Here is the view of our house from the street not long after we moved in and started messing with things (although we had already removed some of the trees). From what we have found out, this house was likely built sometime in the vicinity of 1930, and it hasn't seen a whole heap of love since then.
Here it is now after we raised the house for the second time. Yes, that's right, it had to be raised twice, thanks to a measurement misunderstanding between our surveyors and building designers. Gotta love it when the professionals let you down!
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, but I'll explain those as we go, room by room. This was the future floor plan that we decided on for the house. We do also intend to build in a little self-contained unit underneath the house with all the space we've created by raising it, but that probably won't happen for quite a while yet. So we'll just focus on upstairs for now.
This is how our poor little house's rear end looked in the beginning. Some crazy (and not very skilled) person decided to add that smooth-walled section that juts out on the right as a bathroom some time in the last thirty years or so. It was truly awful, and actually started separating from the main house during the raising process, making us worry that it would one day just come crashing down. Hopefully not while someone was inside using the facilities!
It took us far too long to finally put that old bathroom out of its misery and destroy it once and for all, and we have since attached some blue board to the gaping hole it left behind in the original wall to protect the inside of the house from the elements. We hope to eventually replace that blue board with timber weatherboards to match the rest of the house, but for the moment we're comfortable that the house is secure and fairly weathertight.
Please try to ignore the ridiculous plumbing situation in this shot, it is being addressed!
This is a closer view of the back of the kitchen as it was originally, on the opposite side of the rear wall of the house.
We extended both the height and the width of that little area with the stove pipe in its roof, added a window more in keeping with the rest of the windows in the house, and let it sit like this for much too long.
We finally took pity on it and added some blue board at the same time as we added it on the other side of that wall when we covered up the post-bathroom-destruction holes. Like the other side, we also plan to replace the blue board with weatherboards when the time is right.
We are working very hard to get some properly built, bolted-to-the-house front stairs in place, so we no longer have to warn any house guests that they are risking their lives climbing up to our doorway. So far we have made it part of the way at the front, with more to come on that topic very soon.
In other changes, we have replaced the chainwire fence along one boundary with a new one...
And built a very makeshift dog-mesh fence to try to keep the furriest member of our family (who thinks her name is actually Allie Houdini) inside the yard. I'm sorry to report that it's not been particularly successful, so we're trying to get a more permanent solution organised.
Shall we move inside? 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. We will eventually cut that strange little window-with-shelving-in-it on the far wall out and put French doors in there to open onto the front verandah. The door you see on the right will become the door to my home office. We also need to replace the ceilings in both the lounge and dining room, which are looking quite sorry for themselves, which is a task we're not particularly looking forward to.
Looking from the other direction from the far end of the lounge back towards the dining room, the view used to look like this. Tom and Daniel are mucking around for a bit of comedic value.
Here is what it's beginning to look like now. I promise I will upload better shots soon. Our original floor plan was to close in that back door entirely, but we're toying with the idea of keeping it in some form and having a tiny little back deck out there and a washing line.
This particular view won't change much, though.
And closer into the dining room, I'm dying to get rid of those yellow panes in the windows! And replace our still-in-the-packaging light fitting with something a bit fancier.
We squeezed this hutch into a space we created when we extended part of the wall dividing the dining room and kitchen, for some much needed storage. You can see where the original wall meets the extended wall because the new boards are stark white and still waiting for a final coat of paint.
To the left of that hutch you get a glimpse of the kitchen. This is what the kitchen looked like at the beginning. It was ugly. UG-LY.
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 (which you saw outside) 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. We found a second-hand freestanding oven, dishwasher and kitchen cabinets for sale, which we're doing our best to fit into the room in a way that looks as intentional as possible. It's improved enormously, but it's still got a long way to come.
And we've since made the sad decision to remove that big hutch on the left, so now that left wall looks a bit more like this.
