If you follow me on Instagram (or you’re related to me) you’ve probably seen these spaces as we work on them. They’re a long way from done, but already look so different! The few months since we got the house have been crazy, so we haven’t been able to do as much as we wanted before moving in.

The layout of the house hasn’t changed drastically since it was built, way back in 1890-ish (still researching to nail the exact date). It was built as a two-up, two-down. So there are two main rooms on both the ground and first floors, divided by a very narrow staircase.

On the ground floor, the two original rooms are the living room to the front of the house and dining towards the rear. Back when the house was built, the dining was most likely the kitchen, with a scullery and toilet out the back. I found plans in our local council’s archives of a nearly identical house built on our street, which had them labelled as such. Will I ever know for certain? Nope. But hey, I like to make uneducated guesses.

We’ll start the grand tour with the living room.

Gorgeous fireplace, right? And that carpet colour? Oooooooohhh… you can see why we bought the place, right?

The first thing you’ll notice about this house is that while it might have been built in 1890-ish… it has absolutely zero character. They ripped out every good thing over the years (coving, fireplaces, woodwork, floorboards, etc.) and replaced it with ‘blah’. The 60s have a lot to answer for when it comes to housing.

Why did we buy this house again? Oh yeah, proximity to the train station, shops, quiet street, and the fact that it’s basically a blank slate. I would have preferred a home with character, but definitely didn’t want one where I had to redo someone else’s renovations. I hate the idea of buying a property that someone ‘flipped’, only to pay more for someone slapping on white paint and installing a bunch of builder-grade finishes. Character I can add!

When I’m through with this place, you won’t know that it didn’t start out full of charm and character. Unless you are reading this blog, of course…

Back to the tour!

The living room is a bit awkward in terms of layout possibilities because it’s narrow and the placement of the bay window/fireplace/doorway means that there’s really no good place to put the sofa/TV. It’s like the Bermuda Triangle of awkward layout options. My first choice would have been above the fireplace, but Richard dislikes it when TVs are so high up. Then I suggested no TV and we put a projector in the bedroom (ha! That didn’t go down well).

So now we’re working on a compromise layout that will incorporate some library built-ins!

It’ll mean that the bay window is a bit underused, but hey ho. What can you do? I get library built-ins and sconces… I call that a win!

Moving on to the dining room…

Oh hey, another amazing fireplace! And those floors?! 

Be still my beating heart…

The dining room (former kitchen) is probably the darkest room in the house. With narrow doorways and only one window (which is shaded by our neighbour’s house), this middle room needs some serious love. It’ll serve double duty as a dining room/entryway since the teeny tiny space at the base of the stairs isn’t going to cut it. We still need a place to put down our keys, stash shoes, etc. so I’m going to have to get creative in here.

I have big ideas around incorporating the original cabinets on either side of the fireplace and playing around with contrast trim paint, I just need to get Richard on board. So far he isn’t quite sold on all my plans…

Moving on!

On the other side of the dining room, we have the kitchen and two and a half bathrooms. Only the kitchen was part of the original footprint, but it probably wasn’t a kitchen back then. I imagine that they moved the kitchen when they converted the fireplace in the dining room. The cavity there is the biggest in the house, and most likely would have had a wood stove inside.

It’s the kind of kitchen that professional chefs only dream of, right? Also, carpet in a kitchen?!

It’s a super awkward layout, with the kitchen a thoroughfare of multiple entry/exit points. It’s the biggest change we want to make in the house that will require moving walls and steel beams to address. That’s phase 2 renovation territory as we just don’t have the capital to tackle it now.

Okay, let’s head on through the kitchen to the weird side-by-side bathrooms…

Oh look, cheap, boring bathrooms… and for whatever reason they decided that two toilets side by side made the most sense. Richard likes to joke that we can now poop side by side and talk through the wall. I sure picked a keeper…

Alright, let’s head up those very narrow stairs and take a peek at the upstairs.

