The son bought a house for his mother and decided to surprise her by renovating it. The mother had difficult character and the son wasn’t sure she would like the house. But the reaction of the mother was shocking!!!
“The customer is an entrepreneur who had absolutely no time to do repairs. He bought an apartment for his mother in a house not far from his own. In his words, my mother is a person with a difficult character who expects everything to be done perfectly, otherwise he will be killed,” recalls project architect.
The initial state of the property: an apartment with a small bathroom (1.5×2.05m) and an entrance hall, but at the same time a spacious kitchen of 9.8 sq.m and a good-sized room of 19.7 sq.m. The house is after a major renovation, but the apartment itself has not been renovated for a very long time: during dismantling, several layers of wallpaper were removed, a layer of linoleum was removed from the Christmas tree parquet.
What was required
The client asked to leave the partitions in their places, as in the BTI plan, and to glaze the balcony at the request of his mother. For the rest, I trusted the taste of the designer, indicating the budget that needed to be met.
The gas in the kitchen was turned off, access to the valve was hidden in the closet. This made it possible to dismantle the interior door to the kitchen. If you want to return the gas, you can install a glass loft partition in a white frame.
The main challenge for the finishers was to maintain the ceiling height as much as possible. The ceiling was not leveled over the entire volume; the seams between the slabs (they can be seen in the “BEFORE” photo) and especially strong rubble were pulled out locally with plaster.
Problem and solution: the customer spent a long time deciding on the flooring: whether to put laminate, quartz vinyl or parquet in the room. Since the hallway is small and the entrance to the living room is literally one and a half meters away, I really didn’t want to use a threshold. As a result, it was decided to buy an inexpensive parquet board, which required only 20 m2. And the joint between the porcelain stoneware and the parquet board was sealed with silicone sealant to match the coating.
The designer wanted to create the illusion of a higher ceiling height in the apartment and fill the space with air. There are several techniques for this:
- the ceiling plinth is painted in the color of the walls;
- light walls and ceiling are painted in the same tone throughout the entire apartment (no visual fragmentation);
- increased height interior doors;
- furniture with a single facade up to the ceiling without division into the main and mezzanine parts;
- overhead lamps only;
Please note: as in the kitchen, in the living room there are floor-to-ceiling curtains on a hidden cornice. In the room they were specially made narrow – not from corner to corner of the room. This also helps to visually “raise” the ceiling.
In the houses of this series, the bathroom is built into a separate cabin with wooden lining of the walls and ceiling (they can be seen in the “Before” photo). By breaking this capsule, we managed to add 20cm to the width of the bathroom, which made it possible to hang a cabinet with a sink of a standard width of 60cm.
After dismantling the plumbing cabin, the ceiling became the same as in the entire apartment – 250 cm, not 230 cm.
