All posts tagged: joinery

Ikea Pax Hack - Nude Bedroom

My Ikea Pax Hack – The Nude Bedroom Update

Hello there, and welcome to the other side of our Nude Bedroom. Today i’m sharing our new wardrobes. Doesn’t sound that exciting does it? But we’re both super excited to have said goodbye to our old ones… … they looked lovely, but there were a bugger to use. The handleless drawers were on wooden runners, so when full of clothes, as most wardrobes are, they were way too heavy to open with ease. Those slim recessed handles were a nightmare for when you’d had your nails done, having to claw your fingers into the recess and heave the drawers open to grab a clean vest. Not cool, Derek. Not cool. Pic – Katie Lee for MADE There was also a lot of wasted space. Something I desperately needed more of. This one wardrobe was certainly not enough for my extensive collection of blue jeans, over sized black tops and boyfriend cardigans. So they were sold on eBay and we used the money from those to build our very own dream storage solution using the Ikea Pax …

Hidden Cat Litter Tray

How to incorporate a cat loo into your home – The Hidden Cat Litter Tray

I’m sure you all know i’ve got a cat, she features quite a lot in my images. She makes an excellent alternative to a sheepskin and is most of the time, a more than willing styling prop. Her colouring also fits right in with our monochrome home. All in all she’s fabulous. One thing that never fitted in our home was the cat litter box. We don’t have a cat-flap, so madam needs access to an indoor loo. When we had the loft converted back back at the end of 2016/17, I designed a space for her litter box to sit, accessible to the furry one, but out of sight from the rest of the house. I was looking forward to not seeing it as I went about my daily meanderings around the house. Alas, as our son is a very light sleeper, just like his mum, Chooch’s midnight races up and down the stairs woke Charlie up. Not actual footage So we had to move Chooch’s overnight quarters to the confines of the kitchen/diner to …

Foresso - Timber Terrazzo

Foresso – The Timber Terrazzo

I’m not the only fan of sheet materials, they’re used a lot in “the biz” to create unique and made to measure pieces of furniture, built ins, flooring, cladding, worktops etc. So far, i’ve dabbled in OSB, Birch and Poplar Plywood, MDF and have written about my love of Valchromat a couple of years ago. It was actually some research on terrazzo tiles and flooring that took me down an internet rabbit hole last week… where it led me to the most beautiful material i’ve (possibly) ever seen. Developed by young designer Conor Taylor, Conor used to be a materials librarian (I had to look up what that was too) and now he’s the creator and maker behind Foresso, the beautifully simple yet cleverly made, ‘Wood Terrazzo.’ Foresso is a new composite sheet material composed of timber, wood waste from sawmills, cement, waste lime plaster, resin, and pigment cast by hand onto an 18mm birch plywood substrate. Finished by hand and sealed with hardwax oil it is a practical sheet material that requires no specialist equipment to alter …

Making Spaces Plywood Kitchen

Kitchen Facelift – Final Reveal

I told you it was coming soon! If you read my last post, you’ll know it was time for me to say goodbye to our gloss white kitchen. Feel free to have a little read of that one if you want to know the what’s and why’s… Adios white gloss! Here’s the wall cabinet layout i’ve had in my head for years and the one I think it going to make our little kitchen look hell of a lot better AND give us more much needed storage.I wanted to move the existing wall cabinets up towards the ceiling, wrap a third cabinet around the extractor hood and add two more open cabinets below, either side of the extractor. Simple no!? I didn’t want handles but I also didn’t want the traditional handle-less J profile design our original kitchen doors had. If i’d gotten my way, I would have had doors than opened by telekinesis, but as my powers of mind-control weren’t quite up to scratch, we went with push openers instead. Fair enough. It’s difficult to …

MADE.COM photoshoot

Kitchen Facelift – Goodbye white gloss

There’ll probably be a lot of people out there reading this blog post thinking, “there’s nothing wrong with your kitchen, love. What ya updating it for?” And one of those people is my husband. So I just wanted to say from the start, I get it. Me, wanting to update a perfectly fine kitchen might seem a bit unnecessary. Especially when it was originally like this: You can read all about the kitchen knock through we did in 2013 here. It’s still one of my most read posts as it seems a lot of you out there are still researching knock-through options, so it’s defo worth a look if it’s on your list of house jobs. And whilst i’m so happy with the new layout and extra space we created in 2013/14, the actual kitchen doors began to annoy me, more and more once i’d taken the step into interior design in 2015. I’ve been patiently waiting to get this kitchen looking more like me without making any huge changes. I didn’t want to buy new …

