Oh that's right. We're in the midst of a major construction disaster, otherwise known as being royally finagled by our engineer. How could I forget?
Well, as I promised, we eventually got over our devastation and starting coming up with solutions. What else could we do?
And we fairly quickly determined that the only thing for it was to...
Rip out the plasterboard in the ceilings of rooms whose floor needed to rise like the second bedroom...
And the lounge room...
Cut holes in the walls where plumbing and gas fittings had to move...
Rip out the insulation from the ceilings that needed to change (which I had painstakingly researched so we'd get some good sound insulation between upstairs and downstairs)...
Frame out a new bulkhead in the second bedroom which has two perpendicular steel beams running through it eating into our new ceiling space...
Not to mention a whole lot of waste plumbing for the upstairs bathroom that had to come out and be re-run so that it slots in right next to the steel beam in our new bulkhead...
After which the ceiling could be re-framed and the insulation put back up.
Same story in the lounge room, although thankfully with no plumbing involved.
All of this activity was the result of a lot of checking rules, brainstorming options, and coming up with what we agreed was the best compromise between giving the council what they wanted, but undoing as little of the work that had already been done as possible.
We quickly discovered that the most important thing was to distinguish between what had to be classified as "habitable" space (i.e. lounge and bedrooms), "non-habitable" space (i.e. bathroom, kitchen, hallway, cupboards), and "undercroft" which is essentially nothing-area under the house that you can't officially call storage or anything.
Then in each of those areas we had to consider what the minimum acceptable floor height could be, and what the minimum acceptable ceiling height could be, with our ultimate goal of course being to change as little as possible.
So! I ended up making this drawing to show our plan. Unfortunately it ended up looking a bit like a rainbow with chicken pox. But it did the job, ok?
The end result, as you already saw in the photos above was as follows:
1) Raising the ceiling in Bed 4 while working around the unfortunately placed steel beams.
2) Leaving the ceiling as it is in the Bathroom. Yay!
3) Leaving the ceiling as it is in Bed 3, because thankfully we were smart enough to actually give it an extra high ceiling in the first place since there was no plumbing running through the middle of it. Yay again!
4) Leaving the ceiling as it is in the hallway because it's considered "non-habitable" area.
5) When I made that drawing, we were thinking that we would have to raise the ceiling in a little section of the Wetbar/Kitchen so that we could adhere to the rule that says that 2/3rds of the ceiling in a "habitable" room has to be at least 2.4m. But then I checked with our certifier, and he said that kitchens aren't considered "habitable" space, so we could leave its ceiling as is! Yay again!
6) Raising the ceiling in the Living/Dining room and building a bulkhead around the steel beam cutting across the middle of the room (the orange line).
Interestingly enough, before we got the carpenter to start work downstairs, Tom and I were actually toying with some ideas to make the ceilings downstairs as high as possible by having bulkheads around the steel beams already. We played with these ideas for the kitchen and lounge area...
The orange squiggly lines were supposed to be the bulkheads or lower ceiling sections.
After I chatted with the carpenter about it before he began work, we decided that the extra effort and labour involved in framing (and then plastering) all of those extra corners around the bulkheads wouldn't really be worth it, so the only room where our plan for a higher ceiling actually worked out initially was Bed 3.
But of course, with all of the council drama we have now come full circle, and our ceiling plan for the kitchen/lounge area is almost identical to that first drawing in the set of three bulkhead plans above! Go figure! If only we'd just gone with that originally, huh?
So that takes care of the ceilings.
The windows were next. All of the window frames had to go up (and of course new plasterboard then had to go beneath them on the inside, and the weatherboards had to be managed on the outside.The front door got the same treatment, and then all the internal doorframes and wardrobe framing had to come out and be re-framed higher. For a little while there it felt really strange walking in there. It was like we were in Alice in Wonderland and we were too short for everything!
All of this was of course because the floor was going to have to be raised by 35cm. Again, because our plan was to try to change as little as possible, we decided that we would now have a step down from our new extra high main floor into the bathroom, so that we wouldn't have issues with the waterproofing in that room. It would have been hard to install new floor joists in the bathroom without being able to nail them into anything, because that would penetrate the waterproofing membrane! Listen to me talk to the talk, huh?!
So that was that. We were resigned to our fate. We had a plan. And that plan was in action. It felt good to at least know that we had a way of moving on and getting things fixed, but we're honestly looking at an extra cost of about $10,000 to make all of these changes when the carpentry, materials and plasterer costs come into it!
That sure hurts. But we can be (and are) extremely grateful that we've actually got enough height under the house to be able to raise the floor and still manage legal height ceilings. Otherwise we would probably have had to give up on this entire exercise, since we've already raised the whole house to its highest possible maximum legal height. And at least we've managed to limit how much has to change (and therefore the cost), and now it's just a matter of gritting our teeth and getting on with it. So we're gritting. Hard.
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