Transcript of How a Couple DIYed Their Small London Flat, 46sqm/495sqft

This episode is brought to you by Rayon Design. This is the first place that we've lived in that's like really ours. It's a 46 square metre apartment, so it has to work really hard for us. But at the same time, it's a perfect size for two. Well, three of us with the dog as well. I think now that we have done the work in here, it doesn't feel like it's too small. It works hard, but it's still bright and airy and, you know, sort of nice and easy to tidy away. I mean, that's the joy of living small, right? It takes like 15 minutes to clean. It's lovely. My name is Celeste. I work in design PR. And I'm Pete and I'm an engineer. I work with batteries. And we live here in north London with our dog, Percy. We moved to London, six years ago from Melbourne. We said we would come to London for maximum two years and we're still here today. The longer we've stayed, the more it's just kind of felt like home is here. We paid £430,000 for the flat, and then our renovation was budgeted to be about 30,000. But we ended up spending about 40. So we are in Gospel Oak in north London. It is at the top of Camden, and we're on the corner of Hampstead Heath. We're in a really lovely modernist estate. We're on this sort of, lower ground of the one of the smaller blocks. We have a lovely little boot box here, which has all of our muddy bits and bobs in for the winter. Means we don't have to bring muddy boots into the house when we inevitably get very muddy on the dog walk. Also, if we've been out cycling we've got a little shed out here, which means that we don't have to track bikes into the flat. It also gives us a little bit of storage for tools and whatnot for our renovation, a bit of gardening equipment and that sort of stuff. That happens every five minutes. Yeah. We have a hospital down this road. We have a hospital up this road, and we have a fire station down the other road we always say if we were ever to, like, have a collapse, we just have to crawl out to the road and someone will pick us up. The hallway was quite a mess. There were radiator pipes everywhere that were painted over and rusting and definitely needed attention. We had front door, kitchen entrance, boiler cupboard door. We had a Dorsa lounge here. There was a door to the bedroom here. There was a door to a linen press here, and there was the bathroom door. It was like an intersection in the middle of the flat. You couldn't really navigate two people through at once. The architects really helped us kind of plan the space around making this, this flow. So this wall here, you can move fully around through the kitchen, which means that if someone's coming this way, someone else can move through the space without kind of that, like collision. I work in design PR and I work with a lot of architects. we actually tapped one of our client, my clients, on the shoulder Loader Monteith. We asked Matt from the practice to help us figure out like what to do with the apartment so that it really flowed. I also took a lot of inspiration from the projects that I've been really lucky enough to work on, and I think we spent six months planning before we started any works. We thought you might want a sneak peek at Celeste and Pete's clever 46 square metre layout. So we created it in Rayon. An effortless, intuitive CAD tool built for interior designers and architects to create, document and present all in one place. We imported their PDF floorplan, edited and refined it step by step. With Rayon, it's easy to draw and edit architectural drawings quickly and accurately. And with everything in one streamlined place, from elevations and design details to tables and presentations, Rayon becomes your full documentation toolkit. It even includes a built in AI panel to streamline things like block search and visualisations. You can build mood boards, blend textures and colours and pull in your favourite references, going from floorplans to perfect presentations without switching platforms. You can even collaborate live with teammates. sharing comments and edits in one real time model. No back and forth. No version control chaos. We loved using it to bring Pete and Celeste's floorplan to life. Want to explore it yourself? You can jump into this exact model, zoom in, adjust it, even make it your own. And if you haven't yet, create your free Rayon account and experience the platform firsthand. Links in the description. We come through from the hallway into the kitchen. Where we spend a lot of time. This is like, kind of the space that we had the most aspiration for. I think in the brief, the previous kitchen just did not function at all. There was cabinetry kind of here splitting up the room and blocking off a lot of the usable bench space from really like about sort of here onwards. So you have to kind of reach behind the cabinetry to use this bench space. So we've tried to make it much more functional. We removed all of the radiators and put in an underfloor heating system just a kit system that we laid ourselves. It meant that we could take the radiators off all the walls, which gave us loads of flexibility on how we lay everything out. When we were working with the architects, they