The Kitchen Plan

I've been intending to do this for a while - explain what I'm thinking for the kitchen at our house. And now I've finally got to it!

Here is the official building designer's plan:

I intend to make a few adjustments to the floorplan, making it look a bit more like this:

As you may recall, the original kitchen looked like this before we started attacking it (see here):

Definitely begging to be removed, right? Well very very very early on in the process (i.e. before we'd even settled on the house), I started searching Ebay and Gumtree for second hand kitchen options that we might be able to adapt to fit the room (and suit the style of the house a bit better). Obviously it would have been lovely to be going to brand new kitchen showrooms instead, but we don't have tens of thousands of dollars in the budget, so second hand it was. And I found one almost immediately! Apologies for the poor quality, this was the photo in the ad.

The price listed was $2,000 for everything. When I say everything, I mean all of the cabinets, the marble benchtop, the stove (Smeg brand, mind you!), the rangehood, the sink, and even that little wall to the left of the stove. We also managed to get the Miele dishwasher for $250, and a claw foot bath and pedestal sink for the main bathroom for an extra $350 that I'll talk about in the bathroom plan later.

We spent a day pulling everything out of the seller's house and taking loads back to our house, handed over our $2,600, and not only had what pretty well constituted a complete kitchen, but a beautiful bath and a sink for the bathroom as well!

We were pretty pleased with ourselves, I can tell you!

I plan to paint the cupboards slightly off-white, and exchange the marble benchtop for a black granite one. The standing oven/stove is a 900mm wide beauty that we're going to centre between two windows (the two that we've removed from the current kitchen, split so there's only one actual window pane each side of the stove). The rangehood will obviously go above it.

We decided not to keep the old farmhouse sink as it was pretty scratched up inside, so at this point I think we'll get a nice round one to go in the corner of our little extension, with a draining rack to its right.

As you will note in my amended kitchen plan above, I have moved the fridge from the West Wall where the building designer had it to the opposite wall. The main reason for this is because I really don't want the fridge to be the first thing you see as you walk towards the kitchen. So then I had a brainwave. We could use the hutch that we bought when we were still at our first house that then stood in our dining room at our second house!

Here's a not ideal photo of it behind the dining table:

What got me started thinking about this was the fact that not only are the living areas in our third house pretty small, but we're very short on wall space since all of the other rooms come off the living area meaning there are doorways everywhere. Therefore tall, fairly bulky pieces of furniture like this hutch won't really work for us in the living areas. So why not paint it up and use it in the kitchen, I say?!

The cabinet doors etc don't quite match the design of the kitchen cabinets that we've bought, but it will be a bit of a feature piece anyway, so it shouldn't really be a problem that it's not all matchy matchy. We might even paint it a slightly different colour to the ordinary cabinets to distinguish it a bit.

So the plan is to position this hutch as centrally as possible along the west wall (in the extension we're building), so when you walk towards the kitchen, you see a lovely balanced wall on the West, and a lovely balanced wall on the North, with the stove nestled between two matching windows.

Here's a better view of the stove and rangehood in the kitchen that we got them from. Pardon the mess.

The one fly in the ointment with the hutch-on-the-West-wall plan is that it doesn't leave enough room to the right of the sink to put the dishwasher there. The only rational place for the dishwasher is therefore under the breakfast bar section of the bench. This keeps it nice and handy to the plumbing for the sink, and as a bonus, it keeps it completely out of sight if you're standing on the other side of the breakfast bar looking at the kitchen! We'll have to see what we can do to sound insulate it a little bit so we don't get loud dishwashing noises while we're entertaining.in the dining room.

I also have some grand plans for the East wall of the kitchen (the one where the fridge will go), but might save them for later when I have some pictures to show you.

I'd love some feedback on the plan. Am I missing anything? Have you tried configurations like the one I'm planning and regretted them?

Love Bec

Can one dig surreptitiously?

Before I begin, can we have a few lines of the Hallelujah chorus please?

The cause of celebration? Tom managed to start up the digger this morning, so wonder of wonders, we didn't destroy it with our various issues yesterday. And all the people re-joy-oy-oy-oiced!

Of course being Sunday, we technically couldn't truly enjoy its capabilities. So let's just say Tom probably didn't give it a few test runs.

Remember yesterday how Daniel started painting black tar onto our steel posts? Well he stopped after 6 because I figured we should save that task for a Sunday since it's nice and quiet. So he and I lugged the remaining 16 out to the farthest extremity of the backyard (the only place where there's much clear ground) and lined them all up for the tar treatment.

Here he is hard at work:

We made a very unfortunate discovery. Because of course we were overdue for some bad luck, weren't we?

All (and I do mean all) our steel beams are too long! Somehow or other the measurements got taken wrongly back when we were ordering them, and they're all about a metre too long. One solution is to dig the holes an extra metre deep, but that's certainly not a simple task. So we're facing the wonderful prospect of having to pay someone who charges $70 an hour to cut and re-weld all of the posts to the right sizes. Yay. Cancel that Hallelujah Chorus.

