Progress and hold-ups

Well, the weekend got off to a good start with my 'design meeting' about my new kitchen. The redesign - subtle, but worthwhile - looks excellent. Much more clear worktop area, and a small, foldaway breakfast bar. Nice vinyl flooring to be chosen. Confirmed my choice of door/drawer face design, but only managed to narrow worktops down to a shortlist of 5.

I was gratified to find that I had discounted most of the ones my mother liked. More of that, please.

The shortlist features a fairly plain dark grey marble effect, something very similar but flecked with gold, a very warm reddish marble effect, a fairly plain blue marble effect, or a fairly dramatic blue marble effect flecked with lighter blues, whites and red.

Kind of favouring the last, but the reddish one looked pretty good. It just looked a little bit too Traditional.

Thing is, as I'm picking stuff out for my flat, I'm finding that my taste runs far more toward wood than the sharp, minimalist, flat-or-gloss colour that I'd like to think I want. I'm going for warm rather than cool. Cosy rather than sexy.

It's quite an eye opening experience.

My mother and I departed the showroom having handed over the deposit - approximately one third of the total cost - and regretting somewhat that we hadn't visited them before we went looking for bedroom furniture.

The salesman/designer is really very good. Personably and knowledgeable, and he also knows when to offer advice and when to let the customer make the decisions.

Of course, things didn't go smoothy for the whole weekend... How could they?

Having forgotten to visit the shops on the ground floor to warn them of the imminent window works - tomorrow, starting early! - on my first visit, I had to trip back to the flat with my folks in the afternoon to do that. Then, rather than going on to look into beds - as had been the main plan for the day - I helped out in constructing some of the bedroom furniture. We actually got started on that so late (my father sleeps really late at the weekend), it was hardly worth heading off to the bed shops.

We made good headway in the furniture, though, finishing off the bedside drawers and very nearly finishing the full-size drawers as well... They would have been completely finished were it not for the error in manufacture in one side of the last drawer - the dowel holes had been drilled in completely the wrong places, so it didn't fit. At all.

And while my father was able to drill new holes for the side, he wasn't able to do the same for the face. We're probably going to have to buy a whole new set... which actually might not be so bad, considering that a couple were damaged in construction thanks to some overzealous hammering.

After deciding to call it a day, we walked down to the local pizzaria - a really good one, just another reason why this flat was such a good purchase - for dinner. I'm a semi-regular there, as I often end up there when dining out with a friend. I was half expecting my father to order one of the pizza alternatives, but he joined in the spirit of the thing... Surprising all.

Today was a complete wash-out... odd, considering the fine weather we had. It's almost as if summer is finally here (in September?!). The most I managed to do was a bit more paintwork on my TF:Animated Soundblaster (the gloss black actually doesn't show up that well, versus the Movie Optimus Primal I did a while back) and, eventually, taking some more photos.

I really should have taken pictures of my half-size G1 Seekers (Sunstorm, Dirge, Thrust, Ramjet (minus one tail fin), Black Starscream - aka Blingscream, owning to his predominantly black and gold deco - and Ghost Starscream... With Thundercracker still in his box and Ghost Dirge as kinda the odd man out), but the best I could manage was adding Blingscream into some of the shots I took of Soundblaster.

Oddly, Ghost Starscream shows that there could have been a bit more posability to the G1 seekers - they very nearly already have a combined hip/knee joint, if only the look of the plane mode had sacrificed a little more to allow for some backward rotation.

Still, they were excellent models for their time and, ignoring the odd flaw (and the frankly terrible sticker quality), these half size remakes are great stuff.