With the insulation out of the way (but not completely done yet, more on that later), we were going to tackle the walls.
You know, those ugly brick walls.
I’m sure you remember them from laying out the kitchen part of electric cables. If not, you’ll surely remember them after this post (as it’s all I’m going to talk about!).
Part of the preparation had already been done, the cables were already carved into the walls. Now came the time to finish the electrical preparations, patch up the wall and rub it in with some kind of adhesion improving solution.
First thing I did was patching up the old walls. Things I used were some old bricks, some mortar, a hammer and a chisel to remove old mortar if necessary, and some trowels.
The wall between our kitchen and the storage had two holes in the wall.
The upper one is from our old extractor, the lower one I guess from a previous, even older extractor. As we want our wall to be nice and clean, they had to be filled up. Before starting I did some puzzling to find pieces of brick that would be a good fit to fill either gap, then I threw some mortar in the mix to make them stay in place nice and easy.
After that I filled up the other holes, left by the old radiator supports, old switches, and so on. Some were small enough to fill up with mortar alone, others got mortar and a piece of brick.
Then I could patch in the boxes necessary for the new electrics. This meant first I had to cut the walls up again, with my grinder, where the boxes needed to come. Once cut up, I needed to remove part of the brick, so that the boxes will end up protruding around 10 to 15 mm from the bricks. Finally I put some plaster in the holes and some on the box, and pushed them in place. Check they’re level in all directions, and you’re done!
For these walls I only had three little boxes to go. One that will house the outlet for the fridge…
… two that will house the outlets for the oven and microwave …
… and three that will house switches for kitchen, entry and cellar.
Last but not least was smearing the adhesive thing on the wall.
Yay, let’s turn everything pink!
I used a large paint roller, and just went at it. Luckily this didn’t require the same finish as paint, so I could really go fast (which was still kind of slow though…). Worst part was that the roller sprayed all these little particles of dirt on me (I still have a sweater to prove it), but finally it was done, and ready for some serious plastering!
Before:
And after:
Added bonus: there once has been a door between this little entry to the kitchen and our dining room. I never noticed until the adhesive was on the wall… Can you spot the old door in this photo?