Blog Post 18: Barn Conversion - It’s Been A Busy Month

June 2023 - from October 2022 progress with the conversion has been relatively steady-away, but, suddenly, in June, it seems that it’s the tasks that make a significant visual difference to the property that are being undertaken … this is how the boot room is progressing …

Whilst I would have loved to get InHouse (the kitchen folk) to ‘do’ the boot room … the reality is I just couldn’t afford it :-(

I seem to be bleeding money left, right and centre leaving the project overspend way beyond my contingency :-( … but … trying not dwell on that …. the practical consequence of it is that the boot room has become a Howdens’ creation … above is the Howdens’ render of how I think it will look … images of the reality follow below …

The anti-crack matting went in …

… then the floor tiling was finished.

In the kitchen there was no need to fully tile the floor under the carcasses as nothing in that run of units will ever be moved, but, because the washer and tumble dryer will live in the boot room and the likelihood is I will have to change them at some point in the future, I thought it best to tile the whole boot room floor … besides … it is quite a small space so the cost of the ‘under-carcass’ tiles isn’t too much :-)

The carcasses went in … there is a tale behind the carcasses …

… Howden’s had 3 choices of internal carcass finish: white, ‘natural oak’, or ‘grey oak’ . Given my vision for the space, my choice was ‘grey oak’, but, in the length of time between the boot room design and the boot room being delivered to site, Howdens discontinued ‘grey oak’ as an internal carcass colour.

I wasn’t made aware of that, instead Howdens took a unilateral decision to replace the ‘grey oak’ carcasses with ‘natural oak’. I only found out when the ‘natural oak’ carcasses arrived on site - so - they had to go back :-(

Howdens have introduced an alternative grey internal carcass finish called ‘croft grey’ …. so I just had to go with that.

As luck would have it, now that the carcasses are installed, I think the ‘croft grey’ internal finish is actually going to work better for my boot room space than the original ‘grey oak’ :-)

The extractor fan, which I’m advised is a Building Control necessity in a room with a tumble dryer, was a total ass-pain to sort out … the ducting for the cloakroom extractor fan has to run from the cloakroom, through the boot room, to vent at the rear of the property, so the boot room extractor had to be created as a spur off that ducting run.

Next came the counter tops and the sink …. now it feels like I have another almost done space :-)

I guess grinding out those hard yard from October 2022 to now is beginning to pay off :-)