Ventilator for Walk-In Pantry

On Thursday evening, the kitchen fitter and the carpenter are coming to look at the site of our new walk-in pantry. They are both too busy to start the work immediately, but they said it would be good to look at it together so that we could discuss what was required, and what would be possible. The other day I spoke to Gary, our neighbour who recommended them and the damp proofing company, and he told me that the kitchen fitter would be able to source a slab of marble or equivalent for my pantry, which is good news.

Today Gary came round and installed the new ventilator. There was an old one higher up, but although the grilles for it were still there, on the inside and outside walls, the ventilator itself had been blocked up at some stage. Gary said the ventilation would be more effective at the bottom anyway, so he said he would install a new one there, and remove the grille from the existing one and block up the hole and plaster over it, so that the wall would be nice and smooth, ready for the shelves to be fitted.

In this detail shot, you can see what a neat job he has done, and as he hadn’t yet fitted the grille to the outside, you can see the light coming in from outside.

All done, the outside grille installed, and the floor swept up (he is such a neat worker and always uses dust sheets), and once it is dry, he will fit the sliding cover for it.

The whole of the recess, showing the upper ventilator having been bricked up.

Detail of the upper ventilator brickwork. Once this is dry, he will plaster over it.

Outside, you can see the existing old metal grille at the top, and the new one at the bottom. He said he would leave the old grille because it won’t cause any problems.

The grille for the new ventilator. Once it is dry, it will blend in pretty well.

Gary told me that if you use a traditional air brick on the outside, it only lets in about 30-50 percent of the air, but this type of ventilator, which has sloping slats a bit like a Venetian blind, draws in 90 percent. The flow can be controlled from the inside by the sliding panel on the ventilator grille. We won’t want a roaring draught in the middle of winter!

This whole job may be taking a while to complete, but it is happening, gradually, step by step! Meanwhile, I am still managing pretty well in Mum’s tiny kitchen in the flat, as long as I keep on top of the washing up. If not, I soon get inundated and can’t move in there. My baking is on hold for the time being, and I’m not doing a lot of very complicated cooking. Fortunately the freezer is well stocked at the moment.

I’d hummed and ha’d about whether it was worth having a ventilator, but on balance I decided that no self-respecting walk-in pantry should be without one, and it would make it a much more effective cold storage space, and worth having done before the rest of the work was begun. He had the job done in no time. He will have the grille screwed on well before the main work on the pantry begins. We are so fortunate to have Gary living so close by as he can turn his hand to anything and is such a perfectionist! Also, he knows everybody worth knowing, and would never recommend a tradesman that he wasn’t prepared to use himself, or that hadn’t been tried and tested to his exacting standards. He does quite a bit of work for our other neighbours too, and is currently working on the garden wall for our next-door neighbour.

Hopefully I will have some more news after Thursday evening about what our new walk-in pantry will be like.

Dry Rot–Work Begins

Today the man from the damp proofing company came to begin work on our dry rot problem in the kitchen.

He worked fast, efficiently and very tidily. I was amazed how much he had got done by lunch time, and with so little mess, too.

To backtrack a little, here are the pictures of the problem area. First of all, the old kitchen cupboard to the right of my fitted double oven.

When the fitter installed our new kitchen when we moved 3 years ago, I asked him to leave that cupboard because it was an original feature of the house and it seemed a shame to strip it out. However, it proved an absolute pain – it was too deep, and the back was inaccessible, and whatever I wanted was always at the back, which meant that I was constantly taking stuff out to get at what I wanted! The first rule of larder design: have shelves that only hold one or two things deep, so everything is accessible. Also, in front of the cupboard was an area of dead space in the kitchen. The fitted oven unit is built against the front of the old chimney breast, and the cupboard goes into the recess to the right of it. When the new pantry is built, the door will be flush with the front of the cooker and will make use of this dead space.

Here is the top cupboard open, and you can see the problem I have with access to the contents.

This is the bottom cupboard, already cleared – you can see how far back it goes, and you can also see where the floor boards have rotted away, and the hole on the left.

The rotten floor boards and the hole.

Looking down into the void beneath the house – you can see the rotting joists.

