Shopping for accessories

We popped over to a place near Amsterdam on Friday that sells old and reclaimed building materials, called J. van IJken Oudebouwmaterialen bv. We've been after some original Jugendstil tiles for the toilets after discovering the background of the house (we've since found out that the house was used by a chiropodist prior to it being converted into an art gallery) and we weren't disappointed by this place; we're now the proud owner of 200 authentic Jugendstil tiles (see picture on the left)!


The place sells lots of things that have seemingly been rescued from old buildings, like tiles, bricks, roof tiles and soap trays from old bathrooms, like the one we bought for our new shower pictured above. We were going to have a tiled shelf built into the shower cell, but after chatting with a guy in a bathroom showroom, we were put off by the idea of having to clean it every day. So this old solution should turn out to be more practical... and more charming.


I suspect that we may be paying this place a couple more visits in the future. They sell lots of old doors and windows and frames; it may turn out cheaper and stylistically quite interesting to try re-using some of these old bits and bobs in the new house, for example for the glass division we still need to source between the front entrance and the kitchen/dining room and maybe to construct some furniture from?


And talking of old furniture, we managed to acquire a vintage piece of what we assume is a kitchen wall cabinet. You can just about make out the bottom half of it in the picture above, sat on top of the floor standing cupboard. After a good clean up and some new hinge pins, we plan on hanging this on the wall in the dining area to keep our cups, saucers, glasses, tea and coffee in.

So, we've generally had a good week and I'm certainly glad that we took the week off; we seem to have got on top of things a little and we're both feeling more confident about getting on with the job. Next step is to try and get the building cost down, since we got the quote off the building contractor this week...