Booty

Today GG and I trekked out to Wimbledon (15 minute bike ride, 15 min wait for the train, 15 min train, 15 min walk) to Wimbledon Stadium, where they run greyhounds or 'the Dogs' as they are called.  Not, of course, to witness this travesty of barbarian entertainment (although judging from the posters around the joint it is a très classy event). Instead we went to check out the weekly car boot sale.

A car boot sale is a strangely UK phenomena. It involves everyone driving into a large dodgy looking carpark or field with their boot full of stuff that to get rid of, opening up said boot to display wares, and playing trashy dance music from crappy car speakers.  I think it might only be this last part that is unique to this country.

And did we bring home some booty.  Well, as much as you can get for the grand sum of £6.50.

Item 1, a small 1970's metallic drinks tray featuring a map of the Maltese islands, 50p. Super exciting because we have been there but would never considering purchasing such a tacky souvenir, yet somehow it seems so right 3 years later and right in our home town.

Item 2, a Midwinter green and gold stripe tea cup, £1.  Hardly a standout, but it is green, and I felt bad after the lady rummaged around to pull out a whole box full of the stuff after I picked it up for a quick squiz.

Item 3, the crowning glory, a drawing of a Rough Legged Buzzard, £5.  I've since discovered this is a hawk found in Europe, Asia and North America, with an average wingspan of 134cm and an average total length of 53cm. Thankyou Wikipedia. Its special because its the only hawk of its size to regularly hover over one spot, which (aside from those awesome beaks) is what makes hawks so interesting in the first place. Woe is the hawk who can't even hover. What a loser. This guy was part of a pair, but the his partner wasn't so cool and so he got left behind.

He's hanging in the hallway, which you may never have seen before now. A sunless, dog-legged room with 5 doorways and a warped floor thanks to the leaking roof issue before we moved in. This is the view looking towards our bedroom at the back of the flat.

 

You might have noticed GG's little addition to spice up the hallway decor, a postcard of Rocky, in which it looks like Rocky is holding hands with Michael Jackson circa 2006 wearing a long skirt.

And while I was getting busy with the screwdriver in the hallway, I thought screw it, why not hang the mirror that's been sitting in the corner of the room on a chair for the last 14 months (seen most clearly here, behind the dining room table)?  After all, doesn't matter how many pock marks we put in the walls, they're all getting a new paint job in the next few.

Voila! £35 from Camden market when we first moved over here and I got confused and thought £35 was cheap.  Its a great shape though, and will hopefully reflect a little more light around the place.

Are you loving the industrial-ness of those pipes in the hallway?  They're similar to the one running through our bedroom, but they all originate outside our flat, and are probably whisking away the cooking fumes from all the other tennants.  They all disappear into the laundry cupboard (around the corner to the right in this photo), which is a veritable spaghetti mess of gas, water and electricity pipes and meters, along with the upstairs neighbours poo shute. The joys of apartment living.

Bedroom upgrades

I haven't posted any photos of the bedroom before now (except a snapshot of the beside table, and I'm sure the suspense has been killing you.  Here's a photo taken in the first week after we moved in.  That silver cylinder of loveliness streaking through the room is actually the kitchen exhaust, winging its way to the atmosphere at the rear of the building. 

Note the ubiquitous Ikea Malm double bed.  In birch veneer no less.  Well, it was inherited so I can't take the blame on that one.  But I ask you, what is wrong with Black-Brown? Or even oak veneer? Basically anything is more interesting than Ikea's birch blandness.

Anyway, we've made 3 key improvements since this photo was taken. (1) We changed up the position of the bed so the head of the bed is opposite the window. (2) We replaced the ugliest blind in the world, and (3) I bought a new duvet and cover when we were in Australia.

The previous owner had rented the flat with a very fetching cream blackout blind, which would have been extremely functional (albeit very ugly) - if only they had bothered to get the right size so that it covered the entire window! As it was, the blind was fitted a couple of inches below the top of the window, and when fully extended the blind left about 5 inches of free space at the bottom of the window.

From the looks of the additional plug holes, it looks like they made at least 2 attempts to finally end up with it in this genius position.

Anyway, our new blind was bought online, hassle-free from www.blindsuk.net.  It is African Blackwood, which translates to "cheap wood painted black". Either way it is 100 times better than what we had. GG has filled the old holes so now it looks the finished product.  We did discover a rather large crack in the brickwork while drilling the holes, but hopefully its nothing serious.

