A trip around the Flat

We live in a small one bedroom flat that is the perfect size for the two of us.  Upon our move we found a basic set of furniture and friends of ours provided most of the items any well established British household could possible need.  A lot of what we use on a daily basis is run of the mill items any American household would find helpful and recognisable, but there are a few things that stand out.

Our flat is part of a larger row of terraced houses.  This means we have upstairs neighbours and ones on both sides of us.  Originally (like in the late 1800s) ours would have been a single family residence with an upstairs and downstairs.  Many have now been converted into multiple unit houses instead.  We live at the end of our road and sometime in the past part of the building was torn down to make room for a school and park that are at the end of our row.  All that means to us is that the other rows of houses are much longer than ours.  After the mass destruction of housing during the Second World War terraced houses were a quick and efficient way to rebuild, so there are some that are more recently built.

The room we use as a bedroom is at the front of our flat and would have been used as a parlour for when company came around.  Parlours were decked out with all the best in furnishings and decoration and were used to make a good impression on visitors.  Other areas of the house were for private use only and were not so elaborately furnished.  For just this downstairs portion we have 5 doors that control access between each room.

One thing that has taken adjusting to is the lack of door knobs on the exterior doors.  This is the inside of our door to the main hall.  To exit the top lock has a knob to disengage the lock, then pull and the door opens.  On the outside the key turned in the same lock and a push opens the door.  The door to the outside has the same pattern to the locks, turn and pull to exit, twist and push to enter.  Not sure if there is any sort of advantage but it's definitely different.

We spend quite a bit of time in the kitchen so we'll start there.

The gas cooktop is known as the Hob. Luckily ours has 4 burners even though many are just one or two burners.

Our oven is one of the most complicated models I have ever worked with, and this includes the couple of years cooking on a 70+ year old model.  One of the first things I learned the hard way is the temperature dial is in ˚C, so for recipes it takes a conversion.  So yeah, my first experience with this oven was a simple baking of chips that ended with me in tears, all of the smoke alarms going off, and a pan that had to be soaked and scrubbed a couple of times.  We have recently committed to a second year in our flat and I'm fairly confident by the end I will have figured all the settings out.

In our kitchen the fridge-freezer combination is roughly the size of a travel fridge in a trailer.  Ours is split 50/50 between the top refrigerator and the bottom freezer.  Fortunately for two occupants this is about perfect, except for the first day or so after shopping when the fridge is packed from top to bottom and an avalanche risk every time the door is opened.

Tea is a staple in most British households so they have perfected the quick boil electric kettle that can sit on the countertop waiting for the switch to engage and be at a rolling boil in a very short time period.  The kettle can of course be used for anything requiring boiling water, but I'm pretty sure it was invented to decrease the time from start to finish for the daily pot of tea.

The kitchen in a basic flat like we live in is on the compact side but not tiny.  Still there is no room (or need?) of a dishwasher.  You do sometimes see the clothes washer in the kitchen, but I think that has to do with plumbing more than space.

Next let's look at the loo.

Many of the bathroom taps have this configuration with separate nozzles for the hot and cold water.  To get lukewarm water you use the plug and fill the sink with a magic combination of the two and work from there.  In public restrooms there is usually a sign warning of "Very Hot Water, Caution", because of the boilers used for hot water the water goes from cold to hotter than hell in no time flat.

Many of the toilets have variable flush volumes triggered by one of two buttons.  They are usually of different sizes to make things easier to identify with the smaller button used for wee and the larger for poo.  This is a water conservation feature that is brilliant.  In public toilets the multi-flush is not always seen and a more familiar lever or button is used.

One of my favourite features of the bathroom is our radiator/towel rack combination.  Around 5 minutes before a shower I will engage the boiler to start warming the room up but also to warm the towel to be used at the end so it is comfy cozy warm.  When getting into a shower I will hang my dressing gown on the rack so it's nice and warm too.  Definitely not a necessity but it is a welcome luxury.

Speaking of the boiler this is the magic box that provides all the hot water for the taps but also for the radiators that keep the rooms warm.  It is controlled by a fairly complicated set of switches to allow for it to engage at set times or has a bypass switch to fire it up on demand.  It is incredibly efficient and within minutes of engaging the radiators are almost too hot to touch and all you can use hot water is flowing from the taps.  So far we have not run it out of hot water so it puts out a crapton at any given time.

Most of the room radiators look like this, they are not huge but they do a great job of warming up even the coldest of the rooms.

Our little washer is nothing fancy and it does a great job with whatever we throw at it.  The problem we have is that without a dryer we need to hang dry our loads but in a climate that is cold and humid (when it's not outright raining) things just don't want to dry.  We have gotten creative with locations to hang clothes in our flat and most of the time they are ready by the next day.  An early lesson we learned was small frequent loads and don't count on the outside clothesline.

When traveling overseas an outlet adapter is a necessity.  Here in the UK our outlets look like this.  We are using a combination of adapters and purchased plugs for our USB chargers.

One thing that I had never seen or heard of was that each plug on an outlet has a switch.  Here is one of our kitchen outlets where the left plug is powered on but the right is off.  The one on the right is the plug for our toaster and since we rarely use it we leave it in the off position, which of course means I forget about the switch for at least a few minutes while I fight the toaster to toast and then have my Duh! moment and turn it on.

Our Christmas lights came like this, with an interchangeable plug end that can then be screwed onto the light string.  My husband says (and he's usually right) that this is because the plug types in the UK were not  universal in the past so this would allow for greater flexibility.  Along with this many appliances come with wiring diagrams so that one type of plug could be removed and a new one wired into its place.

A quick trip back to the bedroom and you will find no closet but instead clothes are hung go in our wardrobe.  It wasn't until getting here that I finally understood the wardrobe portion of C.S. Lewis' book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  I can totally see hiding from my siblings in here (without shutting oneself in) and suddenly finding a portal to another world.  I'm perfectly content with exploring the new world I have found myself in without travel by wardrobe (and I prefer Jelly Babies to Turkish Delight when it comes to sweets).

We love our flat and feel like it was the perfect place for us to land.  We are within walking distance of everything we need and have access to amazing public transportation.  Finding a place that can feel like home has helped the transition.

I hope you enjoyed your tour.