Back again!

I can't believe it has been 4 months since I last blogged!  Christmas came and went, the builders arrived and it seems to have been a blur ever since.  Well there has been lots of progress in that time - some of it is little stuff, but still makes a difference and other changes have been quite significant and amazing!  Have a look at some of the progress:

Before

Open plan living space the week we moved in!

The wall we named "Beirut"

What will be our study

Chris' begins the work of stripping paint

And after:

Our now cosy and painted living space

The study - work in progress!

No longer the "Beirut" wall!

Stairs now fixed!

When I return from Spain where we are hoping to bring back Moorish inspiration, I will write more about each of our projects so far!

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!