photos of our house next week - still struggling to get broad band set up! - Oh, the joys of moving!!!

It must be fate!

It is all finally coming together!  I have always felt that this house was "meant to be" for us; even at the start of the process things just seemed to slot into place.

For instance, on the fateful Tuesday when I'd driven all the way from Dorset to view the property for the first time, I contacted my mortgage advisor. Usually this means leaving a message and having a conversation some later. This time, I was put straight through and Dave (our mortgage advisor) very calmly and competently told me what I needed to do and what we would need to borrow. Phew! - it was all okay, we could afford the house; he put me in touch with a firm of solicitors and arranged a mortgage promise to be faxed to the estate agent's later that morning.  Fantastic!  All going to plan so far, and so armed with a coffee and biscuit, I set about writing the bid for what I hoped would be our future home (fingers and toes crossed).  I wrote what I hoped was a very good bid, describing not just the offer amount, but what we hoped to do with the property. It was all delivered to the estate agent's office by 12.30, after which I set off back to Dorset for the rest of the family holiday! 

All we had to do then was wait...  Little did I know then, that the two months until the Council meeting on 25th October 2012 was a short wait, compared to some of the other delays we've faced! In the end, though, we got there: contracts have now been exchanged and amoving date set for next Wednesday. So the next time I sit down to write this blog, I will be sitting in our new house! I'll be bursting with ideas of what to do with it, but first I guess I will have to tackle the boxes and all the unpacking!!  My head is a little fuzzy right now with the 101 things that need doing before the move, but there is light at the end of the tunnel and soon I can finally get down to crafting my new home!