Moving In

We've moved in to the new house!

It was a hot and steamy day, and we had just pulled an all-nighter at our current house to try and get all of its outstanding jobs completed. We were still frantically mopping floors and carrying things down to the car when the new tenants arrived with some furniture to move in. Embarrassment!

Thankfully they were lovely about it. Perhaps the fact that we were basically walking zombies at that point had something to do with it. So, we piled the remaining bits and pieces into the back of the ute and drove it over to the new place.

Having had nothing to eat or drink in quite some time though, we took one look at the house and the things still left to do, and turned right around and drove straight over to my brother Daniel's new place. We turned up on his doorstep demanding food and sustenance, and then promptly crashed on the floor of one of his bedrooms.

We roused ourselves eventually, since the prospect of all the work we had to do at the new house before we'd be able to go to sleep again was worrying me, and there was NO way that I was going to be sleeping on any crusty old carpets over there!

So to our new home we went, dragging Daniel with us.

And we proceeded to toss everything in the house that made us shudder over the balcony.

 

And we found all manner of junk!

It would appear that the man of the house used to be a bit of a tinkerer!

Tom was quite enamored with this old tie.

The bathroom I could not stomach. We're showering at Daniel's place (which is thankfully not far away) until we sort out our shower arrangements.

 So! With a pile of junk in the front yard that now looked like this (the boys had competitions to see who could throw things the furthest)...

We were at last left with a relatively clean slate in the house to get organised. We'd done loads of our furniture and belongings in the evenings of the week prior. We'd removed the strangely angled bed in the master bedroom and tossed the mattress into the yard, which included getting rid of the ridiculous strung-up extension leads along the back wall of the bedroom... what were these people thinking?

And I started vacuuming the carpet in there in the hopes of making the room feel less awful. It didn't work. The carpet basically crumbled as I rolled over it with the vacuum.

Eugh. Makes my skin crawl. Although I will say that there is a surprising lack of creepie crawlies present in the house (thank goodness), so that's something to be grateful for! Nevertheless, there was nothing for it but to get rid of the carpet if we were to have a peaceful night's sleep! Tom got to work immediately.

It came up quite easily, and the room was transformed!

Beautiful wide never-varnished floorboards! Won't they be amazing all done up in the future? But the most important thing to me right now? They feel clean!!!!

So the carpet went the same way as all of the other junk quick smart, we moved our bed in, trundled off to Daniel's house for quick showers, and then crashed (in bed, not the car).

Remind me, whose idea was it to move house? Can I kill them? We're desperately missing our lovely kitchen and bathrooms!

About That New House...

So that new house we're buying...

We've finally reached the point where I can start talking about it! We've settled on it, and started moving our belongings in. And we're very very glad about it, since we've been working so much on our current house trying to get it finished that I'm thoroughly sick of it, and well and truly ready to move on!

Just for fun, I whipped up this floorplan on floorplanner.com.

Forgetting the fact that the house itself is in desperate straits (i.e. there's hardly a wall where the paint isn't flaking off and the floor coverings are a dusty, threadbare disgrace), there are a few problems with its layout that simply won't work for modern living.

1) It has one bathroom (in the top left corner) and it can't be accessed from the main living area without walking through either a bedroom or the office. Not ideal for having guests over

2) The kitchen is stuck at the back of the house all by itself, with no flow-through from the main living area. Very lonely when cooking dinner unless everyone hangs out in the kitchen!

3) The laundry is outside. Need I say more?

4) Every single internal door is hung off the opposite side to what would be considered logical. So instead of the door opening against the nearest wall, it opens into the main space of the room. Silly.

5) On the topic of which... the master bedroom has two doors. One right around the corner from the other. No idea why.

6) The second bedroom gets ZERO natural light. It has no windows, and its only doors lead into other rooms, not the outside. That means that it is very dark. All the time. We'll need to do something about that.

But that's about it! And for such an old house, that's not doing too badly for structural layout issues, which is one of the main reasons we were so keen to buy it.

So here's what we propose to do with it!

1) One day, we'll hire a house-lifter and relocate the house a bit further forward on the block so that it gets more natural light and leaves some space in the backyard for future development. But since we've spent ALL of our money actually buying the place, that prospect is very far off at this point.

2) We'll turn the sleepout on the right into a kitchen and fabulous walk-in pantry (can't wait!), and open up the wall between it and the lounge so that it's a lovely big entertaining space. Tom's shining his torch at me here through the doorway that will become that big opened-up kitchen wall.