sort of mentioned that if we had high level cabinetry, it would actually block like the sight line of the kind of wall all the way through to the through to the living room and through to the outside. So actually, to keep these shelves open gives it like that sort of sense of, kind of an elongated sense of the apartment, which is really nice and keeps it feeling open and airy. We have everything for tea and coffee over here so that we can grab a mug really easily, grab all, our Aeropress or our teapot or our cafetiere here. All of our sort of serving ware bowls, etc. are here. So if you are like serving hot food in the evening or for lunch, you can just really quickly grab a bowl and then all of our kind of wine and drinks are towards the end, so you can pour friends a glass of wine really close to the dining table, I guess one of the challenges with open shelving like this is that you don't have an extractor fan or a hood, we usually just open the windows, at either side of the apartment and, you know, sort of any oil, smoke or anything can kind of just zip out of the flat quite quickly, which is great. We’ve done all the joinery in the apartment ourselves. We did an order of timber that was enough to get all of the joinery for the kitchen, the lounge room. Yeah. The office space and the furniture. It creates a good bit of continuity throughout. We integrated and routed in, LED lighting, it also dims down in the evening so we can create kind of more mood, especially for when we're hosting. And we want things to feel sort of more, ambient and atmospheric. We've had this bin for Percy's food for years. Percy! All of his little biscuits are tucked away in here. And he has his own little space where he can have his dinner or have his water bowl. Our friends definitely confuse this for the kitchen bin. I would love it to be just that little bit slimmer to, like, really fit in this wall, but we might have to, keep shopping around. One thing that we don't have is a cutlery drawer, because actually, cutlery takes up a lot of flat space when you're storing it sort of in a, in rows. So we just keep it in a little jar on the bench. I think we had a very conservative estimate when we first, planned the renovation. But we did completely gut the apartment, you know, all new heating, all new flooring, whole new kitchen, whole new bathroom, move some walls. So we saved so much money by doing all of that work ourselves. We had a plumber and an electrician come and do some kind of key services, but ultimately we did most of that hard graft. This is our dining space. It's very close to the kitchen. So very easy proximity for when we're hosting friends. And even just, like, cooking and chatting in the evenings after work together. We have designed all of the kitchen furniture ourselves, obviously, except for these amazing HAY Bruno Rey chairs. But this table is made from chocolate Velcro mat, which we designed and had C and C, cut out and essentially sent to us in like three parts. After a while of looking and not being able to find the right thing, we just decided to make our own. We made this beautiful, oak bench seat. We have, all of our linen, spare blankets, sofa covers, duvet. We've got some spare placemats, some rugs, all of our towels, sheets, everything is tucked away in here. And it means that we don't have to have a separate linen cupboard elsewhere in the flat, which frees up a lot of space. And then of course, we kind of have like, the rest of the living space. We have this fabulous sofa which is lovely. Oh, yeah. This is great. It's, timber from Fallen & Felled a really fantastic joinery workshop in East London, and they take trees that are cut down in parks across London or in other sort of cities. So it's waste material they've made it into this lovely platform for us. It's a little bit Donald Judd, it's a bit Mark Tucky from Australia. And we've got a few different, like, covers made, like a nice green as well as this kind of charcoal slate colour so that we can change them regularly. So pers doesn't, get them too messy. Under here, we have, our clothes rack, which is a folding clothes rack, that we can hang our washing out with. But it doesn't take up too much space. it's made out of timber, so it's nice and, kind of natural, but it just slides under so we can tuck things away. On this side of the room, we've got some more built in storage. So we've got some IKEA Besta units down here. Just with their hardwood top on them. And it's the same timber, as the joinery throughout the rest of the flat. The rest of the apartment has like such a good flow to the garden even from, like, the front door. The architects, suggested that we had things that were kind of at least raised up so that you could really, like, see the full span of the room on the floors, which just makes it feel really light, really airy. If you took all of our things out of the apartment, there wouldn't be much colour in it. But like all of these things that we have are really special to us. This plate in particular has had a few lives. I brought it from, a really wonderful artist on Instagram during lockdown. We walked over to her house, and then I had it on a little low side table in our old apartment, and