On the right wall (as you stand at the entry to the kitchen), we put up some open shelves beneath the high cabinets, cut a slightly-too-large cabinet down a bit to fit it above the microwave space, built the fridge a little house, and found the perfect piece of furniture to repurpose into a pantry. Please excuse the mess. It's not always like that. Better pictures to come.
Off the lounge room at the front of the house is the original useless little front entry. Our piano started residing in there when we redid the floors in the rest of the house. Our eventual plan for this little area is to close off both of the existing doorways (including the one from which this shot was taken) and cut a new one in that left wall which adjoins the master bedroom. This will then become a teeny tiny ensuite bathroom.
What would once have been the front door in the house's original incarnation is to the right of that view, 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 much more crowded.
The current front door to the house is around the corner on the left. Eventually we will convert it to more of a security gate, remove those horrible aluminium windows with plastic-y frosted glass and open this area up to become a verandah again, as it probably was when the house was first built. This area of the house gets beautiful breezes in the afternoons, so I can't wait to set up a nice little seating area there for evening relaxation. I'm also toying with the idea of painting the timber floor, because the timber isn't in perfect condition anymore. New French doors will open straight onto the lounge room on the right eventually, as well. But for now we're happy to let it serve us as a storeroom.
The sleepout/verandah actually wraps around the front corner of the house in an L shape. The storeroom status doesn't change as you round the the corner, though. This shot is taken from the other end of the "L", looking towards the front of the house.
We
have plans to eventually close off that corner section and make it a
home office. We've made a little bit of progress with it, painting the
walls a nice grey, although it's hard to tell from that same angle.
Turning around, the opposite wall used to look something like this. That doorway used to lead to the third bedroom. More on that shortly.
That wall now looks like this. Surprise! No more doorway!
The master bedroom shares the front of the house with that little entry from above and the sleepout/verandah. Once upon a time it looked like this.
We repeated our staining-the-floors and painting-the-walls procedure in this room, and even stepped out of our comfort zone and painted the ceiling a colour, albeit a fairly subtle one.
We still have a lot to do in that room, but it's looking a million times better than it did. The ugly wardrobes opposite the bed bring it down a couple of notches. They're definitely on my list.
Now if we move next door to the second bedroom, it's more of the same. That dastardly yellow still prevailed, and the paint on the ceiling was peeling very badly. This picture was taken once we'd already made a start on scraping the ceiling, as you can see from all that house dandruff on the floor!
Poor Daniel (my brother who lives with us and occupies this bedroom) currently has proper use of only about half of this room, because it's become a second storage area for all the bits and pieces we haven't had time to sort through yet. As a result, I've got no photos of it in its sad and sorry current state. This photo of it empty and freshly painted from top to bottom is much nicer.
At the rear of the house was this little corridor leading to the old crummy bathroom and toilet.
Since destroying the old bathroom (and incidentally the old linen closet that was on the right), this room has opened up enormously, even once we closed in that wall on the right with blue board. It is now in the process of becoming a laundry. That will involve a fresh coat of paint on the walls and ceiling, tiling the floor, refurbishing a cabinet, and much more.
When the old bathroom was in existence, you would turn right at that window and not only risk life and limb, but get a lovely view of the toilet.
And to the right of it was 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.
Since attempting to salvage the old bathroom would be an act of idiocy, we instead decided to convert the original third bedroom (the doorway to which you saw in my home office above) into a lovely new bathroom. This is how that room first looked from its original doorway.
This poor room has seen a fair bit of action. 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 then, as you saw in the photo of the home office above, we closed that doorway in, and instead opened up a new doorway to the room from the dining room.
We tiled (well, hired a tiler), repurposed our old timber buffet unit as a flashy vanity unit, and installed a clawfoot bath.
And there you have it. Our house in all its getting-there glory. We often find ourselves getting a bit discouraged by how much we still have to do to get the house looking the way it does in our heads, but it's come a long way. We'll keep chugging along, and of course share all the gory details as we go!
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