Welcome to the very very belated tour of our current house!
Here is the view of the house from the street not long after we moved in and started messing with things (although we had already removed some of the trees)
And here it is now after raising the house for the second time. Yes, that's right, it had to be raised twice!
This is the floor plan of the house when we first bought it, as drawn by our building drafter.
All of the little red squiggly lines are things to be removed.
And here is the intended floor plan for the house. We're extending the little kitchen add-on (at the top of the plan) removing most of the wall between the dining room and the kitchen, moving the bathroom into the third bedroom and demolishing the entire existing bathroom extension, moving the laundry upstairs into what is currently the hallway to the bathroom, closing in some of the sleepout to become an office (hopefully with enough room for a little sofa bed so it can moonlight as a third bedroom), stealing some of the space in the second bedroom for a built-in robe for the master bedroom, closing in the useless little entry space to become an ensuite to the master bedroom, removing the back door (and stairs) entirely, and adding french doors to become the main entry to the lounge room (with matching ones to access the new office), and opening up the rest of the sleepout to become a verandah again, the way it would have been when the house was first built.
And those are just the intended changes to the floorplan!
Here was the view of the back of the house at the beginning. That's the horrible existing bathroom extension on the right.
This is a closer view of the back of the kitchen (on the left above):
And later on once we'd progressed with the extension of the kitchen add-on.
When we entered up those back stairs originally, we saw this. It's totally our fault the floor's so muddy though, don't blame the house! That's the dining room in the foreground and the lounge further on.
With a lick of paint it turned into this.
And here's the lounge.
The room where you see that little window to the top left of the above picture is the existing front entry. Our piano started residing in there when we redid the floors. Our eventual plan for this little area is to close off both of the existing doorways and cut a new one in that left wall which adjoins the master bedroom. This will then become a teeny tiny ensuite bathroom.
The front door is to the right of that, opening onto the sleepout.
The sleepout has basically been our storage area since we moved in, so it always looks something like this from that little entryway. Actually usually it's way more crowded.
Eventually we will remove those horrible 70s aluminium windows with plastic-y frosted glass and open it up to become a verandah again, but for now we're very happy to let it serve us as a storeroom.
If we spun around from the little front entry way and faced the back of the house again, this was the view towards the back of the house. Lounge room in the foreground, with Daniel and Tom mucking around in the dining room further on.
This view now looks a little more like this:
I know, with all of that junk in there it really doesn't seem like much of an improvement. But we've got rid of the yukky yellow walls, and the floor looks pretty great. Here's a closer view of the dining room with marginally less junk in the way.
Don't worry, I will be removing those awful pink curtains and replacing them with something that will cover up the yellow glass in those windows as soon as possible. What is it with the people who built this house and the colour yellow?
If we back back into the lounge and turn immediately to our right there are the doorways to the two bedrooms.
The master bedroom on the right started off like this.
Yes, that pesky scaffolding keeps getting in the way, doesn't it? Although it blends in better in the older photos, with the backdrop of the yellow walls.
Not only did we also stain the floor and paint the walls in the bedroom, but we decided to go a bit crazy and paint the ceiling a colour.
Sorry, that photo was before we removed all of the masking around the ceiling and the window.
Now if we move next door to the second bedroom, it's more of the same. We've staind the floor, painted the walls, and sanded back and painted the shockingly awful ceiling in there as well (yes, those white flecks all over the floor are off the ceiling):
And now it looks like this:
If we now turn around again and walk across the lounge, we will enter a part of the sleepout (which currently runs in an L-shape around the front corner of the house) that will eventually become the home office. It's currently maintaining its storage room status, and usually looks like this:
The door you see on the left there is the door back to the lounge room that we just virtually walked through. If you then turned to the right, where I was standing to take the above photo, you would enter the door to the third bedroom. Which used to look like this:
This poor room has seen a fair bit of action so far. First we ripped up some of the floorboards in there to use in the kitchen, then it became my sorting room, and then the storeroom, and we're now just getting to the point where we start changing the floorplan by blocking up the current door to the room from the sleepout and cutting a new one in the dining room wall to access it directly from the main living area. This room will soon become our new fancy bathroom. Watch this space, a lot is happening right now!
Oh and for anyone with an eye for detail, the floorplan from the building designer above shows us moving the wall between the home office and the bathroom to make the home office bigger. That is not going to happen. Way too much work for way too little gain in our opinion, given that there's a perfectly good wall already there. A smaller office never hurt anyone... did it?
Anyway, back to the tour! If we then retrace our steps back into the lounge room and into the dining room, we have the kitchen on our right. This is how it started.
That doesn't even show the worst of it. The doorway to the kitchen was just like the others in the house, with a wall separating it from the dining room. Then there was a small barely-big-enough-for-a-human gap immediately inside that wall, and then this benchtop island started. It was fairly clear that these cabinets were not actually designed for this kitchen, so it made for a rather strange floorplan. A wall oven was positioned over to the right next to the sink. It was very attractive.
We started destroying this room with a vengeance quite early on, removed most of the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, extended the old stove nook to give the room a bit more floor space (discovering, and having to remove a furry friend in the process), and of course, staining the floor and painting. Now the kitchen looks like this.
A big difference? Definitely. In any way resembling a kitchen? Nope. We'll get there eventually.
So now if we turn around again and look across the dining room, we will see the little corridor that currently leads to our crummy bathroom and toilet.
That door on the right is the linen closet. And the door refuses to close at all unless encouraged properly with very sophisticated door-closing mechanisms.
Yes, that's a rubber band.
This little hallway (including the linen closet) is the last little bit of the house that we haven't seen yet that remains under the existing roofline. We plan to turn it into a little laundry.
Currently, if you turn right at the window and walk forwards, you not only risk life and limb, but you get a lovely view of the toilet.
And to the right of it is the horrible horrible horrible bathroom.
I attempted to brighten it up with an $8 shower curtain from Crazy Clarks when we first moved in. It helped, but not much. And yes, that's mould on the wall and around the top of the tub. Lovely.
So there you have it! Our current house, warts and all. It's definitely a work in progress (to say the least), and we've got a lot of effort ahead of us, but we're getting there step by step, and boy is it making a big difference! Just you wait till you see our new bathroom!
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