within about three hours, Percy had knocked the table over and it completely broke. So she made me another one. And then about three weeks later, he knocked it over and it broke again. This is the other one. So they've both been glued back together. All the things that are in here are things that we don't need regularly. But like if we need to access them, they're here. This one is the Percy shelf. This is all Percy’s stuff spare lids, toys, etc. Obviously we have to have a dehumidifier as pretty much every flat in London. Ugly as well. Ugly but necessary. We have this. We have another one out in the shed to keep things like keeping them dry. But actually, like, your first, like, a year or so here, we really struggled with, mould in the apartment because you couldn't get airflow through the flat because obviously it was kind of more smaller rooms. Our clothes in the old cupboard was right next to the old external wall and the condensation from that, just like poor insulation, ended up having the built in robe be really damp, which was not nice. It was awful. Yeah, This is our office space. We've got our Google Nest Thermostat there. That's to control all of our, underfloor heating system. This used to be kind of a little mini hallway. And there was a, linen cupboard here. And then behind it was a built in robe for the bedroom. Being creative with making storage space elsewhere in the flat, we've been able to turn this into its own little space. We don't work from home all that often, but it means that when we do, we've got a little light that can turn on here to bring this down. and we've got a monitor ready to go and a mouse and keyboard. We can just plug a laptop in there it means that we don't have to do a big set up and pack down every time we work from home. We made this out of the same timber joinery that is throughout the rest of the flat. Got a little rounded edge on the front. We didn't want to have, like, a sharp edge there's some storage space for some other bits and pieces. This is a piece that Celeste had made for me for our first wedding anniversary one of our friends drew this, and it's got all the things that we love on it. This, was a linen cupboard which had the electrical switchboard inside it. When we removed that cupboard, there was lots of discussion about whether we should move that electrical switchboard somewhere else. It was also quite an expensive exercise to go moving that. We made this out of leftover offcuts of of board from other parts of the flat and just pops off and then, access to all of the bits and pieces that you might need. Pops back on. The bathroom door itself is in the same position, but we've swapped it out for a pocket door. We're able to kind of get rid of the wasted space of a door radius. We painted them this kind of lovely sage green just so that we could have a little bit of colour. But it's not always on show. The layout of the bathroom is basically the same, from when we first moved in. But what we've done is build this wall out here so that we could integrate flush storage and get some additional storage in terms of this shelf. It also meant that we could suspend our light from the wall here instead of having a ceiling light. And this is really lovely for when we need directional light, because we can move the beam of light down or up as we need, but we typically tend not to use this. Instead, we have another hidden strip light. The bathroom can feel maybe a little more moody so you don't get like that shock of a bright light in a bathroom from coming out from the dinner table, which is quite nice. We have sort of a whole set of cabinets each, it meant that we really didn't need to have storage down low. There's obviously the loo system here. It means we can hang the, basin off this wall too. We also have as a stainless steel tap. I got this off eBay for £10. I think it was sold via the British Red cross. And actually just so many of our things came second-hand, from online. A lot of, like, London apartments have big issues with mould and damp. So we have an extractor fan here in the window, and often after a bath or shower, we’ll just open the window up for extra ventilation. This is just a really easy shower screen. I think it came off like a standard hardware shop, and it can just rotate in so that any time we're kind of cleaning the inside or the outside, it can hang directly over the bath and won't kind of drip down it’s also really handy for when we're washing Pers, and we can push this back. So he's got more space to kind of dry off. We can dry him off with a towel before he gets out and does zoomies around the apartment. Oh my gosh, this pilea is so happy. He's like doubled in size in the last few months alone just by being in the bathroom. From the office, we come into the bedroom. The old design was we had a bedroom door here in the corner of the room, with the bed sort of sitting just in front of the doorway, which we weren't that keen on. So we've taken that door off, rebuilt this wall and put it in a pocket door system to give us a bit more space. We were keen to centre the doorway so that we could have clothes storage on both sides. We've offset the door a little bit to the right. That's for a couple