Friday, June 20, 2014

Let There Be Light

The moment we've been waiting for for 18 months since we purchased the apartment finally happened this week - the knocking out of the back wall. I felt equally excited and nervous about it seeing as there are 5 stories of brick above it that needed supporting. Luckily however, our structural engineer did indeed seem to know what he was doing and it all went smoothly.  After all the meticulous planning and months of waiting, the actual method of bashing it down with a sledge hammer did seem rather rudimentary but who am I to judge! Here is the before and after...


Before: With the newly installed steel support beam.

After: Light glorious light!

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Windows

We finally finally finally have windows we can actually see though....AND they open and close, imagine that! The builders have been busy installing the new windows on the front of the building as well as in the bathrooms. Due to landmarks restrictions they had to be custom made by the company Marvin at great expense.


Doesn't it look so pretty without the "jail bars" on the lower windows?!



Whilst the main windows are perfect, there has unfortunately been a bit of an issue with the bathroom windows. I had thought we were ordering clear glass for all the windows and would add the necessary "frosting" on site. I had actually decided only to do this on the guest bath window as its actually in the shower area. The master bathroom has a great view of the river and is a large window behind where the toilet will be so I'd planned to do some sort of blind, likewise in the powder room. I personally really despise frosted glass, and so was pretty disappointed when the bathroom windows showed up frosted.  The master bath window is especially awful as there seems to be graining/lines in the way the frosting is applied and the top pane of glass does not match the bottom one with the lines running perpendicularly.  You can sort of see what I mean here.... needless to say, it is going to be changed.