It is such a large window that the blind is ridiculously heavy to lift, so much so that I'm afraid one day I'll rip it out of the wall.  And it actually does a pretty poor job of keeping light out in the morning, but that's not a problem because there are few things that can come between me and a good ol' shut-eye.  These days the only thing that keeps me awake is GG whinging about noise from the neighbours.  Sorry for the poor quality photo, the rooms not very wide and the window is so tall its hard to get a good perspective (or lighting conditions!).

The second major improvement was the purchase of new linen - a black and white graphic duvet cover and grey coloured sheet and pillowcases.  I am incredibly fussy when it comes to duvet covers; it is virtually impossible to find one that I like and that GG won't hate. Originally I wanted something asymmetrical, with trees and bird silhouettes but I was unable to find anything that had the right colours (i.e. blue/grey tones with not too much white in it) and wasn't too trendy.  I'm pretty happy with what I found, and was even happier with the price: $AU50!  

I've since been using the old duvet on the couch for watching TV, and last night I accidentally ripped a huge hole in it. So it was probably a rather timely purchase.
The one thing the bedroom is really lacking is storage, at the moment we only have a couple of rails on the wall for hanging clothes (to the right in this photo), and consequently we are still living out of suitcases. 13 months after moving in.  I can't even bring myself to take a photo of that horror show.  But in the works is a wall-length floor to ceiling wardrobe that will solve all our storage problems and probably yours too.

A long time between drinks

Happy new year! A little long in the tooth now but then I am almost always late.

We've spent some time in Australia over Christmas and new year, 5 weeks in total for me.  Its very difficult to return to London midwinter after spending time in 35 degree heat let me tell you.  And before you ask - yes, I have family in Queensland, Toowoomba as it happens, where the flash flood occurred. (about a week after I left for Perth).  Thankfully they were not affected by the floods, although as I'm sure you've read, there were many, many people who lost their homes, and in the flash flood around 30 people died or are still missing.  The size of the 'inland sea' was greater than France and Germany combined.  Cost of repair and recovery expected to be $AU3.9bn.  Despite all this, we managed to completely avoid all the disruption and spent quality time with our friends and  families in the sun.

On the home front, we were pleased to find that, contrary to the constructs of my vivid imagination, no squatters had taken up residence in our flat and all was exactly as we left it. 

Before heading to Australia, I had invited a few of the girls over for a morning tea, mostly so that I could prove to GG that all my kitchenalia is a useful, nay, absolutely necessary investment.  In fact, all it did was highlight to said sceptic the missing items in my cupboard.  Like a coffee maker. And a teapot (although I do have a tea cosy, forlornly waiting in the drawer).

I made a list. I got up at 7. I raced to the bakers.  Of course I didn't actually make all that stuff. We don't even have the oven hooked up.  I got everything from Sweet Boulangerie and Patisserie in Exmouth Market.  They've been given a nice write up by Sarah Lambersky here.


Note the vintage green tea cup (part of a trio with cake plate), and 3 layered cake stand, both gifts from my Mum.  The 4 green glasses with gold rimming were part of a lemonade set (there is a beautiful accompanying jug that I later used for champagne + OJ), which were a 30th birthday gift from 2 of my lovely friends S and C who joined me for morning tea.  And lastly, the Snowden Flood tree glasses in black, also a 30th gift from KtB.

Anyway, the food was good, the conversation even better, ending at around 6pm that evening after grazing all day on the nibbles, watching a few literal videos and having a giggle at this.  

Hopefully not too long until the next update, GG has been working hard on our flat - its nearly finished. In Sketchup that is. I also made a few choice purchases back home so will share some of those with you over the coming week or so.

Additions

A couple of weeks ago GG and I went to midcentury.modern, the annual fair for all things design from this era.  Apart from the weather, which was pissing it down as is typical of London, it was spectacular.

Even the location, Christison Hall at Dulwich College was spectacular. I forgot to take my camera, but you can see Dan Hill's photos from a previous fair here, and I've just discovered he also has a pretty cool blog called City of Sound.  Coincidentally, Dan is also Australian and based in Sydney.


So, back to the design fair.  Almost all the stalls were familiar stores who had carted their wares down for the event. It must be a nightmare to organise, moving everything in and out just for 1 day. But at £7/person entry fee, and judging from the number of 'sold' stickers on everything at the end of the day, I'd say its a pretty wise investment.

We were pretty happy to find these 2 Kaiser Idell lamps, which we've been searching for on eBay for ages.  Typically they go for about £160 (although there's 1 on ebay now from France which is going for £220!), but we got these for £80 each. 2 for the price of 1. Ours a bit beat up, but I think that adds to the charm. As did the sticker I found on the base of one of them after we got home that says £3.85.  Oh well, one man's junk...

