Temps Perdu – Croix De Chambre

It’s been a few weeks since our last update. We haven’t been sitting around enjoying the sun sipping cool white wine, although I have to admit it’s tempting!  The weather has started to get a bit variable although I’ve been wearing shorts most days.

We have a couple of projects running at the moment both in their early stages really. The first one is the bathroom, if you remember from the pictures it is in delightful brown tiles, well we have waited 5 years for brown tiles to become fashionable again and nope it didn’t happen! Being on the north side of the house it makes the room feel darker than and smaller than it actually is. We also have to use a shower that is over the bath and the taps are well past their best now.

So we intend to refurbish the whole bathroom. The cupboard that opens in to the bathroom will be blocked up and some new doors added in the corridor outside. This will then give us a corner in which we can install a shower enclosure. Where the bath currently is will be a double basin with drawers below and wall cupboards above.  A new slightly longer but contoured bath will be installed on the opposite wall to where it is now. We will lose the bidet, we don’t use it and it just takes up space.

The bathroom is quite large in area but quite long and narrow, so it’s been quite a challenge to design and find the units that will work in the bathroom. Every last centimetre is accounted for.

So progress this month… We have the double basin unit from Ikea. And we have identified the bath and shower enclosure. We just need to identify and purchase taps for everything. We have got the floor tiles… the same ones as we had in Pembury (blue with silver specks in them) and we have got the new tall tiles which we found in our local DiY store (so many different sizes to choose from). We decided on some white tiles with a sheen finish to help make the room look bigger and lighter.

The other project we are working on is the garden it’s fairly blank in terms of what is in it! So to make a start we have started work on our new parking area which will be by the gate. To do this we had to remove a section of the driveway wall, then take the rubble to the tip, which was a mornings job! The next part of this job will be to start profiling the edge of the garden down to the driveway so we can come through the gate and then swing left up on to that area of the garden. Judging by the number of stones in the ground which you might be able to see, I don’t think we need to worry about reinforcing the ground for a car to be able to park on it!

Other small jobs I’ve been doing include moving our Wifi router to the top of the stairs, this is where the phone line comes in to the house and it will also give us better Wifi coverage around the house and garden. I’ve also been able to put in a network cable to the router for my work bench as well.

That’s about it for now… until next time…