First-time house renovation

TomsMom

Latecomer :T

BB1984

Hello! :hello:

Haven't got a lot to say but thought I should prob pop my head in and say hi! I have been very lax on the DIY front lately - OH has been away and whilst that doesn't normally stop me, I've been taking the opportunity to catch up with friends etc, so not much has got done.

I am very impressed by you all though - you seem to have been very busy! TM, your loft looks absolutely amazing, the photos are brilliant. It's all going to look so lovely :cheesy: Just remember that when you're cursing your tiles...! AB, hope your bruises have gone down and that you're recovered in time for another hard weekend's work...?! LC - annoying about the timber but sounds like you might be onto a good result after all. The end result will be worth the stress I'm sure. JT - ditto re the bathroom! Keep hassling B&Q, and I reckon you're well within your rights to expect a credit note as a good-will gesture. Everyone else, keep up the good work!

I have a bit of a dilemma, actually. Doors. Three of the b*ggers!
Now, we have some very nice original timber doors, they are in every doorway except one (the kitchen - had a hideous panelled sliding door with a translucent plastic panel :eek:). They're all fine, just need to be sanded and re-painted. So we need to buy one more timber door for the kitchen. I've never ever seen our doors anywhere else - have scoured ebay etc to no avail. Plus TBH I'd like a half-glazed door to the kitchen, so we're thinking buy a new door, and not worry about it matching. In fact, I reckon it'll look better if we deliberately make it NOT match - i.e. buy a modern style or something - so it doesn't look as though we've tried and failed to make it fit in. Any thoughts?

Then we have the front door, and the other front door(...!) I don't know if I've ever talked about this aspect of my house, but the front is a bit of a mess. The front front door, (that you can see in the external snowy photo on my blog) is aluminium and double-glazed top and bottom. I guess it was put in when the rest of the windows were done - c.15 years ago? It's ugly and draughty, and not very secure. The thing is, this door is actually at the front of what was originally a storm porch. But when this door was installed, they kept the original front door position as well! So there we have the internal front door...! This door is equally ugly, one of the glazing panels is broken, and it has a letter box in it, which is rather pointless. Clearly both these doors need to be replaced.

Now, in an ideal world I would remove the external front door, and put a proper front door where it originally was meant to be. However, this makes the front end of the hallway rather cramped. So my plan is to replace the external front door, with a nice new secure one. PVC, timber? Not sure. We have (or at least will have!) PVC windows, so it's not like we can preserve the original look of the bungalow, much as I'd like to have. But I don't particularly like PVC doors...

Then for the internal door, I'm thinking of getting a normal internal timber door - and similarly to the kitchen door, I'm wondering if it might be best to not even try to match the other doors. I saw this, this and this, what do you think (apart from the fact they're from Wickes :rolleyes:) Be honest....! I'll try to find a photo of my other doors, so you can keep them in mind too. And I'll take a photo tomorrow of my two front doors!

Of course, in doing all of this, we also are going to need to over-haul the storm porch, seeing as it's now the main entrance, plus it will be visible from the hallway if the internal door is glazed. One of the things that needs doing is to sort the render out. It's a thick, spiky white render, that has attracted loads of grime over the years and is generally hideous. Not sure whether to just give it a good scrub and a coat of paint, or to skim it with smooth render (how/what with?!). Any ideas? We'll also need to box in the fuse box, put a light up, and generally make it look a bit more homely and welcoming.

Right, that's quite enough for one evening - sorry to blab on for so long. But seriously, I value all of your opinions, so please let me know if you have any ideas as I'm in quite a pickle!

Night night

BB

TomsMom

Hi BB

First of all, if you are thinking of having doors from Wickes don't let our problem put you off. The saga of the tiles is unusual - we had a delivery of 34 boxes of tiles from them about a month ago and everything went very smoothly that time, no problems at all. I really do think this latest fiasco is a rare event. With the delivery of the problem tiles we also had a delivery of 11 doors. You have to pay £4.95 per door packaging/handling which we weren't best pleased about but we couldn't have got 11 doors home ourselves, not even one! And we have to say they were well wrapped for transport, not just a sheet of shrink wrap polythene but also each door was in it's own cardboard box.

As for your original internal doors, would you prefer to get as close as possible or a completely different one? The only 1930s doors available seem to have 1 top panel and 3 bottom panels. What about trying a reclamation yard? Is anyone renovating a similar property in your area and might want to get rid of their doors? Have you tried advertising - local newsagent/free paper, etc.

If you want a glazed one, what about this one with 4 panels. I'm wondering if the size of the panels are nearer your originals than the 3 panel door at Wickes.

But thinking about your internal front door. If you changed this to a normal internal grade door instead of an external grade door, would this make your property less secure or affect your insurance? I'm probably getting mixed up a bit (not hard I know :rotfl: ) and thinking maybe it's like a porch with windows where the external front door is, with the old (internal) front door visible from the outside and maybe a bit vulnerable to break-in if intruders broke a porch window. Actually, I think I'm talking cobblers here, so it's probably best to ignore me! I might do better when you've got some other pictures.