When the damp expert came to assess the problem, he said we would not know the extent of the problem until he’d got the floor up, but the worst case scenario was that it might have spread quite a distance, and he anticipated having to remove the oven unit anyway, and possibly even need to take up some of the floor in the sitting room next door. He said he would definitely have to take out the whole of the old cupboard, and I had no objection to this as it had proved such a problem to use.

He was due to begin the work a couple of weeks before Easter but a death in the family took him away for a few days so he said he would start the following Thursday instead, until I reminded him that the next day was Good Friday, which would mean we would have a hole in the floor for four days and no work being done, and he said he would start the day after the Easter bank holiday, which was today, Tuesday 18th April.

In the meantime I had plenty of time to clear the kitchen, starting with the rest of the offending cupboard. I didn’t know how much mess would be created, and anyway we needed to move into the kitchen in the flat, so I cleared everything that was out on top – no point in taking everything out of the kitchen units as they’d be protected from dust anyway. The next two photos show work in progress with the clearing!

It started to get very bare indeed and it became quite echoey in there! Once the work is done, it will be a great opportunity to give the whole kitchen a good spring clean before bringing the stuff back in, and the new pantry will allow me to organise things better so that I won’t need so much stuff out on the worktops, making it tidier and easier to keep clean.

Here is the flat kitchen with our stuff moved in. (You can see the primrose bank through the window!)

It’s very small, but I can stand in the middle and reach virtually everything! We’ve now been in for more than a fortnight and I’m really quite enjoying it! It’s funny to be using my old cooker again, too.

So – this morning the work began, with Kevin, one of the firm’s subcontractors taking on the work. Here is the space where the cupboard once was – these photos were taken at lunch time.

He said that the man who had laid the laminate floor had done a beautiful job – the pieces were so snugly fitted together that he had to exercise great care to remove them without snapping off their tongue-and-groove edges.

In this photo you can see that he has already cleared away the rotten timbers.

The pipe over the hole is believed to be the gas pipe which fed the old gas cooker which we had removed when we had our new kitchen – Kevin wasn’t keen to interfere with this, and I am hoping it won’t cause a problem in the new walk-in pantry – I shall discuss it with the kitchen fitter when the time comes. It runs through the wall and under the sitting room floor, presumably to the main out in the street at the front.

During the afternoon he cut new joists and wrapped the ends in damp proofing membrane (the black roll bottom right in the next photo) and cut new floor boards. He also made new wall plates to replace the rotten sections he has cut out – these support the joists. The old ones were extremely hard wood where he had to cut them, beyond the rotten part – and he couldn’t get his big power saw in and had to use a small blade which got extremely hot and made a nasty smell, as well as a great deal of noise – and of course during this stage, I had to deal with an important phone call!

All day the kitties were shut in the bathroom because the last thing we wanted was for them to start exploring the hole, and wandering about underneath the house! They were not best pleased. We discussed what to do, and we agreed it was best to keep the kitchen door shut and the cat flap locked, and after Kevin had gone, let them out so they had access to the rest of the house, and if they wanted to go out, we could let them out through the door from the flat into the garden. However, by the end of the day, Kevin had laid the new floor boards in place to cover the hole, without fixing them, so we were able to let the kitties out without any danger of losing them in the foundations of the house!

This is what it looks like this evening now he has gone.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of the work he’d done so far in the hole, showing the new joists in place, before he covered it up, but I’m hoping to get one tomorrow morning when he lifts up the floor boards to continue work, as it looks quite impressive!

What we have learnt today is all very good news. He says that it is a great advantage that the joists run transversely, because if they were running out at right angles to the end wall, the rot could well have got into more of them, necessitating a lot more digging out, and more floor having to coming up. As it is, it has only affected the two joists running across the cupboard space, and they are bounded each end by two solid walls. Not only does he not have to dig up the sitting room floor (WHAT a relief!!!!!) but he hasn’t even got to remove the double oven unit! I was pretty well certain that this would have to happen after what the boss man Andy had said.

Tomorrow, Kevin will remove the joists he’s just laid in place for now, and hack off the render from the walls where the cupboard was, as he needs to ascertain if any rot has got into the walls. He will redo this with sand and cement. Depending on whether he can get away with one or two coats, he may even finish the job by the end of Thursday! If it needs two coats, it will go on into Friday, but the job will certainly be finished by the weekend.

