Breakthrough!

It's all happening over here at the moment!

After our anything-but-fairytale-like electricity situation last week, we made a big decision.

To move into our house anyway, without power. We've run an extension lead across to our very kind neighbour's house (thanks Peter!!), and we spent Sunday moving all of our necessities back in again. And let me tell you, I would happily have cold showers every day of the week and never be able to have the microwave and kettle on at the same time ever again (combined, they trip the single power cable) just to be able to live in my own space again.

So we're feeling much happier now, and are therefore much more patiently awaiting the mystic event that will be our eventual power reconnection.

On that positive note, let me catch you up on our other progress!

Since our existing bathroom is no longer particularly safe (see here - every time we go to the toilet or have a shower we are very relieved that we come out alive), we're fast-tracking the creation of our new bathroom. See here for our house tour that includes the floorplan, and here for our bathroom fitout plan. Aside from actually getting the tiling done (see here for our tile shopping), the biggest step is actually getting the door to the room in the right place. The existing doorway comes off the sleepout.


Whereas our bathroom plan actually has it coming off the dining room.


So before our tiler can start his work, we need to deal with that situation. Sounds fairly straight forward, yes?

But wait. We also need to cover over the VJ boards that the walls are made of, because they're pure timber and timber moves too much with changes in temperature. If we were to stick tiles straight to the timber, we could end up with all sorts of problems. As well as that, the way most of the internal walls are constructed is that there are no wall cavities at all - you see one side of the VJ boards in one room, the other side in the next room. Nothing in between. So, we need to build out a little frame on the top and bottom walls in the above plan to allow room for the plumbing for the bath and vanity to be hidden behind the tiles.

So, with all of that in mind, Tom toddled off to Bunnings and bought some pine framing timber (so much easier to work with than hardwood), and knocked up some wall framing for those two walls.



Here it is up on the West wall (the one to the right of the new doorway).


And here it is on the East wall, where you can see the existing doorway still.


Since we were obviously then at risk of not actually being able to access the room at all if we kept blocking the existing doorway, it was time to cut through the dining room wall to create the new doorway. It's always a nail-biting exercise when circular saws come in contact with walls, but fortunately we got through it without incident, making sure that we measured it to the same dimensions as the existing bathroom door, so we can just relocate it.

Here's Tom marking out where to make his cuts, so the doorway lines up perfectly with the doorway to what will become the laundry (currently the corridor to the existing bathroom)


Now sawing along the top line.


You can just see the outline of the cut


And now hand-sawing the edges that the circular saw couldn't get to.


Moment of truth...


Voila! A new doorway! It was pretty terrifying actually committing to the positioning of the doorway and even just watching the person doing the sawing (let alone actually sawing into the wall) was nerve-wracking, but in retrospect, it was pretty easy! Talk about dramatic changes that don't take long!


And as if we'd planned it that way, the doorway opening almost perfectly lines up with the window in that room!


Then it was time to install all the villaboard to line the walls with, so the tiles could attach to it instead of the timber walls themselves.


Although it sounds easy, and isn't exactly what I'd call difficult, the whole process was incredibly time consuming.

We had to rig up very sophisticated support mechanisms to hold the boards against the walls while the glue dried...


(These are some little pieces of fibro that we used to secure timber beams as firmly as possible against the boards)


We had to measure, cut, re-measure, and re-cut the boards to fit into the smaller gaps perfectly (surprisingly hard)...


And fit them around the existing window...


We also highly recommend investing in a decent glue gun. For about half the sheets (until we saw the light and saved his sanity) Tom had to battle with a gun that would split the cans of glue part way through, pouring glue absolutely everywhere.



I'll leave it there for the moment. There's plenty more to come! This bathroom is a long way off finished, so stay tuned!