I'm a laminate and proud!

 Quite a lot of progress this week. We've gone from bare framing through to insulation and gib this week, plus a very exciting improvement upstairs...

 In this blog we'd like you to get involved.... Spot the error, and help us pick a benchtop please... see below.

By the way, sorry the photos are not too good.  There is no lighting in the flat at the moment and as it's winter I don't see the flat in daylight during the week so most of these are flash photos.

I've tried to document the progress in photos.

Our reclaimed villa door looking out.  Lovely original reed glass window

The cavity slider door to the bedroom goes in.  It is starting to feel like a separate room

Two different types of insulation here - noiseline for the ceiling (to insulate against noise between the two dwellings) and pink batts in the walls for warmth.

 Ben - here's some insulation news for the sewage stack as you were interested...

Boxing out one of the sewage stacks ready for the insulation

And here's the insulation around the stack

Insulation goes in to the new bedroom (and some gib on the ceiling).

Here's the kitchen before insulation and gib...

Kitchen plus insulation

Kitchen plus gib (oh and a new window to the left)

Gibbing around the new meter box, and before some boxing of the pipework above

So one very exciting thing that happened this week is that the upstairs bathroom got switched over onto the boiler.  When we moved in the whole house was running off a new hot water cylinder in the bathroom.  When we installed the gas boiler we didn't bother switching the plumbing in the main bathroom over because firstly the hot water cylinder was nearly new and secondly it would have left a gap in the bathroom where the hot water cylinder was.  However, we came to realise that the bathroom was running on a low pressure cylinder and the pressure in the shower was clearly inferior to the ensuite shower.  So we decided to switch it over now.  I came back to see this mess in the corner of the bathroom....

What the upstairs bathroom looks like now

Sadly Steve's stirling work building shelving in the corner is now in the skip :-(

However, the pressure in the main shower is now excellent, which is great.  The builders are going to tidy up this corner for us.  

The garden is a builder's yard and is looking very sad.

Grass?  What grass?  

 We had our first real problem with the building work this week.  Let's see if you can tell what it is from the photo below of the bathroom window?

Anyone spot the problem with this bathroom window???

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Answers in the comments section please!

And finally, we'd welcome some feedback on our kitchen design.

We've been designing the kitchen this week.  It's quite challenging as it's so small that once you've got essentials like fridge, oven, and sink in, there's very little space left for storage.  Also, our ceiling in the kitchen area is particularly low at only 2m so we can't fit standard height units in there.   Anyway, we've done the best we can to provide as much storage as possible. We've chosen an economy colour called streetlight, which is basically a neutral colour for the cabinetry.

Much to my regret we've decided we can't justify the cost of a stone or acrylic benchtop (around $4500 as compared to around $1200 for laminate).  So we need to pick a laminate benchtop.  The good news is there's lots of choice.  The bad news is that I have violent aversion to anything that looks like fake stone or fake wood, which is most of the laminates.  My preference is for a laminate which says "I'm a laminate and proud!", not "hey I look like I'm stone, but I'm really a fake"....

Anyway, we've shortlisted four colours which meet my requirements.  I'm leaning towards the green as there's no way you'd mistake that for stone, but would it be a bit too radical?

Let us know in the comments section...

Kitchen cabinet colour in the middle, potential benchtops surrounding.