He will also spray the whole area with a chemical to destroy any dry rot, and make sure it is all damp proofed and ready for the new timbers to be permanently installed.

After the render has dried, he will plaster the walls, and then once the floor is all back in place, we can go ahead and get the kitchen fitter to start building my new walk-in pantry. He probably won’t be able to start immediately as he’s bound to be booked up with other work for a while, but at least we’ve got the flat kitchen and I’m quite used to cooking in there for now.

Today’s news was so good, and I am so relieved, and no longer worried about a huge, ongoing job causing major disruption and a lot of mess.

I am very impressed with this firm, and with Kevin’s expertise and efficiency. I can’t believe how much he has already achieved, especially as once he’d seen what needed to be done, he had to go out and purchase supplies.

I should have more news and photos tomorrow.

Allerton Three Tea Party and New Chandeliers

Warning – Long post, picture-rich.

On Friday we had our Allerton Three Anniversary Tea Party. The Allerton Three is the group of us girls who met up on Allerton Ward last year, all having our bowel cancer operations. (It sounds like a criminal gang. I am convinced they discharged us for bad behaviour.) We became firm friends and have kept up, meeting when we can, and are in regular email contact. We all attend the monthly relaxation sessions put on by the Lodge, the cancer support centre at the hospital, which is a good regular contact time, and we’ve had lunch out together, and last week one of them had several paintings in her art group’s exhibition so we went over for that, on a day that she was stewarding, so we could see her.

We decided to celebrate the first anniversary of our friendship by having this tea party. Unfortunately we couldn’t do it exactly a year on from our meeting because the other two were away, and Friday was the first day when we were all free. It also coincided with a Lodge day so we met there and all came back here together afterwards – first we chilled out, then we pigged out lol!

It was lovely showing them where we live, and both of them enjoyed seeing my studio and some of the work I have done, and the artist denied being green with envy!!

I had laid up the table in Mum’s room with my best embroidered cloth, and it was groaning with plates of all my baking! Unfortunately, in all the excitement, I completely forgot to photograph it so I will have to leave that to your imagination, but it did look lovely. Afternoon tea is a great favourite with us all, and we agreed, happily, that this seems to be an institution that is at last coming back into fashion. I got my pretty cake plates out (I wish I still had Mum’s old wooden 3-tier cake stand!) and my Denby pottery tea set – this is rather thick and heavy, unfortunately, but the beautiful bone china one that was my grandmother’s all got broken over the years and is no more. I put out my little tea knives, though, and the silver jam spoons for the cream tea, and the matching table napkins that go with the cloth, and it all looked very pretty. I’m so fed up with myself for forgetting to photograph it!

This afternoon I decided to plate up the leftovers and photograph them so you could at least see a bit how things looked.

Chocolate chip cookies. They are flavoured with vanilla. One of my friends said that instead of vanilla, you can add orange zest and/or essence and get a real Terry’s Chocolate Orange (“not for sharing” lol! – remember those adverts?) flavour. I must try this.

Cinnamon biscuits.

Shortbread.

Remember the little cakes I made with the sticky icing (featured in my previous blog post)? Well, that icing failed to set, so on Thursday I scraped it all off and chucked it out. I made some more, this time butter cream, which worked much better, and coloured it pink, and spread it on the cakes, and then coloured the remainder a nice rich dark red and piped the little stomas on top!

Here’s a detail. You can see that for added realism (!) I have added a chocolate chip in the centre!

One of my friends asked me, “What’s that little brown thing in the centre?” I said, “Well, it’s poo, isn’t it!!” We all fell about laughing at the stomas and she said, “Yes, but what is it really?” so I told her it was a chocolate chip! Then she helped herself to one of the chocolate energy bites and said, “These look just like poo, too!” More laughter!

I am convinced that our time together on Allerton Ward turned us into three giggling poo-obsessed schoolgirls! It’s all the fault of the nurses. They never talked about anything else – but then you can’t blame them – it was the gut ward after all! It was there that we learnt all about the Bristol Stool Chart – I couldn’t believe that someone had actually poked around in people’s poo and graded it, and was convinced that the nurses were pulling our legs, but no, it’s genuine!

