Project Casserole: UK vs US DIY terms

A short and sweet post for you guys: as we've been working hard at completing the renovations to our home, I encountered some serious linguistic differences in the words Americans and British/Irish (Bi-rish) use for home improvements. I stubbornly refuse to switchover to many of them, resulting in a fair bit of confusion and sometimes hilarity. Here's a quick list for your amusement:

crown molding, or cornice (US) = coving (UK)

molding (US) = beading (UK)

spackle (US) = filler (UK)

baseboard (US) = skirting boards (UK)

drywall, or sheetrock (US) = plasterboard (UK)
hardware (US) = ironmongery, or fittings (UK)
shop-vac (US) = Henry (UK)

I'm sure there are more, so I'll update you when I discover them – but maybe you have some to add? Send me your additions to the DIY word differences list!

PS: Even though I use it liberally across the blog when talking about our renovations, DIY as a term is a uniqely British concept and saying. It not only encompasses the activity (i.e., the home repairs completed by an individual not a builder) but also the category of paraphenalia and associated jargon surrounding the activity. So if you talk about what you did over the long Easter weekend, you could say you "Did DIY" which isn't grammatically correct AT ALL but refers to the wearing of yuck clothes, going to B&Q, prepping, doing, cleaning – the entire lifecycle of a home repair. And it can be anything – renovation, repair, redecorating, replacing lightbulbs – anything home-related.

Project Casserole: the DIY files

Hi everyone. I hope you've all been well and staying warm  – here in the UK, in London, on the 4th of April, it snowed. SNOWED. I'm sick of the winter now and am really desperate for spring.

The other thing I'm desperate for is my house renovation to be complete. I know I promised to keep you up to date with our progress, but it all happened so fast that on the Tuesday after my birthday I left for work and came home to this:

It's been over three weeks now without a kitchen, and frankly, I think we were a bit naive. We really just thought they'd take down the wall separating our kitchen and our living room and that would be it. But they also reinforced the structural support in the ceiling (so our bed doesn't end up on our sofa).

And they re-routed the pipes, which went through the wall we removed, and moved our boiler to the opposite wall which helped with the plumbing being made all nice and tidy. They also extended this wall, so that we could put more cabinets on it. This is really only exciting if you're into plumbing and plastering.

While all of this work was going on, my living room looked like this:

And everything, I mean EVERYTHING, was covered in dust. We spent most of our time in the loft, sitting on mattresses from the spare bed, watching tv from the iPad via the Apple TV. It was like being a student, in a squat, only we own it. Weird.

At the end of the 10 days our workers were in, this is what we were left with:

On the left there, that new door is my coat closet. I fought The Irishman very hard for that closet, and I'm very excited for it. This is my life now: excitement about built in storage. But the space is open plan now, and feels light and airy and BIG.

Obviously you can see that the flooring is gone; our kitchen had tiles and the rest of the ground floor was a laminated wood. We decided to put wood down on the whole floor, and went with engineered wood – and decided to save money by installing it ourselves. It arrived last Thursday, in time for our Easter Bank Holiday DIY-athon Weekend.

This is what they call "curbside delivery." You have to heft it into the house YOURSELF. I was the lucky one who worked from home that day and had to do it – all 28 boxes.

And here is the wood, and all of our DIY supplies bright and early last Friday. We covered a lot last weekend – filling in holes, removing the decorative woodwork, sanding, priming, painting, and laying over half of the flooring. We are finishing the flooring this weekend, and installing most of the kitchen cabinets along with the new oven (which arrives tomorrow) so we will have a pretty much functional kitchen AGAIN for the first time in nearly a month. We'll post photos of the nearly complete space next week – and in the meantime, if you have any tips about countertops or tiles, we'd really appreciate it!

Til next time... xx

Project Casserole Design Development

Sorry for the massive delay in posting, guys. Since I last got a chance to update you, it's snowed quite a lot here in London and my family was here visiting. So I was a bit, shall we say, preoccupied! But now the snow is gone and so are the familials, so let's talk kitchen design. Specifically, IKEA kitchens and trying to figure out an aesthetic for our open-planned ground floor.

Photo courtesy of Design Crisis

I'm finding that the problem with an open plan kitchen / living room is that setting the "look" for our kitchen is actually about setting the look for the entire floor, as the kitchen will spill into the living room and vice versa. So it's made me slightly adverse to do something wild like this nautical blue and white kitchen, because how do you synch that with sofas?!

Photo courtesy of Apartment Therapy

And my aesthetic for kitchens tends towards industrial chic, which is all well and good in a warehouse conversion but not our little contemporary mews house. First of all we don't have any exposed brick, and secondly it just doesn't feel homey enough. Our house feels like a home. This kitchen felt like it was a step in the right direction but still too cold – all that steel! I hear it's a bitch to keep clean.

Our other option is to go for a modern or contemporary kitchen. We could definitely do it; it wouldn't feel like an anomaly in the house and our current furnishings could definitely work with a more modern aesthetic. But when you touch these kitchens, there is something off about them... a bit soulless or something. I don't know.