The house originally had just two bedrooms on either side of the staircase (hence the fireplace locations). At some point, they added a small room on top of the new kitchen, which required dividing the second bedroom to create a hallway. And of course, they built the wall with those amazing glass windows…

The hallway, middle and little bedroom all had carpet tiles, which you can see in some of the photos. They weren’t stuck down at all, so the moment we got the keys I picked them all up in order to get a better look at the floors. I forgot to take photos before I did it – whoops! Just imagine all these spaces feeling much darker with navy, brown and beige carpets everywhere.

Because of the new hallway, the middle room no longer has a fireplace (boo) and there’s a big chimney breast in the hallway. It’s not ideal, as we can’t really add a nice fireplace (too narrow) but I have plans for making it a feature anyway! Two words: exposed brick.

We hadn’t planned to do much to the middle bedroom yet, since our phase 3 plans involve a loft conversion and part of this room will become its staircase. However, we ended up deciding to refinish all the floors upstairs in one go, so out came the wall! We’ll build a new one with the doorway shifted over and frame it in such a way as to accommodate future loft access. We definitely won’t be adding huge glass windows to our wall, but will most likely incorporate transom windows above the doors, letting some much-needed light into the hallway.

Next up, we have the ‘little’ bedroom at the end of the hallway.

It’s just a wee little room (hence the name), which means it’s only really suitable as a nursery/box room. But then we thought, what about turning it into a bathroom?! We really want a family bathroom upstairs and figured it was a much better use of the space.

We’ll still have three bedrooms once we convert the loft upstairs, but this way I won’t have to walk so far when I have to pee in the middle of the night.

Rounding off the upstairs, we have our master bedroom.

Oooh, so fancy, so grand.

It’s not a terrible size, but the narrow layout (like the living room below) makes adding storage difficult. The wee closet is currently doubling as the access point for the loft and housing a large water tank. Eventually, when we redo the kitchen we’ll get a double boiler installed, getting rid of this tank and another one in the loft.

It’s not much right now, but we’ll add plenty of character and try to make it worthy of being a ‘master’ bedroom.

Alright, let’s head back downstairs and through the kitchen, to finish off with the backyard!

For people who love to garden as much as we do… it’s laughably small. Our street is at an angle which means that gardens get progressively larger the further down you go. Guess which end our new house is? Yup, we have the smallest garden on the street!

In case you couldn’t tell from all the apples on the ground, the big tree that’s sort of smack dab in the middle is a nice old apple tree. If it was anything else, we’d probably get rid of it because of its awkward placement, but nope. We’d feel too guilty, ha. And of course, Richard has grand ideas of making cider from it too.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking about how there are probably lots of people with way bigger gardens who don’t use them at all, and then remind myself I’m lucky to have any garden at all. Back when we lived in the flat we could only BBQ at the allotment picnic-style! Anything is better than nothing after all.

We’ll work hard to make it feel so much larger than it is. Plus, with the aforementioned allotments (three plots!), we have more than enough growing space for veg – this space will just be pretty flowers and a wee outdoor dining area. But those plans will have to wait until we tackle the kitchen since it’ll involve digging up new trenches for pipework etc.

Although with the whole coronavirus thing, we might need to do some quick fixes to make it function better right now. I have a feeling we’ll be spending a lot of time in our backyard this summer…

And that’s it! Can you see the potential? We sure can (otherwise I doubt we would have bought it – ha). I can’t wait to start seeing some of my ideas becoming reality.

Waaaaay back in March, we listed our flat on the market and started hunting for the perfect house. We debated a few areas and neighbourhoods, but in the end came back to the good ol’ London Borough of Bexley. Our new house is actually just around the corner from the flat!

When it came to the neighbourhood pros and cons, we looked at commute (we both work in London), schools (both for resale and in case we’re still living here by then), house prices (could we afford to live there), resale potential (could we make money) and the overall ‘feel’ of the neighbourhood. Some of the areas seemed amazing on paper but when we visited them and walked around… just didn’t feel right.

