The first thing? To close up the gaping hole in the bathroom left by the old doorway.
Obviously putting villaboard up on the bathroom side of that solves that problem, but from the other side that doesn't t look so good. So it was time to go shopping for some more second-hand VJs to make it look like a door never existed on the sleep-out side of the wall.
Technically that's not a task that holds up the tiling process, but because the VJs need to be nailed into the frame that the villaboard is glued to on the other side, we figured it was sensible to try to get that nailing out of the way before the villaboard was completely glued in place (and then tiled over), because heaven forbid we cause the tiles to move by hammering the wall behind them!
First things first, remove the architrave surrounding the door.
And then removing all of the non-full-size VJs. We can't have any tell-tale joins that give away the fact that this used to be a door now, can we?!
The ones above the door were pretty tricky to remove, actually. They were nailed into something inside the ceiling that we couldn't see (and can't access, because the ceiling cavity in this sleepout area is so tiny we can't get in there).
Tom ended up sawing off the boards with the circular saw (it's getting a workout at the moment) as close to the ceiling as he could, and then hammering them up into the ceiling.
He did first try pulling them down out of the ceiling, but they wouldn't cooperate, so hammering upwards was the solution.
Last one...
Allie watched from a safe distance.
Then we whipped out the circular saw again to cut through the doorstep (the floor of the sleepout is a bit lower than the main floor of the house, so each doorway off it has a piece of timber that acts as a doorstep. It would have peaked out underneath our VJ wall if we didn't remove it. Can't have that! Remember, this door has to act like it was never there!
And then came the fun part... well the fun part for me because it's the turning point where we can stop destroying things and start creating. Time to attach the VJs to the wall!
First one down (or up).
Allie made sure she supervised Tom's technique, and checked that they were all straight.
The gap is closing...
And that's as far as we got. As it turned out, we didn't have enough second-hand VJs that were tall enough, so we couldn't completely finish the job that day, but not far to go. I couldn't resist immediately attacking the new boards with a paint scraper. Not only are those VJs filthy (I think they're from the same batch that we put on the West Wall of our kitchen), but the existing paint on them is in terrible condition. I could pretty much peel the top layer of paint (the dirty one) just with my fingers (which in retrospect is what I should have done in the kitchen), and it didn't take much effort to peel the layer below that off with a paint scraper either. It's more work, but the perfect paint job on that wall in the future will thank me. You can see the peeling process creates quite a mess, though, as it did in Daniel's room!
So what's next? The bathroom doorway. We had to build a new doorframe for the new doorway that we had cut out. We thought it made sense to make sure it was snugly fitted in there before the tiling started so that everything slots in nicely.
Sounds simple, right? Two posts and a beam along the top, yeah?
No, of course not! We are living in a Queenslander, remember? So everything has to be pretty. And has to match the other doorways in the house. We currently have five doorways leading off the main living area, one of which is right beside our new bathroom doorway. So, they have to match, since any differences will be pretty darn obvious.
So, I put on my thinking face.
Daniel and Allie, not having anything useful to contribute, decided to go for comic relief.
Cute. Very cute.
Back to work! Tom bought two lovely long vertical posts that are the same measurements (i.e. width and depth) as the ones on the other doorways, and I salvaged the top horizontal pieces from the kitchen door that we had removed months ago.
Then came the very interesting process of measuring and cutting notches into the two verticals so the horizontals would fit in there securely. We grabbed my two horizontal beams (since you need one at the top of the doorway itself and then another one above the fancy window-ey thing above the door, like on the laundry doorway), measured where they went on the laundry doorframe, and marked on the new vertical posts where the little pre-cut chock bit would need to slot into the vertical post so they fit snugly. I swear I had more photos of this part of the process, but they seem to have disappeared!
Tom got it perfectly slotted in, and then when we stood back and compared the height of the horizontal above the door from the bathroom to the laundry, the bathroom one was too high! It had turned out we'd measured our chock mark off the wrong measurement from the laundry door frame. Not too hard to fix, we just expanded the lower end of the hole on the verticals so the horizontal would sit that little bit lower, and filled it up with glue so it couldn't go anywhere.
And voila! Done! Tom gave them a quick undercoat so the naked timber fits in better with our beautifully painted dining room, and we had officially relocated the doorway to the bathroom (pending the extra fancy bits like architrave and finishing putting up the VJs in the sleepout).
Next step hopefully... tiling! Huzzah!
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