of reasons. One, it gives us some extra hanging space that we'll see when we go into the bedroom. It also, it gives us more wall over this side for the pocket cavity that the door has to slide into. We've put in some walk through wardrobes which are actually just like IKEA Pax systems. Pete has a side and then I have a side. If you’re opening a door, you're locking someone else out of the room. So in just having like a sliding curtain, you’ve never got the pressure of, opening and closing a door on someone else. Like, as you're both, you know, getting dressed in the morning or getting ready to go out. We both just have a few drawers. Our shoes on top here. Although we might be, borrowing the sliding pullout drawer, for shoes that we saw in one of your other videos. And then, like, high level storage for the things that we don't access very often. For my side, it doesn't need to be, rare access items. Just having a little bit more reach than Celeste does, I can reach my shoes up on the top shelf. We pushed it out from this kind of external wall here to give ourselves hanging space for coats, dresses, suit bags. We can kind of hide things that we don't need very often. Pete also put in a handy little hook for me to hang my hairdryer so that when I can kind of dry my hair every day in front of the mirror, that's just there ready and plugged in. This is an amazing kind of find. It's just a gym mirror it does reflect the curtain. So the room feels really soft but like quite long, Percy's already nibbled a little hole in the bottom of this one. We also built a built in headboard. It gives us some nice little storage space to put things on top. And it also made it a lot easier with putting in these bedside lights and some extra power sockets next to the bed. We had these beautiful, original pieces of art, these drawings which were completed by, Loader Monteith, the architects who helped us with the plan. I think these were just like early days sketches of how the flat could work potentially. They kind of look a little bit like Mondrian almost. Such a nice memento of the house. We've got, Percy's dog bed next to the bed in here. It never used to be in the bedroom. It was always out in the lounge room. And then when we were renovating and the flat was a mess, we always tried to keep the bedroom fairly clean. And so we moved his crate in here. It's never, never left. Yeah. So now he sleeps in there every night next to us. I have grand plans to do a timber crate. One of the next projects. One of the next ones. Once we've got over this one, sometimes in the morning, Percy, if we're feeling particularly lazy and we don't want to walk out to the other door in the lounge room, we just let Pers out from here. It's a really nice way to get air through in the summer as well, when it’s warm. Yeah, definitely. Also, in the warmer months when you wake up and it's quite warm in the flat, it's nice to just be able to open the windows. Just let a bit of fresh air in the mornings. We were sort of looking for a year before we purchased or found this apartment. And it was under budget for for what we'd been looking for too. The other places we're looking at, we're all bigger flats. But didn't have the backyard space like this one does. We thought we were making it be compromised by taking a smaller flat. But getting a backyard as a trade off. Now that we have the one bed plus study space or office space with the garden, I don't think that we could have found anything better for us. Got out a little outdoor space. Got a bit of work to go this summer to replace the deck. It's getting a bit rotten in places. But this is a space that we use a lot in the warmer months. We often say that he's a different dog living here when we first got the keys to the apartment, we let Percy off the lead, like, in the front door, and he just ran straight out to this space when we opened the door. And I just, I kind of knew in that moment we'd made the right decision. This is embarrassing of how excited I am about the clothesline. But we have a retractable clothesline. This was another fairly early addition when we moved in to be able to have somewhere to hang our clothes outside in the warmer months. It makes such a difference to be able to, like, keep the, the the flat, like, tidy and the house tidy, It's so cool. I think Celeste has the kind of design, brain and eye for working out what the end product should look like. And then I've got the logic side of it with working out, you know, what's going to fit and how big things need to be, and getting all dimensions and all that sort of stuff. Projects go over budget and people become stressed when there's, like, a really hard deadline. And I think because we didn't have one the project was more enjoyable, I think in the long run for us, having done the DIY ourselves. We just wanted it finished for ourselves. I look around the apartment and I feel really proud that we've been able to do this over the last year. Certainly whenever there's imperfections, I think I'm happier to live with it. But I know it was me. It was the best I could do. Yeah. The best we could do. That's true. That wonky corner, that's on us, and that's fine. Maybe that's just part of the character.