Some neighbourhoods were too ‘up-and-coming’ (to put it nicely). We knew the value could go up over the next 5-10 years but didn’t really feel comfortable living there. Others were too pricey (here’s looking at you Hither Green); we debated Sevenoaks, because we liked its ‘quintessential English’ feel, but the commute and prices just made it unsuitable.

So we sat down, talked through everywhere we had looked at and realised that we both actually liked living in Sidcup! It’s not that we were lazy and didn’t want to move – Sidcup has a lot going for it. I actually can’t understand why the market here isn’t more expensive!

It’s got great rail links (22 minutes to London Bridge), green spaces (Five Arches is lovely), convenient shops (Waitrose, Morrison’s, Boots, Holland & Barrett, etc.) and, as I said before, great local schools. And the biggest bonus? We can keep our allotments!!

Our new house isn’t perfect (yet), but we’re going to make it something really special. I have sooooooo many plans and ideas, as you can imagine – I just need time and money, ha. Want a sneak peek? Just check out this mess!

Oh, and in case you weren’t sure it was meant to be, the house has a name (which I have always wanted by the way)… Victoria Cottage. Yup, I didn’t give it that name, it already had it! It’s the name of the city where I grew up, which I named this blog after… so of course it was the house for us!

So stick around this space and see how we’re turning this old house into our dream little cottage… it’s going to be amazing.

Now excuse me while I order a custom address stamp… I’ve always wanted to have a house with a name…

As I mentioned in the first kitchen saga post, our kitchen came with IKEA cabinets that were no longer available, and we had to replace the upper cabinets in order to add more storage. Now, we could have kept the lower wood, as I’m a fan of a two-tone kitchen, but all the white appliances sort of messed that up. My original plan with the kitchen had been to do a tuxedo kitchen with deep navy or green lower cabinets, and a white top. But, as our appliances were all white, you’d be left with half white, half colour. Not exactly the look I was going for. So, in an effort to make the kitchen feel brighter and larger, we went all white. Does that make any sense to anyone besides me? No? Okaaay…

beautiful navy + white tuxedo kitchen via Apartment Therapy

So, that meant painting our lower cabinets white, but what about the upper ones? I could have colour-matched IKEA’s SÄVEDAL doors, and then painted everything in our kitchen the same, but decided against it. See, every ceiling, door, and trim in our flat is painted All White by Farrow + Ball. If I wanted to use the IKEA white colour, then it would have meant repainting our doors and trim in the kitchen to this different white, and I didn’t want it to look different from the other rooms in the flat. (Richard wishes I had told him about the colour-matching option…)

Am I crazy? Yes. But I also justify it because the finish on the doors was so smooth and machine-made looking, that all the built-in trim with brushstrokes would have looked different. We would have had to paint the doors to make them all look the same, no matter which white we used.

Aaaaanyways. So in addition to painting all the wood doors and trim below, we had to paint all the new upper cabinet doors as well. That meant removing all the hinges and handles, cleaning everything of grease etc. and giving it all a light sanding. For the wood cabinets and trim, we used 3 coats of this primer, and then 2-3 coats of our Valspar paint in All White. For the upper cabinets, it took 2 coats of primer, and then 2 coats of paint. After the doors were up, I did a bit more sanding, and some touch-up paint, as we had been painting on low surfaces and little bits of fluff kept getting caught in the paint.

Now came the fun part – making all the IKEA cabinets look built-in. See, I’ve always been a huge fan of inset cabinetry and wanted to try and give our bank of cabinets a similar look. This meant filling in the gaps all the way around the cabinets with wood and trimming it all out.

inset cabinetry inspiration via Curated Interior

To get the look I wanted, it meant lining up the trim with the cabinet doors, as opposed to the frames. So we added a piece of 21x21mm strip wood all around the cabinets, flush with the face of their frames. To install it, we simply screwed into the piece from inside the cabinets with a couple of wood screws. Not only did this give us a piece we could then attach the trim to, but allowed us to offset our next piece by a few millimetres in order to create a gap between the doors and our trim.