3) We'll get rid of the outdoor laundry completely, and turn the end of the little hallway that leads to it into a little powder room, so that our guests can use a toilet without having to walk through any bedrooms. The room near the kitchen that is currently just a store room will then become the laundry, probably with a built-in shower in case we have guests staying in the guest room, and perhaps even with a door leading outside along the right wall for hanging washing outdoors.

4) We'll turn the existing kitchen into a guest room / media room / library. I have visions of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and pull-down projector screens. It will be great. One day.

5) We will extend a wall across the already-large-enough master bedroom in order to make use of that strange second door for a future internal staircase, for when we eventually build a ground level in underneath the house in the very distant future (i.e. after the house is relocated).

6) We'll divide up the left sleepout for a walk-in-robe and ensuite for the master bedroom, and extend (and of course completely renovate) the existing bathroom so that both the other bedrooms can access it like their own little ensuite.

7) Oh and of course we'll re-hang the doors so that they open in a logical fashion.

And that's about it for major structural changes! Thankfully we can work quite well with the current floorplan without having to move walls around, which will cut down on major work considerably. So, although the house really does look to be in awful condition, most of that is just down to paint. Lots and lots of paint! And that we know we can deal with!

So who else is excited?

Most Glamorous Laundry Ever

OK, I know that's quite a claim.

But who's going to stop me? You know how we added pressed tin to the back of the kitchen peninsula downstairs (after painting it black)...

And the upstairs kitchen (after painting it the same colour as all of the cabinet doors)...

And the downstairs laundry...

And I have always threatened to do the same in the upstairs laundry!

So we did! And I completely forgot to talk about it!

For a while the pieces we scavenged from the offcuts just sat there on top of the bench preventing us from being able to install the laundry taps so we could use the laundry sink.

But eventually we pulled our fingers out and decided to install it properly! We started by drilling holes in the panels to slot over things like powerpoints and taps...

And they slotted very nicely over the tap fittings.

 

And then it was installation time! We learned a valuable lesson here. Tin panels need to have a decent chunk of wood behind them for the nails to grip into when you try to knock them in. Most of the wall above the laundry bench was made up of a fairly thin sheet of fibro board, which wasn't really enough for the nails to cling to. We punched as many of them into the wall studs as we could, but because tin paneling is quite floppy (for want of a better word), it needs to be secured in more places than the wall studs would allow us to.

We compensated by coating the wall and the back of the tin with glue to make it stick, but in the future we would add an extra timber board along the back before installing the tin, to guarantee that the nails would work.

Lesson learned!

After the tin was installed Tom installed the laundry taps (note that we'd turned off the water for this whole procedure, so he accomplished this without flooding the place).

I rediscovered the wonders of Gumption in removing nikko pen marks...

And the little nook near the sink because really useable.

We actually then finished off all of the edges of the tin by cutting some little timber trim to size, spray painting it silver and nailing it in so that there were no more exposed tin edges visible, but in a move that's becoming all too common as we race to the finish line of this renovation, I completely neglected to take ANY photos of that. Sigh. That's what unrealistic deadlines will do for you!

In the meantime, how about some very-nearly-complete photos of our glamorous laundry?

As you can see, I went on a bit of an organisation spree before taking these photos.

We even added a little chandelier that I bought on Ebay for about $70, for a bit more glam.

What do you think? Most glamorous laundry ever? Or you've seen glamorous-er?

Windows of Hell

So the windows... OMG the windows!

This is a LONG post (43 photos!). But surely you'd prefer to just get ALL of the upstairs windows done in one giant post than have me talk about windows non-stop for the next two weeks, right?

So shall I list all of the windows that need painting for you? Let's work our way around the house in a clockwise direction! Doesn't that sound like fun?

The office windows (just undercoated so far)...

And the new section of wall beneath them that has been cleverly hidden by my printer cabinet...

So I painted them (two coats of gloss).

And the wall beneath. Can you spot me in this mess?

So then the office looked like this. Yay!

But no time for rejoicing. Get back to painting!

So then there's the bathroom window. Like the office windows it's brand new. Unlike the office windows, I haven't even undercoated it yet.

And the frame around it is definitely not brand new, so it isn't in the best condition.

So I gave it a bit of a paint-scrape...

And a sand...

And then I painted the window and its frame. Three times.

And forgot to take a proper picture of it fully painted. So you'll just have to live with this fancy shot that clearly shows that the window is no longer natural-timber-coloured.

Office down. Bathroom down. Now the laundry!

Unlike all of the other windows in the house, it's a little single-hung window. And it is NOT in good condition.

