How do I get rid of all this stuff?

We're embarking on a complete refurbishment of the flat we bought.  First of all, you might think that a refurbishment is not the right thing to do in the first place - one of the lowest impact things to do would be to simply leave the flat as it is.  After all, the last people lived there perfectly happily.  Well, to be honest, I can't say we thought about that one for too long.  It's only really in retrospect that I've considered this.  However, I don't think we're doing the wrong thing.  You see, homes need to be upgraded periodically - hopefully not too frequently, but often enough to make sure that the places we live in are in good shape.  Also, as we've learnt more about energy efficiency, it makes sense to upgrade our homes - realising though, that some of the benefits may take a while to pay off.  In other words, we all need to maintain our homes, for ourselves and for those that may live there in the future.

With that in mind, we set out to get a few things right from the start - we wanted to replace the old (and slightly strangely but very ineffciently arranged) heating and hot water system with something more efficient; we wanted to use low impact materials for our floors and walls; and we wanted to put in as much energy efficient lighting as possible.  All that was a great plan to begin with, but we soon found ourselves with another problem.  Even though the flat seemed completely empty, as soon as we started taking the flat apart, we realised we were sitting on top of a huge amount of really useful stuff.

OK - what I mean by stuff is:

• an oven
• a fridge
• a gas hob
• 2 different sets of wood floors
• a carpet that was under the wood floor
• underlay that was under the carpet
• massive mirrored sliding doors
• 2 wooden cabinets
• 2 bathroom suites
• a bunch of old radiators
• 5 radiator covers
• a mirror
• 2 shower doors

So my goal became - How do I get rid of all this stuff?

At least, how do I get rid of it all without sending it to a landfill - or in our case, to our eco-friendly waste company that recycles as much as 80% of the waste they collect.  Keep tuned in to find out what happens.

Refurbishing - Part 1

Since we're refurbishing our flat, I thought it would be interesting to chart its progress here.

All the pictures in this post were taken by the previous owners before we bought the place. Hopefully, I'll be able to post more pictures as all the refurbishment work starts to happen.

We decided to make our refurb as eco-friendly as possible - but we realised pretty quickly how difficult it was to make choices that reflected that ideal. There simply isn't a 'best' way to do things - everything is a compromise of sorts, so you just have to do the best you can.

The Kitchen

In the kitchen, we're taking up the floors (some of which were damaged), replacing the appliances (the old owners already took the washing machine and dishwasher), boiler and the counters, but keeping the cupboards. By deciding to save the cupboards, we made things incredibly difficult on ourselves - anything new had to be sized to fit the existing layout and we're going to have to be really careful doing work around them.

Bedroom

The old hot water and heating system was a bit strangely set up - with both a combi boiler and an electric immersion heater. So we're changing the system along with replacing the boiler with something much more efficient. The bedrooms were set up in a strange way as well, so we're re-arranging the floorplan to make it a bit more sensible. However, this meant a lot of time with structural engineers and architects to get landlord's consent and the party wall sorted out. We're still not there on all of that, but we're hoping that the ridiculous amount of steel our engineer wants us to put in will keep everyone happy.