For the left and right side facing trim pieces, all it required was some No More Nails, and then some finish nails into our strip wood. The one on the left was one solid piece, but the one on the right was two separate pieces because of the window. As the side pieces were quite narrow, they didn’t need any other support, but the piece running along the top required more help. If we had only secured it to the strip wood, then it wouldn’t have stayed in place – the long expanse of pine was just too heavy. So we used some scrap wood that we had lying around and built some supports all along the length of the cabinets, to prevent it from leaning, and then screwed the piece into supports on either end as well. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo showing the larger support pieces on the ends, that we screwed the facing trim into. Just imagine them…

As our ceilings aren’t level, we were left with a bit of a gap towards the right side. However, we weren’t too concerned as crown moulding would cover it. See, all the rooms in our flat, except for the hallway and kitchen had some sort of moulding or covering around the ceiling. Even the bathroom has a really simple coving. But for some reason, the kitchen didn’t have any, which always bugged me. I wanted to make the room feel a bit more architecturally interesting, and add some character back in. Not only that, but it would finish off our built-in cabinetry quite nicely.

Now, one thing I have noticed here in England is the lack of available moulding for the average DIYer. You can buy wood coving at trade-only shops, but nothing for the average Joe (me!). The main reason, I discovered, is because coving here is traditionally made of plaster. And after our experience with installing a heavy plaster ceiling medallion, we weren’t about to try that again. Which meant that our only option was to use the stuff readily available to us – polystyrene. Now, I know what you might be thinking – “ew, plastic coving – gross! that’s not adding character at all!” – which is exactly what I thought at first. But, as it was the only option, we went for it.

We ended up purchasing this kit from B&Q as it was the closest in style to the existing moulding in our flat (see above) and came with mitred corners. It was relatively easy to install, except that our not-perfectly-flat walls meant that we had to hold some pieces up for a while so that they held instead of drooping. We probably would have had an easier time if we’d used No More Nails instead of the coving adhesive, which took aeons to dry fully. (We found that out after using it to fill the gap along the ceiling and had to wait until the next day to sand and paint.) The other part that made it so time-consuming was the number of pieces we had to cut. Our room has 5 corners, which meant we had a total of around 13 or so pieces to cut and stick up. That also meant a lot of joins to try and smooth out. I’m a bit meticulous about filling and sanding, as Richard could tell you.

Our final pieces were some quarter-round trim that we added vertically along all the edges that meet the tiles. Once they were up, filled, and sanded, all it took was a few coats of paint. As per usual, we used All White for the trim, and then I cut in again using the wall colour – Barest Hush.

Then, all the cabinets got their matching handles, and the drawers as well. The handles that we chose are these ones from Etsy, in the 14cm length for all the cabinets, and one 23cm long one for the drawer below the oven. The drawer pulls are these ones from the same Etsy seller, in the 7.5cm length. They have a subtle texture, like cast iron, but visually match the smooth handles.

The final touch was filling in the gap along the tiling with silicone caulk. I made sure to tape both edges before filling and then smoothed it with a damp finger before quickly removing the tape and smoothing it again. Once that dried, the whole thing was finished!

We went from basic IKEA cabinetry to something that looked built-in and far more expensive! Not bad for just some simple pine trim, and plastic coving eh? Just don’t count how long it took us to accomplish…

Now we’re just one step closer to a finished kitchen! We can finally put away the paint cans, and start adding those finishing touches. Soon, we’ll have the first properly finished and decorated room in our flat! Yay!

As for what we have done since I last blogged about it? Well, we finally have a functioning kitchen again!

