Attacking The Wall

Buoyed by the success of our wall-building operation in the home office, we were keen to reward ourselves by making our next job one that promised to be fairly instantly gratifying (because that's how you reward yourself, right? With more jobs?).

Right next to our new home office wall (which you can't see because it's on the other side of the wall on the right of this photo), is this strange little non-Queenslander-ish window in the lounge room. This photo was taken way back when we were redoing the floors.

More recently, when I was finally willing to share pictures of the room with furniture in it, it looked like this. Please forgive how crowded it looks. Those black spindly chairs are not staying.

Since before we even moved into the house, the plan was to get rid of that window and convert it into French doors, to match the doorway we've built in the office. With our doorway-building confidence built up, we decided that it was time to attack this window wall.

We stripped away all of those crazy (and useless) little shelves...

And peeled away the skirting board...

Then removed all of those short VJ boards underneath the window.

And then like magic, a doorway!!!!!

Unfortunately that doorway is neither big enough, nor in the right position, so we moved to cutting through the boards to the left, to widen it.

As always, we have a very sophisticated procedure to avoid making too much mess, involving me holding a vacuum cleaner in one hand and shielding my eyes from sawdust with the other. Don't try this at home. Safety glasses are probably a better option.

After cutting through the boards, it was a fairly simple matter to peel them away, giving us a nice wide doorway!

Here's the view from the other side.

The newly-cut section on the left here is at the right height for the doorway, so it's exactly the same height as the home office doorway. Unfortunately for us, the existing VJs to the right of that, the ones that were above the window, are just a bit too short!

Since we don't really want a join in the VJs in such a conspicuous spot above our new front doorway, there was nothing for it but to peel away the picture rail running horizontally across them so that we could pull them out and replace them with some slightly longer ones.

With a bit of wiggling, they came out.

 Leaving us with this! An extra tall doorway, letting in heaps of light!

We really enjoyed having an unobstructed view of Allie guarding the front steps.

But in amongst all of that VJ board removal, we had to deal with the positioning of the two posts that had been in position on either side of the window, meaning they had to move to flank our new doorway.

We pulled out the acrow prop that had previously held up our precarious old bathroom, to support the ceiling while we moved the post.

We had to saw the top and bottom of it to be able to move it, and then there was quite a lot of shuffling and grunting to get it into its new position.

It only had to move a little way, just so that our new doorway clears the piano, which is along that little wall to the left of the doorway (from this point of view).

Then it was time to move to the other post, to line it up with the new edge of our doorway. The acrow prop came into play again to support the ceiling while we manouevred...

 

More shuffling and grunting...

And there it is! A new extra-wide doorway!

And the view from inside (you can see the edge of the piano covered in that blue blanket on the right)...

Talk about instant gratification! With just a bit of mucking around, we created a doorway in place of that annoying window. It's not very pretty yet, but give us time...

There's No Such Thing as Too Many Frames

There's been something that keeps photo-bombing shots of our progress in the home office. Can you spot it?

Here's the story. One evening after work I was all alone in the house. So in looking around deciding what to do with myself, I spotted this wall above my new desk in the home office.

I had been hoarding some more picture frames since making the gallery walls in the lounge. This big one I got for $5 at St Vinnie's...

These were a few more that we either already had, or that I also got at op shops for a few dollars each...

And I found this little pack of three for something like $6 or $7 from Crazy Clarks...

So while the boys were out (and I didn't have to be building a shelf or holding a paint brush), I decided to amuse myself with creating another gallery wall above my desk! The newspaper and painters tape came out again, and I started playing around with arrangement.

And then I realised that I'd missed a couple of frames, so mixed things around a bit more...

Until I finally ended up with this arrangement. Don't mind the missing frame in the centre at the bottom. It fell off. Oh and sorry about the really weird lighting. It was night time.

The next step was gathering my mismatched collection of frames for a spray-painting party.

I decided on white spray paint, to match all the crisp white trim (or what would be crisp white trim, since I started this process before we got that far with the office).

And after much climbing up and down the ladder and attaching screws to the wall, here it is now! Most of the frames are up, but not yet filled.

In two of the frames I did put a couple of postcards we got from art museums during our European travels. One is a Van Gogh...

And the other is a little Monet water lily one. Above a photo from my graduation that I printed out.

I also printed one of the first photos we ever took of Allie when she was nine weeks old, the morning after we brought her home. That's my cutie-pie.

And because I'm a little strange (and I work in finance), I bought an oversized silver calculator and made Tom attach it to the wall just above the desk, too. It makes me happy! Now I'm never going to lose my calculator under a pile of documents again!

