Lots of different stuff

I am behind with my photos of our new downstairs toilet.  First of all the porch.  If you remember, we had the step taken out, and at one point there was a big hole in the concrete floor where they were fitting pipework.  It is now all tiled - and this is what it looks like...

I will take another picture when all the building materials are out - presuming we haven't already stuffed our junk back in there by that time.  I did get these photos taken just in time though.  Literally five minutes later, the IKEA delivery men arrived.  We have bought a cupboard - like a sort of sideboard thing - to go along the right-hand wall of the porch (on the right as you look out from the from the front door).  So the pieces are now stacked up everywhere and you can barely see the tiles at all.

In the downstairs toilet, the sink is in place (although not fully fitted yet), and the door has been hung.  It is clad in these vertical panels - which is what the lower part of the space under the stairs looked like, before the building work started.

When you open the door, the space looks really big!  There are actually double doors, although the left-hand door will be narrower, and bolted in place.  It will just be a lot easier to clean with two doors though.

Porthole window, above the door.

Toilet! 

Ooh - look who turns up when you get the camera out!

Don't tell me we have a spider in residence already.

I have managed to get a few bears finished, whilst all this has been going on, but they're currently waiting for clothing.  My mother, on the other hand, has been knitting furiously - not only finishing jumpers, hats and boots for the twins, but also dressing every bear foolish enough to be sitting around without any clothes on.

Bingley - the bear I was going to take apart - has a lovely new fair isle jumper.

At my unit in the Art & Craft Centre, I sell a number of manufactured bears, suitable for children.  The most popular is probably this lovely big, floppy, ultra-soft polar bear - now wearing a beautiful ribbed pull-over.

Phew - and that's it for now.  Hopefully back with some more bears soon.

Extremely slow progress

I didn't mean that title as a reference to our current building work - there has been lots going on, but it's been mostly behind-the-scenes, hard-to-photograph pipework.  This picture below is not actually in the cloakroom itself - it's behind the little wall they built to put the toilet against.  There will be a door at the front of this space, to box all the pipes in, but to leave it accessible for maintenance work (and no doubt, for storing some of our junk)

Sorry the picture's a little bright - Rory is looking rather luminous here.

No, the extremely slow progress is with the bears.  We seem to have so many babies around at the moment- either in the family, or belonging to friends (belonging?) - that I thought I really ought to come up with a pattern for a simple unjointed teddy bear.  I have made bears as gifts for babies before, but always from commercial patterns.

Well, this pattern is giving me fits.  I am so far on my fifth version of it (fingers crossed this one turns out alright).  It's incredibly frustrating to work on a pattern for an entire week, and still having nothing to take in with me when I go to work on Saturday. 

Luckily, this Saturday, I will have something.  I don't think I ever showed a picture of Charles and Gerald - two of the first bears I ever designed and made myself.   Anyway, Charles and Gerald became Charles and Geraldine when my mother made them bride and groom outfits to wear.  They had been sitting in the unit for a long time, with very little interest, so my mother made a pair of dungarees for Charles, in an eye-popping print (see here), I rechristened him Eric, and he found a home soon after.

Poor Geraldine meanwhile, was left standing at the alter, and sat alone in the unit for the next 8 months or so.  The solution?  A reverse sex-change - back to Gerald - and another eye-popping pair of dungarees.  She could still be Geraldine in her dungarees of course, but to be honest, she does look more like a Gerald.  Or he does.

I just need to re-embroider his nose, but hopefully I will get some photographs up tomorrow.

A small toilet update...

A little bit has happened since I posted last.  With the toilet that is - sadly not with the bears.  The new light are in...

There are two of them - one at the very top, and one on the sloped section of ceiling.  The blob at the back isn't a light, it's a movement sensor.  I personally think that an eyeball painted on it would be very effective!  Effective as decoration and in inhibiting people from using the facilities!

The hole in our front porch has been filled, and the new steps are in progress - here...

And here is Rory perusing the new concrete.  This will be tiled eventually.

Poor Rory hasn't been right recently.  He has had weird moody spells where he jumps on Maude (our other cat) and follows you around, whinging and trying to bite your knees.  He had a very bad accident a few years ago, and apparently it can take several years for the injury site(s) to become de-sensitised.  We think the temper might be due to his injuries hurting, so my mother took him back to the vet for some painkillers yesterday.

She emerged with her purse considerably lighter, the painkillers, a bottle of flea killer, and this strange little plastic vial, which attaches to a plug, which you then plug into a wall socket.  It apparently releases pherenomes which have a calming effect.  So, we're all feeling quite relaxed at the moment.

Anyway, here's Rory - before the pherenomes - looking a touch peeved.  That ankle he has stuck out the front - that's the one that was pinned after his accident, and he always tucks it out one side.  His opposite hip was broken as well.

Bathroom tiles

These are the sparkling turquoise tiles we're having on the back wall of the downstairs toilet.  They're probably rather brighter than this - particularly when the lights are shining on them.  It was just very difficult to get a good picture; my camera lens isn't wide enough.

The lights are now in - although they were done after I took these pictures.  There is a sensor to detect movement, and the lights go on automatically.  Without the doors on, the lights have been going on every time someone passes through the hallway, but it gives you a chance to re-admire the tiling every time, so it's not a nuisance.

Ahem... our downstairs toilet

Okay, sorry this is a bit off-topic, but I have a sister in Peru and an Auntie in LA who won't get to see the building work we're having done at home, so I wanted to share some photos. 

We recently had our upstairs bathroom redone, and the builder gave us a catalogue (absolutely fatal!), in which there was a picture of a downstairs cloakroom tucked into the space under the stairs.  It was really 'bijou' and neat, and since our downstairs toilet is next to the kitchen, moving it would allow us to extend the kitchen, which has been on the 'stuff to do' list for a long time.

So, here's the first stage in pictures.

This is the insulation being put in under the stairs and the little wall behind which all the pipes will be hidden

This is the dirty great hole they made in the floor of the front porch, for putting in the pipework.

These two pictures just show the space from another angle - this is how it looks from our front door.

In the meantime, the tiler has just been and gone, putting the most lovely shiny turquoise tiles on the back wall of the space (will post a pic tomorrow), and the electrician's here now.  It looks really good already, but looking at these pictures, we really must do something about those stairs!