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the flat

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Finally: Willow and I manage to take some photos of our newly renovated flat. Most of you probably don’t know the difference between the “old” and the “new” flat, but you can get some ideas by compearing the The Big Makeover flickr set with the Eastside Academy set or by browsing the flat tag.

In short, it’s a new kitchen in a new place, old kitchen turned into storage/laundry/larder room, new stairs up to the mezzanine, new mezzanine railing and new mezzanine carpet and a completely newly refurbish bathroom.

I had plans on writing a really detailed entry about everything, since a lot of things (if not all) went down a slightly different path than planed. But i’ve decided to keep it short.

All this work was only possible thanks to my amazing dad. He came up to London in February and, believe it or not, we were done in about 4 weeks. The old man is in better shape than I am. That’s the difference when you’ve been working with your hands all your life instead of sitting in front of a computer.

smoothielicious

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On Friday I received my first ever blender! It’s one of those things I kind of always wanted to try and have at home but never really got around to buy. The current heat wave and the urge for cold smoothies put thought into action.

So this weekend have been very smoothielicious.

Follow the smoovie’s development and other smoovie stories on willow’s blog

new wood flooring in the flat

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The last few weeks I have learned a lot on and about wood flooring. Everything from types of wood, different treatments to the wood, installation method, prices, underlay etc and so on.

Basically, it comes down to two types of wood flooring:
a) a traditional solid wood flooring
b) or a modern click/woodloc flooring

Click and woodloc is suppose the be the modern way of laying down a floor. It’s suppose to be easy and cheap and better in every possible way. But what we found was that it’s quite expensive if you like to have a nice floor. There are a lot of cheap shit out there, but we wanted something nice and not replace the shit we had with some new shit. So the once we liked were were even more expensive then the solid wood flooring.

Solid wood flooring is: nicer, more work, more expensive, less secure and harder to install. First you will need some sort of wood underlay to secret nail the floor boards (unless, of cause, you all ready have wooden floor underneath. If you don’t have wooden floor underneath, remember to cut all the doors etc since the floor will probably get a bit higher). Once that’s done you need to be aware of that the wood have a life, and will grow and shrink depending on weather etc, so… well you nail it down so it might get damaged.

After many day’s of discussions and research we decided to go for
Brown Oil 1 strip Dublin Oak woodloc flooring from Kahrs.
kahrs_dublinoak.jpg
hardwoodfloorstore.co.uk
kahrs.se

The installation process of the project started last weekend. I took friday off work and we laid the last piece of flooring down at 4.30 pm on Sunday, just before the start of the Indianapolis Grand Prix. So it took about three day for three rooms and 57 square-meters. On the image bellow you have on the left our latest member to the family - Ken the vacumecleaner a.k.a The Ferrari, and on the right it’s a photo from the first hours on Friday.

ken_ferrari.jpg

I was totally knackered on sunday evening after the Grand Prix.
But my “knackeredness” was now only caused my uncooperative woodloc joints and annoying pipes and corners…

Monday night I drove all night down from Skelleftea to Stockholm, slept for a few hours to then walk around Stockholm and visiting friends, and then fly back to London and arrived back to the flat late on Tuesday… well actually Wednesday around 1 am. Wednesday morning I was back in the office, which extends to the Death Cab For Cutie gig. Thursday, after work, I went for some clients drinks. After the drinks I went back home to await my parents arrival, which ended up to be 3 am. And that leads us to Friday morning and three following days of floor laying (+ another two days of fixing small stuff).

Im talking about a week ago and a week before that week… but I haven’t been able to sit down and write all this down until now.

A huge thanks to my dad. He’s brilliant. Without him I would still be on my knees, swearing, cursing, and laying floorboards in the living-room.

livingroom.jpg