After we patched all the holes in the walls and cleaned up from demolition, it was time to paint! We had chosen Barest Hush by Valspar to be the color for our walls. We tested a couple of swatches, but Richard was worried they would be too dark, so we settled on this option. My goal was to have a grey-tinted green that didn’t read too strong either way. As our living room is grey, I didn’t want the whole place to feel the same. But of course, I also didn’t want too bright of a color, as I tend to prefer more muted walls. Let the color come from the furnishings, in my humble opinion.

Valspar’s Barest Hush

For the cabinets and trim, we are sticking with our tried and true All White by Farrow & Ball, color matched to Valspar paint. This time around we went with their premium paint, as it was the most scrubbable option. It also comes with a built-in primer, so win-win! However, due to time, we didn’t get around to painting the cabinets, just yet. That’s a job for another day. Or month… year… sigh. Procrastination is real folks.

After painting the walls, we put the pot racks back up and got to tackling the cabinets. Originally, our kitchen had only three upper cabinets – two on the right of the range hood, and one on the left. As I mentioned before, we had planned to simply add three more cabinets above our original ones, and paint them all to match. Instead, we ordered eight of the METOD cabinets – four of the 60×60 size, three 60×80, and one 60×40. The four 60×60 cabinets were in the top row, with the 60×80 replacing our existing cabinets. In order to add the MAXIMERA drawers, we ordered all 60×60 doors, and the remaining 20cm of the cabinet became the drawer. The final 60×40 cabinet sits above the new LAGAN range hood.

Quite a lot of new storage eh?

Installing the new cabinets was another point where things took much (much!) longer than they should have. The IKEA rails were fairly simple to cut and line up, but then we started having issues.

See, we ended up back in the same place as before, dealing with old walls. We couldn’t seem to find consistent studs in the walls, and our expansion screws weren’t working in the crumbling plaster. This meant that we had to go grab some spring toggle screws from Screwfix… only the first set we brought home was the wrong length for our wall thickness – darn! I think Richard had to make three trips that day just to get the screws we needed. Every time we tried one set, there was something wrong with it.

We ended up putting in more screws than IKEA said to, as every now and then we would hit a stud, or have to move to a new hole. We just put up as many as we could (that were secure). The more the merrier, right?

Soo many screws

Once we got the rails up (finally), it was a simple matter of hanging the cabinets. Of course, because our walls aren’t perfectly smooth, the cabinets wouldn’t line up perfectly. IKEA recommends that you screw the cabinets together for stability, which we did. It also solved most of our problems with the cabinets not lining up. Just a simple matter of clamping them together, and then two screws in between the holes for the shelves.

The only thing not quite so simple to put up was the range hood. We decided to replace the one we had (even though it worked okay) with an under-cabinet version so that we could add two more cabinets to the mix. It just felt like too much-wasted space in such a tiny kitchen. While the installation was relatively easy for the range hood, it came with a plug, but ours had originally been wired into a fuse box. All it meant was that we cut off the plug, stripped back the wires, and wired it into a new white fuse box. Then we cut a hole in the back of one of the cabinets so that we would have access to the fuse, should we ever need to replace it.

We sort of sandwiched the new fuse box on the back of the cabinet, and then it sits in the original recess that the old one had. Not sure if that makes sense to anyone, but we did it months ago and I am forgetting details… I also forgot to take a photo of it inside the cabinet.

After the cabinets were all screwed together, and the range hood up, it was a simple matter of putting in the shelves and attaching the doors. Of course, IKEA put silly stickers right where the hinges needed to go, and they are the type that is ridiculous to remove! Coconut oil to the rescue! Just rub a bit of that onto the sticker and it comes away so easily.

The hinges for the cabinets were really simple to install, and I only wish that I had got the 90-degree ones. The ones we bought open a bit wider (I think they are 110 or 120 degrees). When we were ordering them, I thought that would be a good thing, however, it means that the doors want to open into the walls and window. Oh well!

