Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Something more girlie

Enough of kitchens! Just after Christmas I bumped into a member of my quilting guild who offered me a whole pile of bridal offcuts. I was up at her place before you could say "Alençon or Chantilly?" Frances doesn't know what pogey bait means but she knows all about the concept!
Anyway I came away with several plastic bags of laces and fabrics, some 40 years old, some as young as 20. I'll take some pictures to show yiz all soon... :)

Monday, January 25, 2010

Day Six - tiling

Here is a photo of Kahn at work on our tiling. I designed it moi-self. The white 20x10cm (8x4 inch) tiles are divided by lines of glass, coloured tiles. Apart from the ones that are orange from top to toe, they are randomly split between orange coming up to meet red, grey, or light or dark brown. I wanted to give the feel of an equaliser, as I see and think of flavours in that way. Very deep. ;-)

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Day four, something to report!

Days two and three were really quite dull, involving running wires through walls and plumbing, stuff that matters but you can't see. Like interfacing and sewing in stays! :)But today, the kitchen cupboards arrived and things have taken a leap forward. Note that the orange paint is mine and MrC's work, and MrC did the ceiling too!

Ta da! I am falling in love with the curly funky handles Ross (my bmf and kitchen designer) insisted upon, and see how the sun comes through what is a little narrow vertical window to the hall. The room is quite dark otherwise, having such a panoramic view of a retaining wall ;-)

See my lovely retaining wall out the window? It's really kind of funky (AlohaAroha loves it too) as there are all these crannies to plant herbs and flowers, as indeed the previous owner had begun to do.

The only glitch in a very smoothly run project is that this afternoon while drilling a hole to attach a cupboard, the builder appears to have killed all of our downstairs lights. *sigh* Still, we don't really neeeed them and it's just a little thing really. Unless they have to take the whole kitchen out to get at the wall to fix it of course....ARGH!

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Kitchen: Day One


Well, yesterday we emptied everything out of our kitchen and today, most of what was left was pulled out:

The world's stoopidest kitchen, no storage space, ghastly colours, and thank your lucky stars we had already pulled up the heeedious vinyl!

This was the only other storage in there, a cupboard.

This is all that is left!

Bye Bye silly cupboard!
So, it begins. Yesterday I did the best job of all - laying out all the tiles for the splashback. I had to actually do it as the complexity of the design was beyond theoretical planning. We laid it all out, photographed it (in 4 sections), I did a graph paper pattern with colour legend etc, and then sorted all the tiles into separate boxes. Now all the tiler has to do is stick to the plan. The main tiles are white, with stripes of glass mosaic ones. You'll see!
The colours in the kitchen are ivory and orange. Yup, orange. It's a dulux colour called Mangatainoka, a place made famous by Tui beer. It is a great colour. It will look amazing. I hope!!!

Friday, January 15, 2010

Chaos knocks...

...because on Monday, the builder arrives to rip out our blecky kitchen so the new one can go in. As a result, we are emptying the kitchen and there is STUFF EVERYWHERE!!!I'm pretty excited about the whole deal really, and intend to try and blog its progress over the next couple of weeks. The bad/sad bit is that the big cupboard that is going to be our only accessible kitchen stuff repository, is sitting in front of my stash. This means I am on an enforced sewing moratorium for about two weeks. Thank heavens I have not one, not two, but THREE excellent options to wear to the Mardi Gras Art Nouveau ball!! :)