Here's Tom scrutinising the plans

And our much misused diagram of the hole/pole layout.

For some reason, it took us ages to realise that not all posts were lost, we could use the shorter ones in some of the holes where the house was higher up (because the ground slopes, they're not all the same length).

So I started calculating which ones we could use:

We managed to get one hung, which was very much a jump-for-joy moment, but couldn't hang others because either the holes weren't dug, or we needed to drill holes in the right place in the steel above to connect the steel to. We're surrounded by holes that need to be dug, aren't we?!

 

I spent much of the day scooping all of the loose soil out of the already-dug holes. Wasn't that a fun job!

Allie entertained herself (and kept us occupied) by playing ball. It was obviously part of the game to unfailingly drop the ball into one of the holes for us to retrieve it. Perhaps a reverse version of fetch?

I got a bit of a nasty surprise when I jumped into this hole for her.

 

Look at her. Never took her eyes off the ball!

Brisbane has pretty heavy rainfall scheduled for the next few days, so we decided to take some precautions by covering up all of our holes as best we could.

Like our wheelbarrow lineup?

And our repurposed kitchen add-on roof (complete with stove chimney thing)?

Another weekend down, not a great deal accomplished, I'm afraid. Hopefully this can be a big week despite the rain, and we can get the rest of the holes dug and the steel posts re-sized and hung.

Wish us luck! Good this time please!


Love Bec.

Mirror, mirror.... not going to be on the wall for a while

As part of my grand plan for the main bathroom in our house (I promise I will talk about the plan soonish), I need to obtain a mirror.

Originally I was thinking along these sorts of lines...

eclectic bathroom design

Ignore the pink here, obviously we're not going with that, but that's the kind of mirror I was hoping for.

And then I thought about the feature tiles we're using...

I then figured that we're going pretty bold on our tiling choices, so it probably wasn't advisable to go for an overly dramatic mirror. Don't want to overdo it, do we?

So, I could have started touring the various Brisbane shops that stock mirrors (not that I have the time to do that since I'm spending every weekend trying to dig holes. Previously, when Tom and I did up another bathroom in a townhouse last year, we had found a mirror at a builders' warehouse that had a little baby chip out of the corner and was therefore discounted to $99. We figured we could live with the chip, since it could be hidden in the corner of the room at the bottom of the mirror - nothing a bit of silicone couldn't fix.

This is how that one looked:

It was 1200mm wide, which was the exact width of our vanity unit, and very nice looking with a bevelled edge, so we definitely thought we'd got a bargain.

This time around though, I decided to trawl Ebay and Gumtree for some second-hand mirror options, in the hopes of getting an even better deal - and a mirror with a bit more personality.

I won this one for $60, and drove all the way to Victoria Point to get it today.

Here's a close up of it all tucked up in a blanket in the back of the ute.

Don't worry too much about the colour. It shouldn't take much to sand it back and give it a couple of coats of silver-ish colour so it will match the chrome tap fittings etc that we intend to get for the bathroom. I say that now, but not having done this before, that will be an interesting experience. I'm told it's easy. Let's hope it is, because that current colour won't do at all!

So that will be our bathroom mirror! Now to actually get a bathroom for it to go in...

Love Bec

Did we get anything done?

In our digger-problem-ridden Saturday, we did actually get a few things done. Thank goodness!

I finally got to the very important task of making a sign to display that we're owner builders using some stencils, the back of the sign that the real estate agent never bothered to collect after we settled on the property, and some black spray paint.

Not wanting to be left out of the opportunity to spread black paint around, Daniel got to work painting sticky black tar on the bottom ends of our steel posts to protect them when they're concreted and buried in the ground (eventually).

First though, we had to number them to make sure they would all go in the right places.

And we had to invest $175 at Bunnings to get a giant bucket of bitumen paint. Is it wrong that I think it looks really tasty on film?

And then Daniel got to work.

 

With all of the digger problems (see here), I was really disappointed to be wasting so much valuable noise-making time, so we spent a few hours amongst it all sanding the walls in the master bedroom in preparation for painting them. Not a huge priority, but it would be nice to have a few rooms painted before we move all of our stuff back in again. And since we couldn't make noise digging holes, we had to find another power tool to use!

My weapon of choice:

Daniel's weapon of choice. Maybe this just means that he innately loves ironing.

Allie's best 'you just woke me up!' face:

The room in progress.

 That giant yellow ladder-looking thing is scaffolding. It's fantastic, particularly in a room where the ceilings are 3.2m high! We managed to get it for $300 off Ebay, which Tom tells me is an awesome deal. Not cheap, but definitely helpful. I'm sure it will pay itself off well and truly with all the painting and sanding we need to do.

It also has really great easy-to-use locking things on its feet, so I didn't send it scooting across the floor while standing on it reaching for the corners.

The nicely sanded window seat in the master bedroom. I've got grand plans for it.