We finally have drawers!!! So exciting!

Now this is pretty much where we got to before Richard had to go away for work. We managed to put our kitchen back together and use it for a little while. The next steps are to add some trim around the cabinets in order to make it all built-in, and then paint all the doors and trim to match.

I’ve ordered the tiles and hardware, so the only thing we’re waiting for is for me to get off my lazy butt and trim out these cabinets! But of course, Richard is now back in England, so hopefully he’ll be the motivation I need…

Welcome to demolition!

Okay, so I’ve given you an overview of our plans for this kitchen, and what we’re hoping to accomplish. We thought it would be a relatively straightforward couple of days, but boy… were we wrong! Once we started demolition, we realized we had created quite a mess for ourselves.

Let me try and break down where we went awry.

oh, look! It’s Richard’s hand!

So on our first day of demolition, we removed all of the upper cabinets, which also meant moving everything in those cupboards to our living room. Let me tell you, living in a kitchen/living room for about a week isn’t fun. Bleh. We also had to remove the range hood, IKEA GRUNDTAL pot racks off the wall, as well as anything living on the countertops. We kept stuff in the lower cabinets and didn’t bother removing the fridge etc., as none of that was changing besides paint.

range hood and stainless panels removed

Once everything was out of the room, we contemplated the tiling. Before we could paint or start putting up our new METOD cabinets, we would have to remove all the existing tiles. This was precisely the moment that things went wrong…

See, our building has all this great character because it’s old. Do you know what else it has?

Crumbling plaster walls – that’s what! As soon as we started removing the tiles from the main wall (carefully, I should add) huge tile-sized chunks of plaster were coming away with it. Behind the plaster, all we were left with was the original lath and nice gaping holes. From what we could tell, the original plaster “feet” (where the plaster squeezes in between the lath, creating little anchors) had broken away. Due to the sheer thickness of the tile adhesive that they used (crazy thick!), the plaster just came away with the tiles.

our beautiful lath…

After removing everything, this is what we were left with. One massive hole, and another smaller one.

The two end walls were okay as they were either external brick walls or newly built cement board ones. Minimal damage, with only a bit of filling required to even them out.

We googled how to repair walls, looked at all sorts of products available at our local B&Q, and ultimately decided on two courses of action. For the larger hole, we would fill most of the gap with new cement board, screwed into the studs. Around the edge of the board, we would fill the gap with a plaster repair compound (ours was the same brand, but a different type, can’t find it online). For the smaller hole, we felt confident we could simply patch it with the plaster repair compound. In retrospect, we ended up with some smaller cement board pieces when we cut them down to fit the larger hole. Those would have probably been better to use in the smaller hole, but at the time we didn’t want to buy a large board just to use only like 10% of it.

Due to the depth of the original plaster, and modern cement board thicknesses, we ended up using two pieces screwed together. Nothing we could find was the depth that our original walls were.

Here’s where a lot of the excess time of this project started taking place. See, our local B&Q didn’t have the type of cement board we were initially looking for (although we later changed to a different kind, which they did stock) and so we had to wait until the next day before we could get the right stuff. Then, the plaster took aaaages to dry, and we needed to apply it in layers for the large hole, allowing each to dry about 24 hours before applying the second. All in all, it took us 3 days (!) just to patch those two holes.

our drywall patch job

Ouch! Three days of next to no visible progress is quite disheartening. We were feeling quite frustrated at this point, and tired of living surrounded by boxes of kitchen items. At the end of all that time and effort, the result was so minimally changed from what it was before, but it was definitely an improvement!

No more cabinets or ugly tiles, but also nothing else! Hey, at least it’s clean, right?

But that is where I’m going to leave this off! I’ll pick up soon with photos of our new paint colour, and the cabinets in place. For now, I have to finalize which tiles we’re going to use, measure, and order them!