This is where I had to start a bit of a fight with myself. I'm a perfectionist. I hate looking at something and knowing that I've taken shortcuts and I could have done it better. The problem with the windows on this house is that really, to do them properly, I would need to completely strip back all of the paint and start painting them again from scratch. That's a LOT of work. And we've got a deadline! Ain't nobody got time for that! So I have to compromise. And I hate it. Because attempting to partially scrape these windows is like pulling a loose thread on a woolly jumper. The whole thing starts unravelling. And getting that delicate balance of just-enough-but-not-too-much-and-as-fast-as-possible is HARD!!!

Particularly with an old blunt paint scraper.

And I have no idea what happened to our safety gear. I improvised with a tea towel and sunglasses. Good look, huh? Particularly with the fuzzy all-over-the-place-and-I-couldn't-care-less hair!

Oh, and the tea towel was held on with a bulldog clip. Am I resourceful or what?

Okay, office supplies aside, I got the window mostly scraped.

And then I painted it. Three times. Whew! Laundry down.

Next up, the dining room windows! I've had those breezy IKEA curtains hanging in front of the dining room windows for months now to partially obscure those panes of yellow glass that I'm not a huge fan of. First things first, they had to come down.

Then, before painting, we wanted to deal with this rusty, messy old window hardware.

So we replaced it all with fresh new stuff.

And then came the painting.

In fact before painting, it was paint scraping.

And this is finally where we got smart. Instead of attempting to tackle it with the ridiculous old blunt scraper that made me want to curl up in a ball and cry while nursing my bleeding fingers, we actually took ourselves off to Bunnings to see what smart people who want to scrape paint do. And amazingly, they don't do what we'd been doing! So we came home with a heat gun and this beauty.

Source

It's got some kind of fancy diamond blade, and I am completely in love. It snarls its way through paint like it's butter. There's still some elbow grease involved if you want to go all the way back to bare timber, but particularly when I hit an area with the heat gun first, it's amazing.

So here I am, paint scraping by the light of the moon.

So with the dining room windows and their frame at that it's-good-enough level of paint scraped-ness, I followed with puttying any not-so-pretty bits (like where the old window hardware attached)...

And then painted. And painted. And painted.

Are you sensing something of a pattern here? Well we're still not done yet! Stay with me here! And just imagine how claw-like my hands were getting painting each of those little timber strips on each window!

So now for the kitchen!

Those windows that we put above the kitchen sink weren't original to the house. We bought them at a demolition yard, and the paint, particularly on the left window, was really badly cracked. I scraped off the area in this shot with just a screwdriver.

But first things first, since this window has a tendency to flap open and then bang closed if it's not secured, new hardware!

But rather than going through the gory details (marking, pre-drilling, screwing, it's not rocket science), let's cut to the lovely hardware-installed after shot! Hurrah!

And then the painting. Sigh. But first the paint scraping! I ended up taking back that left window to bare timber, mostly. The right window wasn't doing so badly.

And THEN the painting. This window involved the most uncomfortable painting positions I have encountered to date. Try perching over a sink and trying not to put too much of your weight on the thin sections of benchtop on the front and back of it!

Hooray! Finally painted!

The other two windows either side of the stove and rangehood got the same treatment.

Aaaand moving on.

Bedroom two. One little window pair. They don't look too bad from afar.

But up close, particularly the window sill, that ain't pretty. Some idiot painted right over some partially peeled paint, so there's nothing for it but to strip it back if I want a nice smooth finish.

So strip it back I did.

Sanding, undercoating, painting painting....  and done! Man I wish it really happened that fast!

Okay! So the final room on our clockwise tour of the house is the master bedroom! With SIX lovely windows to deal with! So we shuffled the mattress out of the room, draped up the curtains out of the way...

And I got my scrape on again.

And Tom actually removed those front windows so I could get better access to them for some scraping action (and so he could cut off some extra length that was stopping them from closing perfectly). Allie was happy that the action was finally down at her level so that she could supervise my technique properly.

So without any windows on the front of the house, we decided to set up our mattress in the dining room. It was fun! Like camping, but with all the creature comforts!

And I kept painting. And painting. And painting.

When I had FINALLY finished painting, Tom re-installed the windows again, and we put up some security bars for a bit of added security. It's a two-storey window so there's not a high likelihood that someone would manage to climb in, but particularly with the bed in that spot, it wouldn't be too hard for someone to fall out of that window! So we nabbed ourselves some second-hand bars from a demolition yard, sprayed any less-than-perfect bits white, and now no-one will take a quicker-than-desired trip down to the front yard.

So that's it! At LONG last, we can call these windows DONE!

Who else is relieved?