What a lovely topic of conversation over our tea party.

A friend on the stoma forum I’m on came up with the Bristol Ileostomy Output Chart (being different from poo, we felt that we needed our own chart – I printed this out and took it in to the stoma nurses!)

It’s a good thing that for those of us fortunate enough never to have grown up, poo remains a subject of giggle-generating infantile humour. I’m sure it’s one of the things that got us through last year’s ordeal!! Guffaw guffaw!

Here’s a mixed platter of goodies.

You can see that there are some buttered Scots pancakes (drop scones) and a couple of plain scones spread with strawberry jam and clotted cream – a traditional Devon cream tea!

I also took some photos of my beautiful embroidered table cloth which we used for the tea party. This belonged to my grandmother and I think it may have been one of the pieces she brought back from the Canary Islands where she often used to spend the winter. It is a beautiful natural-coloured linen with slightly darker embroidery, with satin stitch and drawn thread work.

Last week everything went brilliantly, timing-wise (apart from the first attempt at icing the stoma cakes) and the two chandeliers I’d ordered both arrived. On Wednesday, when our sitting room one came, I phoned the electrician straight away, and he said he could come the following day to fit it, which was great – it’s now installed and looking so pretty! The light in the room is a huge improvement on the single bulb under a shade that did little to improve the dimness of the room – it has five arms, each with a nice bright LED candle bulb.

What pretty patterns it makes on the ceiling when it’s lit. Also, I love how I can see it reflected in the mirror from where I sit on the recliner.

The other chandelier didn’t require the electrician to fit it, as it is just a fancy sort of lampshade, but he did install a longer flex for it. When Mum was in her flat, she complained it wasn’t bright enough and got my hubby to take the shade off her ceiling light, and it was so grim with just a bare bulb. Having a pretty chandelier answers the problem, and I chose a particularly pretty one on Ebay, in the “cascade” style.

In preparation for our tea party, I also added a few things to the room to make it more homely. Mum had brought very little with her from her old house and the room was stark and unwelcoming and unattractive. Unfortunately she has no sense of style and if something was of no practical use she wasn’t interested. My hubby brought the rug down from the loft, and the red armchair and the Indian table had already gone through when Gary was decorating our sitting room. I finally got around to unpacking one of the remaining boxes from the house move and put out the sitting room ornaments that there hadn’t been room for in our other room. I rummaged in my studio to find my huge Chinese fan that I bought years ago and which had never been displayed. I also put up some other pictures in place of the horrible ones that had been there before! Now that the big bookcase has gone, the room is looking a lot more attractive, homely and welcoming. I brought the large silk ficus plant in from our entrance lobby (where everybody just walked past it anyway without noticing it) and that’s softened things a bit, too.

The standard lamp that we bought for her has a pink shade which doesn’t co-ordinate with the room but I am planning to replace this.

A view of the garden through the open door.

It was great that both chandeliers arrived in time to be installed before our tea party, so that both rooms were complete. Also, on Friday morning, again just in time, my hubby went over to the furniture restorer who has mended the broken section of my magnificent Burmese screen, and for the first time since we moved, it is now displayed in all its glory.

All three panels of this screen are as intricately carved front and back, so it can be displayed anywhere in a room so that all sides are visible. I’ve never had a large enough room to be able to use it as a room divider, which is what would be ideal. I inherited this screen from my grandfather and it has accompanied me throughout my adult life. It is made from solid Burma teak and weighs an absolute ton! Over the years various bits on the tops got broken and the restorer has re-attached the bits that I still had. When I disassembled it to move here, one of the top pieces fell into two halves and I could see that this had happened before, and that my grandfather had mended it, but the glue had dried out. These two pieces have now been stuck back together. This is one of my great treasures!

Our sitting room looks so beautiful now it’s all complete at last, and everything is integrated an appears “meant to be” rather than the overcrowded clutter of before, and with Mum’s room being so much nicer too, we are taking advantage of it and sitting in there sometimes, getting the afternoon and evening sun, and having a nice view over the garden, with direct access to the little patio with the pots of flowers.

I shall be taking some more garden photos soon, and possibly doing a video tour of the garden as things start to grow and mature. My hubby has worked so hard out there and it’s all looking lovely.