 

The inside leaves a lot to be desired. I'll get to that eventually. At least there are no dead possums in there (see here and here for that).

And thus ends a Saturday we would probably all happily forget. We've got a few nice quiet tasks lined up for tomorrow, so stay tuned for more antics. Hopefully less drama.

Love, Bec

Priorities

Doesn't the word 'priorities' just make you feel all warm and fuzzy? Doesn't it just make you think of cuddling puppies and sipping hot chocolate? At the same time?

No? No, me neither. But love 'em or hate 'em, they're ruling our lives at the moment.

Our NUMBER ONE PRIORITY right now, what we're getting up in the morning for, is to be able to move back into our house. No offence Phil (Tom's brother whose house we're staying at), we love you, we just really really really REALLY want to be in our own house again. So we're having conversation after conversation after conversation about what we can do to speed up that process. Obviously the basics would be nice - running water, electricity, maybe a sewerage hook-up... we're willing to wait longer on pretty much everything else, including a kitchen.

But thanks to Christmas and temperamental (to put it mildly) machinery (see here for that saga), we actually don't feel like we're much closer to that goal than we were a month ago.

In a nutshell, we still need to dig all of the holes to become the foundations of our house. We then need to attach steel posts to the steel beams that have been attached to the house, hanging into those holes. Then we need to concrete those posts in with extra-special tough concrete which could then need two weeks to set properly. We need to reattach our old front stairs on the back of the house so we don't have to climb a ladder to get into the house (not particularly practical in heels on a work day). We'll build a proper front staircase later. We need to redo most of the plumbing (including repositioning the kitchen sink) and get it signed off by a plumber. We need to ensure all of the electrical wiring is safe and operational, and get professional sign off on that too. We have to reconnect the toilet (since we'll be using the old existing bathroom until we get our new bathrooms finished).Oh and it would be really nice to have an actual wall on the West side of the kitchen.

And then and only then can we get the power and water reconnected and move back in!

We started seeing a glimmer of light at the end of the house-less tunnel this week when the people that sold us the faulty digger offered us a loan of a different model with which to dig our holes. A very very nice gesture, and very necessary, since our refund of the original one hasn't come through yet, and the new machine we want to buy isn't yet ready. So Tom, Phil and Daniel got to work yesterday afternoon digging holes before our 6:30 noise curfew.

And then started again at 6:30 this morning (very sorry neighbours, but we can't make noise on Sunday so we have to make the most of our allowed time!).

Unfortunately Tom also had to work today, so the house responsibility torch passed to Phil, Daniel and I this morning.

Allie made sure she sniffed out the area.

X marked the spots.

Then what do you know, the hydraulic fluid started leaking (quite profusely I might add) from the hole-digging attachment! Flashbacks of all the issues we had with the first machine (see here) started running through our heads, and we anxiously decided to press on. Still ten more holes to dig!

Thankfully, a worried phonecall to the company that leant us the machine resulted in a visit from a hydraulic fixit man who replaced a few bits and pieces and got it looking airtight once again.

And then.... the machine wouldn't turn on.

Let's have a collective groan from the audience shall we? Yep. Like we haven't had enough digger-related problems! First we have a digger that magically turns itself on whenever it feels like it, now we have one that won't turn on at all. Many phone calls and wasted noise-permitted hours later, it turns out it was our fault. We had put diesel fuel in it instead of unleaded, because the last machine had been a diesel. Embarassed and horrified in equal measure, we called the company up again to find out how to get rid of the diesel. Thus began a very long, slow and frustrating process of first trying to siphon the fuel out into a container.

Phil cleverly positioned himself in one of the holes we had managed to dig at the end of a hose, trying to siphon out the fuel.

Allie kept him company.

And then we gave up and simply letting it drain straight out (only after an extremely lengthy battle with a very tight bolt).

And then? Seriously, you don't want to know.

The spark plug broke. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Daniel went on a pilgrimage to Supercheap and then on to Repco to find a replacement, and came back bearing the not-good-enough feedback that apparently not a single one of either of those Queensland stores stocks the spark plug we need. !!!!!!!! again! Fortunately through the wonder of multitasking I managed to dial Autobarn's number while seeing red, and some lovely mechanically minded guy told me they had five in stock that would match ours, that they only cost $5 each, and that they also had a 20% sale on today, so it would actually only cost $4. I was in my car faster than you can say "#(%$!@#&()$#*^& digger!!!!!!!"

It gives me great sadness (understatement of the year) to report that even a replacement of the spark plug didn't coax our poor machine to life, so I'm praying that Tom can perform some kind of miracle tomorrow and raise it from the dead. Not that that will do us much good tomorrow because we're not allowed to make any noise! GRRRRRR.

So. Our poor priorities are still coming a distant second to dealing with inanimate objects.

Santa (or whoever looks after things post Christmas), please oh please oh please can we have holes soon?!!!

Allie sends her vote for us. She's been a very good girl!

Love Bec