With regard to the rendering I would clean up and paint it. I wouldn't bother with skimming it over with a smooth render, it might not stick successfully all over and you don't want it cracking or chunks falling off. We have the most awful unpainted cacky coloured pebbly type of rendering on the newer part of our house, part of which on the porch has gone green (moss type stuff) 'cos it never gets the sun so it doesn't have chance to dry out. We've bought some Dulux Weathershield which will hopefully be started in the next week or so. We did discuss re-rendering with the builder but he advised us against it and to just go with the Weathershield.

TomsMom

andrew-b wrote: »

TomsMom, can't believe you still haven't got your tiles sorted..i would have cancelled by now and gone elsewhere! I don't think i'd give them many more chances if i were you.

We would if we could Andy. But where we live there is one place we can get tiles, he can order samples in for us to look at as he only has a few on boards, but he is very expensive even with discount to us as our son does a lot of work for him. To look at tiles anywhere else we have to travel about 60 miles so it's a day out for us. We did look at quite a few before we ordered these from Wickes but didn't see anything we liked as much for a price we were happy with. Most tiles seem to be over £20 per sq.m. - but then again I always seem to choose the more expensive stuff (I daren't tell you how much the curtains I want would cost, these are the lounge ones, floor to ceiling, wall to wall!)

Those tiles from Wickes were such a good bargain, reduced from £15.65 down to £10 something (in their 33% off event) then we got a further 15% with the catalogue code. (Actually, on their website they're now down to £7.34 per sq.m. - there is some extra discount until Sunday.) We have overspent so much on the renovation that we have to make savings somewhere and as we liked the tiles (already got them for the bathroom) it was the perfect answer.

Anyway - we wont give up on the goodwill gesture, they've already agreed to do something and we'll be after quite a good refund as we don't really want anything else from there now.

Good to hear you've made further progress in the bathroom. I wonder if No More Nails smells as bad as the stuff our builders have used to put the skirtings on with - they must be high as a kite when working with that!

jamtart6

BB - This was my favourite out of the ones you picked

andrew-b - oh yikes are B&Q that bad? *hmm* we did kind of rush it, but I really love the bath and its the taps that cost so much. I think we did rush it though, so maybe we should look round again. Its not like me to rush, but I thought it was a good deal as it cost us £580 all in. Where would people reccommend for bathrooms then??


Our house today has had the 'planner man' round to draw plans for us. This will take 1-2 weeks he said, and then need to submit them to the council. Electrician couldn't make it today, but for £80 I'll happily wait No luck with the plumbers either, I think its terrible that they dont even get back to you with a quote!!

PurpleK8

hi jamtart - sorry to be negative about b&q as well but the plumber my parents got to install their bathroom actually asked if the bathroom they'd ordered was from there. Fortunately it wasn't because he said he doesn't even give quotes if it is - the job always goes on and on due to missing parts etc.

We ordered our bathroom through PHS and couldn't fault them - loads of choice, they discounted brochures prices without me even asking (prices were a lot lower than bathstore, homebase etc 50% off sales even before the discount) and everything delivered on time.

Andy - just read how much you've done in your bathroom, you've made me feel so guilty that I spent the day shopping instead of finishing off my tiling that I'm now considering putting down my glass of wine and going up there for a couple of hours!!!

TomsMom

jamtart6 wrote: »

Where would people reccommend for bathrooms then??

I think I've mentioned the two companies we've dealt with who have given us fantastic service.

If you find the suite you want, find the best price on the net then get in touch with JABathrooms, tell them what price you've seen it for and they will more than likely beat it. They did with our goods, and when we asked if we had to check the goods before the courier left (some places insist on this) we were told it wasn't necessary, sign unchecked and any problems contact them. Glad to say no problems at all with goods and delivery arrived quickly on the day they promised and they were very helpful all along. They even did us a good price on the border tiles (which always seem to be expensive).

The other place was Diamond Bathrooms. We visited their showroom, got offered tea or coffee, met all the guys in the office, they were all very nice. They have lots on their website but you can always tell them what you want and they will match any price you've seen. They even beat their own web prices when we went. We ordered some things they had in stock, they had to order others in which they usually get within 5 days. We also phoned up two or three times adding to the order. No problems. They deliver everything themselves and go all over the country and as long as your order is over £100 there's no delivery charge.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend either of these companies and no, I don't have any connection other than being a very satisfied customer.

Canucklehead

andrew-b wrote: »

To be honest if plumbers had been more forthcoming on giving me quotes i'd probably not be DIYing it.

Andy: With the exception of my OH I would hope

Canucklehead

TomsMom

Can any of you guys help with my curtain question here?

I put it on another thread in the hope of reaching curtain experts who might not read this thread.

Canucklehead

TomsMom wrote: »

Can any of you guys help with my curtain question here?

I put it on another thread in the hope of reaching curtain experts who might not read this thread.

Hi

Just about anything is possible, brother uses this place Nowhere near you of course but your curtain maker must have some contacts? As for the weight , how good a fixing will you get on the centre bracket?

Corgi Guy