Gas pipe shelf

Bare Joinery

As you guys may already know, i’m the daughter of a woodwork (Design & Technology) teacher. My dad has been a big inspiration to me over the years and helped me on so many projects at home it’s unreal. He’s the kind of guy that can turn his hand to anything. Building, joinery, tiling, plumbing, landscaping… I even watched him build a two-storey scaffold on his own, in the pissing rain so he could fit new barge boards at my first house. He borrowed the scaffold from one of his mates (he’s always knows someone who knows someone) and drove it 100 miles up to Leeds on his roof rack. If my dad lived up here, it’s fair to say, i’d have enough work for him to give him a full time job working with me. My dad with a screwdriver, “in back pocket of Farah“ He’s made all of his own furniture at home, some of which as part of his Creative Design university course at Loughborough, back in the 70’s. They still have an …

Lego Storage

Charlie’s bedroom – Part 2 – The Plywood Wall

Charlie’s room has ended up being a much larger project that originally planned (sorry Pete). The whole design process has been bubbling away in the background for a few months now and am so excited to finally share Part 2. (Part 1 here). This kid’s bedroom is all about the plywood!! There are still plenty of pieces left to go in (carpets and single bed) but it’s the joinery that’s really transformed this room. So let’s get on with the pics shall we? Before After Before | During After I absolutely love it. It’s so mental to see an idea in your head executed so accurately. The guys from Leeds and London based Bare Joinery are mega. Give them a follow, because i’ve been bullying them to set up a proper Instagram account for months and i’m going to look like a right numpty if it’s tumbleweed. The design is a perfect marriage of function and form. I’ve finally reclaimed the living room (and several other parts of the house) and have managed to get all …

Valchromat – It’s not just MDF

You guys already know all about my love of raw materials. I think half of our interior is made from plywood, OSB and bog standard MDF. Like this: Built in MDF shelves. Left bare, because I liked ’em like that. My dad, (actively) did not. Birch plywood featured heavily in our recent loft conversion. Varnished, bare and stained black. Oh and the poplar plywood floorboards. Don’t forget those. Orientated Strand Board (OSB) has been used in a few projects now too. The first being in my home office, 18 months or so ago where I made my own desk top. Still going strong and getting better with age…. ….and again in a commercial design project where it was used for bespoke wall units, a conference table, standing desk and modular display/room divide. I think it’s fair to say, if I had the choice of having something built from solid oak or walnut, you know, something proper posh and pricey or something from ply, MDF or OSB… i’d go for the underdog. You can make your …

Open plan landing and staircase

Banisters, balustrades and building regs

So where were we? That’s right, we were here. Awaiting new carpets, a banister and handrail. I did not want a banister or a handrail. But the building inspector does. And I guess it’s not that realistic to keep it like this forever. Even though is looks so purty. After mulling over several ideas (metal, glass, A.N. Other, you can check out all of my ideas here on Pinterest) we stuck with what we knew and also what we liked best. Timber. Not just any old timber though. Two 24mm sheets of birch ply laminated to form a 48mm depth board and then ripped into cross sections. These lengths would become our “spindles”. We fixed a timber baton to the ceiling to make sure the top of the spindle, once screwed in, aligned itself vertically so the bottom of the spindle attached perfectly to the side of the staircase stringer. The baton was filled and sanded back several times, then caulked and painted over in emulsion to make it appear part of the plastered ceiling. …

To ply or not to ply – A floor quandary

We’ve uhmmed and ahhed about what to do with the loft bedroom flooring for ages now. As i’m going all out Scandinavian for the bedroom design, a blonde wood floor seemed the obvious choice. But then, to save some money and get this room finished in time for Christmas, we played around with the idea of simply painting the chipboard subfloor black (to which the builder just sighed and shook his head). After going around in circles for several weeks, mentally noting the pros and cons of both options, we finally decided on floor boards. Done. Having an actual floor laid meant I finally got to work with my fave joiners again, Bare Joinery. Which is always a pleasure, as they’re always up for a challenge and happy(ish) to experiment with materials, the design, the process, and most importantly, they don’t sigh and shake their heads at my less than conventional ideas. Not within view anyway. Our plan to lay floorboards sounds pretty standard, apart from the fact I didn’t want them to be actual floorboards, as …