One final bit of news – I sang in church for the first time today! I was thrilled to do it and it went very well, and I got some lovely feedback, which was very encouraging. I am booked to sing again on 12th June. It is a number of years since I have done this. I have such a sense of many doors beginning to open for me now that last year is behind me, and it’s an exciting and positive time, with lots to look forward to now that I feel I’ve been given my life back and I am looking upon things in a new light, as if everything is all fresh and clean and new.

I just feel incredibly blessed.

Our Garden in April 2016

Today is such a lovely sunny day and things are looking so nice in the garden that I thought I’d take some photos.

All my hubby’s tremendous hard work is paying off. The rock garden is looking lovely and everything in the garden is starting to spout, gr0w and blossom. Wherever we’ve lived before we’ve had a larger garden, and he has been working full-time as well, so any time he had for gardening was taken up with maintenance and keeping the weeds at bay, and it is wonderful to see him now, so enjoying making our small garden into something special, and having time to be a bit more creative. So as you enjoy the following photos, remember that it is all my hubby’s hard work!

We recently had the cloudy kitchen window replaced with a nice new one, and for the first time I an see the rock garden in all its glory from the correct angle! Unfortunately the water feature doesn’t show up terribly well in photos but it’s there! It sounds lovely, too.

Beatrice enjoying the warmth of the rocks in the rock garden.

One of the little plants we bought recently. These are growing nicely, and have started flowering. Eventually they will cascade over the wall and fill the patio with colour.

More of the new plants in the rock garden.

Looking up the steps to the upper garden, to the left of the rock garden. You can see the outhouse at the bottom, and the garage at the top, and a lovely flowering shrub by the steps.

To the left of the steps, further along the back of the house, you come to Mum’s little patio. We have got gorgeous tulips out (and more to come in another trough).

Separating her patio from the upper garden is a grassy bank. There are quite a few primroses growing in this, and after they have finished flowering, my hubby is going to move some more down from by the garage, and maybe split some of the plants that are already there. Eventually it will be a whole primrose bank. There are also some ferns and other little plants growing amongst the grass, and along the top we’ve got a few lavender plants, which we hope will eventually become a lavender hedge.

Beatrice basking in the sun on top of the outhouse.

At the top of the steps. between the top of the rock garden and the garage, is a flatter bit with a bay tree (on the left in the photo - severely cut back – I was worried I’d have no leaves for my cooking this year but it’s sprouting again, and will be a nice rounded shape instead of the vast great tree it was!) and quite a lot of primroses. You don’t see these if you aren’t actually up there, so we are going to transplant some of these to the primrose bank. You can see the outhouse roof below.

A little bit further on, beyond the bay tree, we’ve got some rhubarb growing. This will be its second year and we hope for a good crop this year. The compost heaps are beyond. Phoebe likes sleeping in the compost heap!!

Looking down on Beatrice on the outhouse roof.

At the top of the steps. alongside the lawn, is a hedge of Photinia Red Robin, a gorgeous shrub whose new leaves are a glorious red colour.

On the other side of the path, against the garage wall, my hubby has put some recycled trellis that he got for nothing, and in the troughs underneath he’s planted some sweet peas. They are not tall enough yet to reach the trellis and he’s put in some little sticks for them to climb up, as a bridge so they can reach the trellis. They are still quite small, but starting to grow. You can see the apple tree on the left. We had a huge crop last year and they were delicious. In the corner beyond, we’ve got late raspberry canes, and again we had a good crop last year.

The apple tree has started to sprout! Soon it will be covered with apple blossom.

Here is Phoebe sunning herself and rolling around on the concrete path between the two patios – her favourite place on a sunny day!

Finally, a view of the fence to the right of the rock garden, showing the flowering shrubs in our garden and next door. We are quite pleased that that neighbour doesn’t clip his shrubs back because we get the benefit of them!

Later on, when I’ve finished painting the little flower boxes, I’ll take some more photos, to include the summer house and the other side of the garden.

You can see that we have a very pretty garden, and in the next few years as the new plants mature and grow, it is going to get better and better.

I am reminded of the beautiful little verse from the poem by Dorothy Frances Gurney:

The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth,

One is nearer God’s heart in a garden

Than anywhere else on earth.