Kitchen: Before and After

Lets start at the very beginning. Want to see a nightmare?  Check this out, the day after we moved in.  

Only half of what you see is ours.  The rest we inherited from the previous tennants. A flatful of free junk.  It was like they got halfway through moving, before deciding that they didn't need to go back for the last load of jeans, shoes, books, piles of bank statements, kitchen equipment...  Or to clean.  There were half full rubbish bags and piles of swept up dust all over the floor. 
You'll also see the ingenious and rather becoming solution the previous owner had taken towards window treatements, upon realising that a standard £5 blind from the budget DIY store wouldn't measure up so to speak... That's right, a wooden pelmet, screwed right into the wall.  It was a happy day when those travesties came down. Although the weather is just turning really cold here now, and I'm hoping we won't miss pulling down those nasty plastic blinds for extra insulation.
But back to the kitchen. The previous rental tennants had tried to create a 'kitchen room' in the back corner by placing the freestanding bench out in the middle of nowhere and using the Expedit bookshelf for the other 'wall'. Crazy stuff. There was also a disgusting grease covered open wire shelving unit, which from a distance I thought I could clean up and paint to be kind of cool.  Up close I realised the best home for it was at the tip. Or the local chippie.
But we did score a free Expedit bookcase! I don't know what they used to cook in here but I spent about 3 hours with industrial strength cleaner removing dust glued onto it with grease. We also kept a few other things like a brand new fancy corksrew, still in the box, a fridge, freezer, a thermos and some saucepans in good nick. 

The first thing we did was push the bookcase against the wall, and move the freestanding worktop alongside it to open up the space.  And that's pretty much how it's remained since.  Despite my protests of "I'm not living with this kitchen for more than a month!", we've now been here 10 months.  This photo was taken a few weeks ago - isn't that extractor pipe just lovely? It runs through our bedroom as well! 

So much better.  But why doesn't my makeshift kitchen look as good as this one?! Possibly because I can't be bothered buying those nice looking wooden crates.

Photo courtesy of Remodelista via The New York Times

So, now to the 'after'.  Ok, so its not my 'after'.  Yet. Make-shift kitchen aside, we're in a bit of turmoil about the new kitchen as well.  The advice to live in your own house before renovating cannot be underestimated. There are some decisions that are undisputable, made even before we moved in.  And there are others that, had we gone ahead with them in the early days, would have been a disaster.  For example, we originally loved the rustic-y style with subway tiles, and GG was even sold on having a butler's sink:

These days we're thinking that ultra-modern is the way to go - it fits better with our mid-century furniture obsession, and will sit nicer in this old building, rather than trying to match or mix eras.  I want the simplicity of the kitchen to mean it fades into the background allowing the industrial features stand out more.
So I've started looking for inspiration on ultra-modern kitchens... and luckily they are a-plenty. But it seems that splashbacks are a bit passe these days, which throws the subway tiles into question. This is a little unsettling, as they have been my one constant throughout these rollercoaster months of indecision.
Would you believe it took 6 months to agree finally that white cupboards would be best?

Photo courtesy of Remodelista

This next kitchen is by Henry Built, which I suspect is the US version of European kitchen companies such as Bulthaup. Which we visited once.  They went up a notch in my book for not sneering at us even though it was blatantly obvious we were not able to afford any of their stuff, and the sales lady even gave us a hardcover book - I mean catalogue - as a souvenir.

Photo courtesy of Remodelista

Swedish log cabin. Love the wood walls, and as soon as it gets cold enough in London to ski to work from the front door I'm installing them.  Also love the gunmetal-coloured cupboards.

Photo courtesy of Remodelista

As much as I hate overhead cupboards, if I had to have them, they would look like this - right to the ceiling and totally sleek.  Nice use of brickwork as a splashback.  Unfortunately our brick wall is next to the kitchen, not behind it.

Photo courtesy of The Kitchen Vote

 But I'd much prefer to try and get away with just this little guy.

Photo courtesy of Remodelista

Or better yet, this.  This picture also makes me want to rip out the floorboards and polish up the concrete.   If I didn't think it might hurt the resale value on this place I'd do it in an instant.

Photo courtesy of Apartment Diet

In reality we'll have to have some form of open shelving, maybe something along these lines.

Photo courtesy of The Kitchen Vote

And then I saw this! Could it be? Stainless steel worktop with white cupboards and subway tiles in a modern setting!

Photo courtesy of Remodelista

Complete with built in sink.  In the end it all seems so obvious and... boring. Not in the way it looks but in the way it sounds when I try to describe it. But, having had 1 or 2 conversations with builders recently, the simpler the better when it comes to describing what you want.