Photo courtesy of Apartment Therapy

Plus, it's not just me. I have strong aesthetic ideas and as a visual person, I see what I want in my head. Sometimes I have a hard time describing it, though, and The Irishman gets a bit frustrated by my lack of verbal clarity. So both of us have been Pinning our ideas for kitchen looks separately, and sharing big finds. Surprise surprise, we actually have pretty much the same thing in mind: traditional style cabinets, minimalist color, oh-so-trendy (but so cool!) railway tile, and industrial steel appliances. Our prayers were answered when The Kitchn posted this amazing and classic kitchen renovation a few weeks ago:

Photos courtesy of The Kitchn

Basically, this is what we want. We're going for a galley style, and want dark cabinets but a sense of lightness. There's a ceramic sink, stainless appliances, and that iconic tiling. And the homeowners even have big French doors like us! You can totally see a nice big sofa leading out from this view.

We'd already started designing our kitchen via the IKEA Kitchen Planner, but these photos really helped us solidify our layout and look. We are going for the Lidingo (or Lidi) style of cabinets, shown here all in grey but depending on the actual color of the white versions we might try the white on top to give the room a sense of lightness.

Sorry, this is a screenshot. But hey, IKEA, I'm giving you free advertising. So, you know.

Here are a few images of our initial room layout. We're not tiling EVERYTHING, but it's just easier to leave it all tiled that separate out the areas where we want tiles (though there will be some full walls with tiles above the sink and around the window.

Now that we're pretty confident on the layout and the style, we're just waiting on a few quotes from contractors so that we can decide how fast we can do the work. A lot of structural stuff has to happen first, as well as pricing the floor (so expensive!) but then we can go and actually buy the kitchen itself. So exciting! For the next installment of Project Casserole, let's talk fun design things: lighting! Taps! Appliances! It's home renovation galore!

Project Casserole

In addition to figuring out what makes me happy, calorie counting, and working 50 hour weeks, The Irishman and I are resuming our home renovations. Specifically, redoing the kitchen and making the ground floor open plan in what we're calling Project Casserole.

I know a lot of you have been clamoring for photos of the house, but as of right now it's sort of a mess. I mean, the house isn't mess-y but the ground floor is in a state of suspended DIY. All of this is sort of abstract, so let me take you on a little virtual history tour of our home.

When we bought our house, the layout of the ground floor was like this:

There was a built-in kitchen diner in the front, by the window, and a pass-through window (with venetian blinds, UGH!) from the kitchen into the lounge. Here's how it looked just after we moved in, at the very beginning of our refurb process. We'd ripped out the built-in table and chairs, and our farmhouse table is visible squished under the window.

You can't really tell, but all of that white around the kitchen is wall.

When we bought the house, we saw the potential of it to be open-plan on the ground floor. We both like to cook and entertain and it was a real priority for us during our house search that if one person was in the kitchen cooking, they wouldn't be sequestered in a separate room while everyone else was partying in another room. This conviction was held up when we met one of our neighbors who bought her house (identical to ours) and it was already open-planned. So we stopped by her places a few times to get ideas, and then went to town. 

First, The Irishman took all of the cabinets off the wall we want to remove and reinstalled them where the built in table was, creating one long worktop and all of the appliances in a row. The fridge also moved down to that end of the kitchen, and a spare Billy bookcase went in to hold our cookbooks and booze – the most important things in life. 

The Irishman then started poking around in the wall before trying to completely remove it, because as he suspected not only did it contain electrical fittings but also pipes that still ran water. Oops. Before we could take the wall down, we'd have to reroute the water and electricals. 

But that didn't stop us from a light demolition work; we decided that we were pretty set on going full open-plan and that we might as well at least open up the pass-through completely. So in late September/early October, The Irishman broke through the half-wall between the kitchen and the lounge. It's so nice living with a DIY-friendly-hunk.

So basically this is the kitchen we've been living with for the last three months or so.

But now it's time to go whole-hog and redo the entire ground floor.

We've been having plumbers and electricians and general contractors come in to quote on Project Casserole. The first things we need to have them do are:

1. Move the boiler
2. Reroute the water so that it goes directly upstairs to the bathroom from the boiler (and not circle around the kitchen - byproduct being a much warmer shower much faster!)
3. Move the radiator
4. Get a building control officer in to tell us whether we can leave the remaining wall (the one near the window) as-is or need to make it more compliant with the fire code (possibly extending it? possibly insulating it?)
5. Ripping down the main kitchen wall as well as the parts of the wall near the ceiling where the doors used to be
6. Quote for installing the new kitchen (but we may do that ourselves depending on the cost)

And while we're getting these quotes, we're having fun playing with IKEA's online kitchen planner application - designing the budget kitchen of our dreams! My next Project Casserole post will be about the look we're going for, and how we're learning to compromise on form versus function.