Houzz

I have recently discovered a fantastic tool for bringing my various home improvement ideas together, in www.houzz.com

This free website is essentially a photo sharing tool that allows you to create 'Ideabooks' of your favourite home improvement looks. You can pick and choose from the millions of photos on the site, to compile your own swatch of photos, so to speak.

Such a great idea!

Here's a link to one of my own ideabooks for the new house.

No more kitchen!

The Christmas period hasn't seen much more action on the house, with visits to family members and general relaxation getting in the way of our grand plans to make headway on the renovations.

Tom carrying Allie up the ladder into the house. Doesn't she look like she's loving it!! NOT!

The backyard continues to look like a bomb has hit it

Some of the tiles that we ordered for the bathrooms. Tom and Daniel put a mammoth effort into lifting them all in to the house (after the staircases were removed, mind you)

Our temporary mobile kitchen underneath the house... consists of a microwave and a rice cooker, powered by a generator!

The cabinet-less kitchen. You can see that someone obviously stained the floor after the cabinets were installed

The little add-on to the kitchen, now with all of the framing removed.

The very important task of possum removal begins...

Has Tom met his match?

So incredibly disgusting!

And that's it for the moment! We did a bit of demolition yard shopping yesterday and bought some timber to extend the kitchen add-on, so that is tomorrow's project. We also found some absolutely wonderful 100-year-old French doors that will eventually be the entries from the front verandah into the lounge room and office.

There's a lot to do before we get there though!


So long for now! I should have pictures of the kitchen add-on tomorrow (hopefully!!).

Love Bec

The Lifting is Complete

Just a quickie this time, to show off a few photos of the house in its final position now that the lifters have finished.

This was the letterbox that graced the front of our last house until well after we finished the landscaping. Tom had nikko-penned our last street number on it. When he installed it here, it took a few days to put the new numbers on it, so the poor postman got very confused.

Our only access into the house at the moment

Tom playing with his new toy, spreading rocks along the driveway so that we can actually use it as something other than a boggy swamp.

It's hard to imagine our front yard was ever anything other than mud. I've bought gumboots though, so I'm all set!

Allie peeking from behind one of the old concrete posts

The underneath of the house

Our backyard. Looks like a tornado has hit, doesn't it?!

Well a lot has certainly happened, but we're nowhere near the finish line yet. I'm extremely keen to get the support posts concreted into the ground, because that is when we'll be allowed to reconnect the electricity and plumbing to the house, which in turn is the time we can move back in again. As grateful as we are that Tom's family have let us stay with them for a while, we miss having our own space!

Nevertheless, I have to keep reminding myself that impatience definitely isn't helpful with this kind of major undertaking. Mistakes get made when you try and rush things, as we've learnt the hard way before! So.... slow and steady we go!

Stay tuned for much much more to come.

And HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

We have lift off!!!

This is the official week of our house lifting, and man is it dramatic! The house is undergoing three movements in this process:

1) Raising about 1.8 metres higher (so we can build in underneath it later)
2) Moving closer to the side boundary
3) Moving closer to the front boundary

This process has been accomplished over the course of four days, and now it sits perched up on its stacks looking just a little bit forlorn.

The little back balcony stripped bare.

Removing the front stairs

The stacks

The destruction of the back balcony (and stairs) well underway

The house before it was moved sideways or forward

The house after it was moved. See how close it is to the fence now!

The bobcat in operation pushing the house into its new position

The naked back area, now moved forward

The now much smaller front yard

OK... I need gumboots.

The house as it stood on Wednesday night.

More pictures to come showing it raised to its final height of 8.485m (just a miniscule 15mm lower than the maximum height restriction of 8.5m). Whew!

Guess who's been living in our kitchen?

On Sunday, it rained almost non-stop. So, instead of curling up in front of a movie with hot chocolates like normal people would, we decided to go window shopping. As in.... shopping for windows. The windows at our house look like this:

They have two small panes of clear-coloured bevelled glass at top and bottom, and a plain clear-coloured pane in the centre.

Our renovation plans include a requirement for a number of new windows to match the existing ones - 8 of them, in fact. We therefore spent the rainy Sunday scouring demolition yards for that window. Unfortunately for us, we came to the conclusion that that particular configuration in a window is quite rare! Or at least rare in houses that are being demolished, which isn't surprising I suppose, given that houses of that era tend to be quite pretty. We're consoled by the fact that it should be possible to at least get enough windows of similar design whose panes of glass can be switched in and out for us to make up the necessary number.

Sunday night was to be our last night at the house for a little while, because the lifters were scheduled to arrive on Monday morning to disconnect our power, water and stairs (for real this time). So in honour of the occasion, we decided to attack the kitchen.

Before I go into the details, I'll explain something. Like many houses of its vintage, our house has a little add-on to the back of the kitchen that includes its own exhaust pipe, the purpose of which would originally have been to house the stove. These little add-ons usually have a low roof-line separate to the main house. Here is ours. The louvre window you can see is in the main external wall of the kitchen.

As part of our grand plan, we intend to use this little bit of extra space and extend it, so that we can make the kitchen a little bigger, like so (the top wall in the diagram is the wall in question)...

Currently, that little stove add-on section has been completely enclosed, and from the inside of the kitchen you wouldn't even know it was there.

One of the first things we need to do in order to sort out the plumbing for the house is to relocate the sink in the kithcen, and because we're relocating it to our extended add-on section which doesn't exist yet, we need to build it as one of our first renovation tasks. So, time to start ripping out the kitchen, so we can get at it!

As much fun as it would have been to take a sledgehammer to the room, we decided to be practical and try to put the old kitchen up for sale on ebay, so destruction became more like dismantling.

First, down came the overhead cupboards (which were all glued together, and therefore inseparable)

 

 

 

The big reveal!

You can just see the red of the inside of the tin roof at the top of the opening there, and the cute little window. I wonder if we can keep the little window?

 First instinct, once the area was opened up was, of course, to see what lurked inside! This is the sight that greeted us...

 Unfortunately it looks like a possum (and possibly a friend) loved the little add-on and decided not to leave.

Tom has a theory that this possum (obviously a different one from the one that's been serenading us nightly) has somehow shed its fur/skin, and therefore what you're looking at is one animal. I can't quite agree with that, and am inclined to believe that it invited a friend along for the ride.

Needless to say, you can be certain that I won't be anywhere nearby when the eviction of the animal(s) is conducted!

Unfortunately I can't claim that no animals were harmed in the making of this blog, but I really hope there are no more to be discovered! Now I'm getting concerned about the source of the odd smell that's been emanating from another corner of the house.