Photo courtesy of Remodelista

But the biggest pain is actually working out the details once you've figured our roughly how it looks.  I just wish there weren't so many practicalities to consider. Like whether you can survive with just an integrated under-counter fridge/freezer, or whether it would be better to have a full size one. With Tescos and Waitrose right next door I'm tempted to just treat them as my personal fridge and pantry... pretty much as I do now.

Caffeine fix

I'm constantly telling friends how the best cafes in London are to be found in and around Soho.  There are so few independent cafes in London that have truly great style, so its thought it was worth sharing these tips here for the uninitiated.

I've been inspired to write this post by a recent feature on Remodelista of the Nordic Bakery:

Its a shame they didn't post a photo of the cinnamon buns they are famous for - they are the biggest and best I've ever tasted!

Fernandez and Wells.  3 exquisite premises. Lexington St. Beak St. St Anne's Court.  If I could live in a cafe this would be the one.  In reality I'll just try to replicate some of their style in my own place (starting with painting our internal brick walls stark white).  

Next up, Lantana on Charlotte place. Australian. Named after a noxious weed introduced to Australia from the Americas. Also the name of an awesome Australian film from 2001. 

A great cafe but way too busy for its own good, so we don't go there very often.  

Milkbar on Bateman st.  Sister cafe to Flat White on Berwick st.  Filled to the brim on Saturdays with super-stylish yummy mummys trying to wedge their prams in which is a bit of a turnoff for the baby-phobic.

And that's the way it is with London cafes - if they have an ounce of cool about them they are rammed on weekends. And since GG doesn't drink coffee and hates crowded places its very difficult to get him into one.

The other thing all these cafes have in common is above average coffee. From a totally different planet to the high street cafes...  So I'm going to say the thing we're not supposed to say when living in London.  The Aussies and Kiwis do it best. You know it.

The hallmark of a good Antipodean coffee? The fern pattern, this one from Kaffeine, on Great Titchfield st:

And so my one true love will always be Atomica in Melbourne.  This place needs no introduction to local Fitzrovians. Uber-popular and busy but never impossible to get into. There's just too much cool going on in the cafe scene in Melbourne for one place to get over-crowded. For more info there is also a review on The Breakfast Blog and an indepth review of the coffee at Backseat Baristas for those still living close enough to pop by.  

They have the audacity to only open from 10am to 4pm.  They have staff that really are too cool for school.  GG and I used to go for breakfast almost every weekend for the 3.5 years we lived in Melbourne, and while we got to know them they never showed so much as a flicker of recognition for us. 'Tats' and 'Blondie' - where are you now?
They roast, grind and blend their own beans on site (the roasting machine itself is impressive enough to warrant a visit), and they taste just as good when working up a morning cappuccino from home (effortlessly proved by my lovely friends M and C on my last trip home). 

 

Ah, the memories of bygone breakfasts.

Green

That's how I feel looking at these bathrooms. Green with envy. And maybe blue with confusion. I'm obsessed with all these bathrooms, but I'm still slightly confused as to whether they are the right style for our flat.  
On the white tile (99% sure this will be a subway tile) there is no question.

Photo courtesy of Emma's Design Blog

Photo courtesy of LivingEtc

Photo courtesy of Katy Elliot via Apartment Therapy

But the sink and fittings? I want an older 1930's style sink etc but have a feeling super-modern built in floating cabinet could be the right decision... and yet after half an hour of intensive searching, I came up with nada that I deemed worthy of sharing.  But I know I've seen them before, so hopefully I can come back to you on this one.

It would be so easy if there was something good about our bathroom that we could keep. Anything. But unfortunately it is a late 90's wasteland of ugly kidney shaped bath, crooked beige tiles and cheap tiny wobbly sink.

We are also faced with a conundrum: to bath or not to bath. No, not literally.  But whether to have a full size bath or just a shower cubicle.  I prefer cubicle but there's this myth that when people are househunting they will look at a bathroom with only a shower and think 'oh, I just don't see how I could relax after work with candles and a magazine in that shower'. Even though they probably haven't had a bath in years and wouldn't have time to use it anyway. To add insult to this myth, in England they will actually advertise your flat as having a 'shower room'. I think we'll have to keep the bath just to avoid turning potential buyers away before they've even seen it.  I hope the same is not true of overhead kitchen cabinets.

Which means I can pretty much kiss this cedar shower floor goodbye: 

Photo courtesy of Inspiration Bubble

And this one:

Photo courtesy of Art + Culture

But I can certainly have this - hate the marble, love the shower fitting:

Photo courtesy of Remodelista

 I hope that's one decision made.