So there you have it. My office frame wall in all its unfinished glory. Here's a long shot of how it looks from our new doorway, which also happens to show most of the room in all its unfinished, messy glory as well. Just keeping it real. I have a bit of work ahead of me to organise everything and get it looking schmick, but it's baby steps as always!

Stuck in a Puddle

Remember the giant hole Tom dug in our driveway, that broke our borrowed Bobcat?

The plan was to be able to then bury these giant lumps of concrete that have been sitting in a pile in the backyard since we raised the house and replaced the concrete house stumps with longer steel posts.

We decided to bite the bullet and fork out the cash to hire another earthmoving machine so that we could bury them in the driveway, once the Bobcat was out of action.

Once they were all lined up like little sardines in the hole, Tom covered them over with some dirt from the backyard, but we still had a definite ditch in our driveway.

And then it rained. And rained and rained and rained.

So then we had this.

Yes, the ute was trapped in the backyard during all of the rain, so Tom made an attempt to get it out, thinking that all of those lovely buried concrete blocks should give him some traction.

They didn't.

We had to make an excursion (in a different car) to Bunnings to buy a heavy duty four-wheel-drive rescue strap so that we could drag it out!

We're hoping we'll be able to find someone who has some dirt to give away soon, but the rain is delaying those plans a bit at the moment.

And considering that some people in Brisbane are now reliving a bit of last year's flood nightmare, we certainly can't complain about our little puddle!

I'm in Chair Heaven

This day has finally arrived! I'm so excited!!

But in order to explain why, I'm going to need to backtrack a bit.

We made the decision months ago that the dining chairs we bought for our last house were not going to work in this house, if only because we had eight of them, and we could only really fit four comfortably around the table.

We popped them up on Ebay and $500 later, they were gone.

As I trawled the Internet looking for some inspiration as to what to replace them with, I made three fairly fundamental decisions:

1) I didn't want the chairs to match the dining table (i.e. I didn't want them to be glossy black), I wanted them to contrast a bit.

2) I didn't want them to be timber. I wanted them to be interesting and kind of unique in their own right.

3) I wanted them to stay fairly neutral colour-wise, so I didn't have to commit to a particular colour scheme because my chairs dictated it.

The problem is that those requirements narrowed my options down quite a bit! I searched Gumtree and Ebay for some secondhand chairs that might fit the bill, without success.

So I turned to new options. I considered going down the slightly industrial, metal road...

Sourced here

But Tom wasn't a huge fan, and they're a little on the expensive side...

And then it hit me. Louis!!!!!!!!

See here for more on my long-standing love affair with Louis. And for the blissfully unaware, my Louis is the Kartell Louis Ghost Chair designed by Philippe Starck. I bought a replica of the armchair version of Louis as my first furniture purchase for our house, even before we moved in.

He spent a lot of time looking a bit sad and lonely while we worked on making the house liveable, and has now found a spot in my home office.

And I realised that he (or the armless versions of him) would be absolutely perfect for our dining chairs! He's not black and glossy like the dining table, he's not made of timber, and he's transparent, so he probably couldn't get any more neutral, colour-wise. He's perfect!

Sourced here

The problem is that they're virtually impossible to find secondhand, so new it must be! The cheapest price I could find online was $376 for a set of four replicas from Milan Direct, but then we'd have to add an extra $75ish for delivery on top. Still not a particularly bad price for four new dining chairs, but I wanted to do better.

So I got myself on the emailing list for each company I could find that sold them, and bided my time.

In the meantime, I spotted these chairs (and their matching table) when I was looking for an outdoor setting for our front yard, and snapped them up for $30 (including the table).

I spray painted them white, and they've served us very nicely as our dining chairs since.

But my heart still belongs to Louis. So I kept reading each email newsletter that arrived in my inbox, hoping for the right deal to come my way.

And this morning, it happened!

The header didn't inspire me...

But I scrolled down anyway, and spotted this!

Can you see it? Last on that tiny little list is "Ghost Replica Dining Chairs - FREE DELIVERY"!

YES!!!!!!

Of course I clicked immediately...

 

And woke up my poor husband with my squeal of delight.

He gave his permission to hit "Buy Me" sleepily, and you didn't have to tell me twice!

Grand total? $376! Averaging at just $94 a chair. Happy with that! And if we think back to the dining chairs that we sold for $500, we're still ahead by $94, even taking into account the $30 spent on our interim dining chairs! Definitely happy with that!

Now we just have to wait with baited breath for Louis the II, III, IV and V to arrive! Can't wait!