Renovation: halfway there!

So our renovations started beginning of August and is scheduled to end 30 November. I want to share some pics of the chaos, and hopefully give you a sense of the progress.

Here is what I came home to after the olympics trip:

Front garden (there used to be a wall, and large bushes and palm trees)

Front wall of the house, they removed a large window and half of the old kitchen.

View of the old kitchen through the hole in the outside wall. Two internal walls were removed, the window that you see in the back was in the domestic quarters which we're removing and replacing with a flatlet.

This shows you from another angle the removal of the internal walls. To the left of this picture is the other side of the old kitchen's back wall, and you can see the window from the previous pic on the left in the one below. This was take standing in the lounge, looking at the space for the new kitchen. Remember this picture, I'll refer back to it below:

Then slightly to the right, the existing patio. There used to be a bar counter with a mirror in the opening behind it, fridge and sink in that recess. The recess will get bricked up and turned into a storeroom at the back.

Same view of the patio, from a different angle:

 

On to a week later. More breaking at the front:

Foundations dug for the extention of the patio (since about half of the old patio will become the new kitchen):

Bricking up the bar recess:

New bay in the old kitchen (new playroom), and the room is split in 2 with a new interior wall to create a pantry:

Then chaos struck. The roof over the old patio, dining room and domestic quarters was horrid and not to code, so we had to remove it. Massive extra cost but no choice, so there you have it. The risk of renovating an older house, I suppose.

So here is the same view that I showed you before of the new kitchen space, but without a roof:

To the right of that, the patio space with bricked up recess and existing gas braai, but no roof. See the old extention that was done on this wall? The clay bricks are the originals, grey bricks done on top of that. This caused more problems which I'll tell you about in a moment.

Oh, I haven't yet showed you the new flatlet. Here it is, or at least the walls. At the left of the pic you see the back of the wall in the previous picture:

From the front of the house, flatlet to the left, looking through the open door to the kitchen/patio.

 

And of course the more chaos struck. The extention that was previously done (when the faulty roof was put over the old patio) was really poorly built, so much that the walls can't carry the new roof. So the patio now looks like this:

We are about 25% over budget, so the surprises have to stop soon or we'll be in deep trouble! Hopefully my next post will be about progress, not chaos.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Pics from London 2012 - part 1

So just to show you that sometimes I do keep my promises to upload pictures, here are the first half of my pics from the olympics trip. They're mostly taken on my phone so not great quality, but at least you can get the sense of it. 

Packed and on our way to the airport!

                                               

The best husband in the world, on the way to the stadium for the athletics on 10 August:

Another one - terrible light, but it's the only picture I have of the actual stadium:

This gives you a sense of our seats. We were reasonably high up, and when you look at the pic the finish line for the athletics events is right at the top right of the photo. The amazing part was that the men's pole vault final, which was ongoing throughout the entire evening, was right in front of us. You can probably see the crossbar with the pink pit right behind the track in the front.

The olympic rings hanging in King's Cross / St Pancras station. They are HUGE!

The javelin train:

Now for just a random collection of pictures, I don't even think they're chronological!

Ben & Jerry's ice cream. It's a good thing these aren't available in South Africa. I would be bankrupt and obese.

Lunch at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford. Geek points - this is where CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien used to hang out; they called it the Bird and Baby at the time. Awesome food too!

 These Manderville statues are distributed throughout London - this one is "Punk Manderville". We took a picture of me standing next to each one of these I could find, but the rest will follow in part 2 of this series.

Burrough Market. Seriously, this place tempted me to move to London full time. I could live like this.

Some standard touristy stuff:

Big Ben

The London Eye:

Winchester Abbey:

10 Downing Street:

Trafalgar Square:

More Trafalgar:

We had an AWESOME fish and chips lunch in Soho. Beautifully battered and fried cod with hand-cut chips.

And dinner that evening was at Meraz Cafe, just off Brick Lane. This little plate is a starter with tandoor lamb chops and tandoor chicken. The chicken was simply the best curry I have ever tasted. Unbelievable. And this was followed by naan bread, chicken tikka masala and a mango lassi. Yum.

A little bit of British humour on a sign outside an ice cream shop in Greenwich:

\

The natural history museum. We spent a morning there and it was WAY too little time.

Super-cool animated T-Rex. I think there is some sort of motion sensor involved in his programming, because he tends to look at where people are standing. It's pretty intimidating, even when you know it's fake!

We met up with some old friends in Kensington, and the pic below is one of the private gardens a la Notting Hill. It's gorgeous.

Inside Hamley's. Another reason I would be broke if I lived in London.

On our way to the closing ceremony - Royal barge with the Queen's seal on the river.

Aah, here's a better pic of the stadium, from the evening of the closing ceremony.

That's all folks. More to follow soon!

Renovations update

Yes. We're 3 weeks into the process!

