It's a Green House

Sorry for the radio silence the past couple of weeks, Jazzie cat went missing before Easter so we have been busy trying to track her down and not had time to write posts (or do anything on the house to write about!). She is back home safe and sound now, she wandered back in filthy and hungry but otherwise fine. Here she is modelling the new floor that this post is all about! If you follow me on instagram (I'm @itsagreenhouse if you don't) you will already have seen the kitchen tiles, but here's how it all went down! Lets talk first about what we chose. We decided to go for underfloor heating in the kitchen because it meant that we could have units all around the room and not have to leave space for a radiator. It also is a large tiled room and the underfloor heating should work efficiently in there. I couldn't seem to find too much definitive research on whether electric underfloor heating is more or less efficient than a radiator, it seems to be about compara...

I realised the other day that it may be hard to picture the layout of our house and what walls we have removed etc if you haven't seen it in person, so thought I would share the floor plans, what has been moved and what will be moved. You can see all the before photos here to show the photos of the full house. Also I love a floor plan, it was my favourite part of house hunting and even now I like to look at listings for houses and look at the floor plans...I'm a weirdo ok... The floor plan started out when we bought the house as the below (this is from the listing). The blank area next to the room labelled "kitchen/diner" is under the archway in the original "kitchen" and they missed off the door from the living room to the kitchen on here but it went out of the top left of the living room into the hallway. It generally had a nice flow and plenty of space, but we wanted to adjust the kitchen a bit. The first phase of the wall removal (...

This is where the week by week rundowns will likely end, as it breaks down into single projects after we moved in at the end of week 4. We had to focus in on finishing things or progressing them rather than having 500 unfinished things and also having to live in the house! Through week 4 there was less progress by us as we spent some evenings packing up our stuff and moving it in gradually and some evenings working on the house. At this point we just needed to get it reasonably habitable and make room for our furniture. Moving in was relatively uneventful, we don't have masses of stuff to move and had been able to move smaller things into the house in our cars already so really only had the larger furniture and the last few boxes to move. We even managed a pub lunch halfway through the day :) We had a skip delivered and loaded this up, clearing the rubbish and rubble from the back garden and also putting the old carpets in there. From a waste reduction point of view we t...

Week 3 was when we saw some really big changes, I was off work that week and we had the plastering booked for Monday, kitchen fitting and construction work for the rest of the week and I had plans to get on with getting some rooms prepped and painted so we could get carpets ordered (at the time of writing this weeks later we still don't have any rooms painted or carpets so that part obviously went well!). The downstairs of the house was out of action for me this week as the living room was full of the kitchen in flat pack boxes, and the kitchen was having various work done on it all week. My plan was to work on the bedroom and hallway, getting all the wallpaper stripped and the ceilings painted and the walls prepped. We got the kitchen plastered on the Monday, which made a great leap forward in how the room looked, and the kitchen fitter came on Tuesday to assemble all the base cabinets (nothing could go on the walls for a few days while the plaster dried). Some photos ar...