A Leg Up

Please join me in my garage. Never thought someone would say that to you, did you?

You're welcome.


As we're nearing the finish line with the downstairs area, there are of course still a million little things that need to be done in order to actually be able to call it "finished". One of those things is dealing with the large height difference between the inside areas downstairs (see here to find out what caused that), and everywhere else. There's a big step up from the garage...

And an almost identical step up from the front yard, as this old not-yet-painted photo testifies.

So, rather than just accepting the fact that entering the rooms downstairs would inevitably involve a large leap for mankind, we decided that that situation had to be rectified. Our carpenter organised a quote from a company that specialised in stairs, and it came in at something ridiculous like $800 per staircase. For two little pairs of steps! Who pays that?!!! Our entire giant front staircase cost us less than that!

As you may have guessed, I flat out refused to pay that much, so instead my carpenter ordered the materials himself and spent a couple of hours whipping up two mini staircases.

One for the garage step up...

And one for the front door to the lounge. Forgive the taken-from-above angle of this photo. I was too lazy to walk all the way downstairs to shoot it. Actually, if I'm being honest, it wasn't laziness. I was in my pajamas, and wanted to minimise the time I spent in full view of my neighbours, so it was a quick flash and dash.

With the materials and the carpenter's labour cost I think they still cost me a few hundred dollars (fortunately not $1,600!), but that's the price you pay when you don't want to do it yourself, huh?

So once we had our little stairs, the next tidy-up item on the list was trimming out the garages properly, with architrave around the doors, and skirting boards along the floor.

The laundry nook also got its little edges finished...

And then the last unsightly gap that we were left with was the second garage's ceiling.

Because it sits directly beneath our now-opened-up-to-the-elements upstairs verandah, we couldn't just put a plasterboard ceiling up there and be done with it, because when it rains, water can slip through the gaps between the verandah floorboards, and trickle down on top of this garage ceiling. And plasterboard doesn't handle getting wet very well. So, needless to say, the question of what to do with that ceiling generated a lot of debate. I was told that the only option was to waterproof the upstairs verandah and then tile over it.

My response was something along the lines of...

"OVER MY DEAD BODY!!!!"

There was no way I was agreeing to tile the verandah of our lovely timber house, over perfectly good timber floorboards, no less! So I stuck to my guns and insisted that someone come up with a better idea. I'm a hardass, aren't I?

Fortunately my carpenter didn't take that as an invitation to kill me, and instead put his thinking cap on. And he came up with this!

It's Colorbond roof sheets nailed to the underside of the ceiling framing. We figured that if we angled the roof sheeting slightly so that any water would run down towards the door end (i.e. the end where I took this photo from, we could have a little internal gutter on that end to then direct the water outside the house. Mission accomplished!

I keep my verandah floorboards, the downstairs garage ceiling is waterproof, everyone's happy!

So in terms of progress, we're nearly there downstairs! It's just a few little details left, like finishing off the painting in the garages, setting up the little laundry nook in the first garage (a laundry tub might come in handy), fitting out the kitchen appliances, putting up window coverings and security bars inside, and finalising the bathroom by putting handles on our fancy vanity cabinet and putting up a mirror.

But then there's outside. Our front yard of ugliness. No rest for the wicked!