So far, we're taking the whole thing pretty well. At least the house still feels liveable and all that. But the chaos has already started. Here are the things that have gone wrong already:

1. We started a week late, because the builder was late in supplying some documents that the bank needed.
2. We've discovered that the roof of one section of the house needs to be redone. That's expensive. Sigh. But I've seen the roof trusses, and oh my word. It needs fixing.
3. In addition, we have to change the layout of the existing sewer system, essentially reroute about 30 metres of sewage line that we weren't planning to do.
4. The electrician did not follow our instructions on where to place the electrical points, so those have to be redone.
5. A window was bricked up against our instructions, and had to be redone.
6. We've discovered that our electrical system is not up to code so the main DB board has to be mostly redone.
7. The removal of trees around the addition site was more expensive than expected.

This is 3 weeks in. Another 15 or so to go. This might end up being an expensive exercise.

I need to download an app that allows me to get pics from my iPad online without plugging it into a PC - then I can show you the chaos.

The big day is here

I am leaving for London today!

Watch this space for pictures. Athletics tomorrow night (Friday) and closing ceremony on Sunday.  I can't wait!

In other news, our home renovation started yesterday, after we left Johannesburg to bring the kids to grandma and grandpa in Port Elizabeth. I am super excited! The last 3 weeks have been devoted to packing up the house, moving everything into the bedroom half of the house and otherwise throwing/giving away clutter and selling a few. I need a holiday, and will get one just in time!

The best news this year

The company that I work for hosts an actuarial conference every year for all actuaries working for the group. All of us are challenged to come up with a new idea, research it and present it at the conference, and the best paper wins a prize - well, the top 3 usually win prizes. Anyway, this year I worked with my best friend in the office and 2 other colleagues from a different area, and we actually won first prize! A trip to London for the 2012 Olympics! I am beyond thrilled. We have tickets for the final day of the athletics (including the 100m final) and the closing ceremony, our flights and accommodation etc. are all paid for. How absolutely awesome is that?!? I'm leaving probably on 9 August, we'll leave the kids with my in-laws who will take unbelievably good care of them, and we'll be away for just over a week. It's actually still sinking in, but I simply can't wait. This will be the first time that I'm overseas with my husband - we've each been away to Europe separately, he's been in the UK and I've been in the US but never together. It's going to be fantastic!!

We won a Global knife!

The results for Eat for the Earth were announced today, and we're one of the lucky winners! We didn't win the big prize of a Global knife block, but we did win one of the knives. Woo-hoo!

A surprisingly disappointing dinner

We went out to dinner at the Attic last night. It was my 3rd visit there, and the previous 2 times the food has been absolutely phenomenal. My expectations were obviously high last night - and I was actually quite disappointed.

Their new winter menu was launched only last week, so I was quite curious to see what they came up with. Some old favourites are still there - the chilli salt squid starter, the crab & fettucine main meal and so on. But we each had only choices that we haven't tried before.

My starter was a slow poached duck egg served over tenderstem broccoli with a herb aioli. Lovely stuff, but the egg was poached firm, instead of soft as I expected, and there were only three tiny pieces of broccoli on the plate. It was supposed to be served with toasted brioche, but instead there were a few crumbs on the plate, the biggest roughly the size of my pinkie nail. My husband chose the winter mushroom salad with gorgonzola, red onion and pine nuts, but there was no sign of any gorgonzola or red onion in the salad. The mushrooms were well cooked but when you order a meal with gorgonzola, you expect to receive it!

My main was the pork belly, which was mostly lovely if a little less tender than I expected. But it was served on a little square potato cake that tasted like the potatoes had been frozen - you know that almost floury texture that potato gets when it is thawed? It tasted like that. Plus the sauce that was served with the pork was entirely savoury, and usually pork is served with at least a touch of sweetness. So that was unusual. My husband had the duck 2 ways, and that was really well cooked, so no complaints.

Then we waited about 20 minutes to be able to attract our waitress' attention, and once she finally took our order for dessert it was almost 40 minutes before we received it. We queried it with our waitress after about 30 minutes and she had to ask again what we had ordered, and then said that it's "definitely coming". I had the salted caramel pot, very nice but the flakes of salt were huge so the taste alternated between too-salty and not-salty-at-all, a little disappointing. It was also supposed to be served with a sea salt tuille, but instead again I received a 1cm by 1 cm little square of baked dough, flavourless and adding absolutely nothing to the dessert. My husband's dessert on the other hand was HUGE, a piece of pear and almond tart big enough to serve 3 people, and the tart base was really hard and overbaked.

Then once again it took forever for our waitress to visit our table so we could request the bill. We told her that we were in a hurry to get home and relieve our baby sitter - the long delay on the dessert meant that this was about 30 minutes later than we expected. And despite us commenting on this urgency, she was still standing around doing nothing for about 10 minutes (I could see her from my seat).

When the bill finally came we were charged corkage on 2 bottles of wine even though we only had one, which caused more delays.

So yeah - all in all a really disappointing evening. Given all the other great restaurants in the area I honestly don't know if we'll be back.