Home Office... Covering Up The Ugly Bits

The home office is coming along, but we're in that annoying stage that involves a lot of small time-consuming tasks that don't look particularly pretty until we get to the next stage (i.e. paint). But if we don't do them properly the paint won't look any good. We've learned that the hard way, but it doesn't make me any less impatient to get this part over!!!

So let me just wizz through it and we can pretend it happened like magic, not over the course of many painful weekends.

Here's where we left off after getting through the messy first few stages (see here)...

The most obvious ugly bits are all the gaps between the ceiling boards. So I pulled out a picture of the original ceiling and attempted to lie out the timber battens we had pulled off the original ceiling. It's surprisingly difficult! Don't judge me.

But we got there eventually.

We paint scraped all of the boards, and then laid them out...

Ready for an undercoat.

 
Meanwhile, onto another ugly bit! The window frame!

We didn't bother salvaging the extremely boring architrave that we'd pulled off the window originally, so bought some new stuff, cut it to size, and voila, the window instantly looks more finished.

Next, cornices. This is where having an angled ceiling adds a serious layer of complexity. Most pre-made cornices are designed for ceilings that are at right-angles to the walls. I'm sure the pros have a much more sophisticated (and simple) way of dealing with this problem, but we had to wing it. So we started by tracing the top and bottom of where our cornice needed to sit on both walls and ceilings, which gave us the point at which they needed to intersect.

We cut off two little pieces of timber cornice to experiment with, and trialed-and-errored it until they fit together nicely in the corner. We could then use them as our templates for the real pieces.

Magic! Cornice and architrave over the doorway installed, puttied and no-more-gaps-ed!

Window architrave puttied and no-more-gaps-ed...

Skirting boards installed...

All of the putty etc sanded...

The VJ wall opposite the door corniced, puttied and sanded...

The window frame painted (I know, I cheated and skipped to the painting stage a little bit). What a difference paint makes...
 

And continuing with the cheating (I know, the earmark of a super exciting life is that painting before installing ceiling battens constitutes cheating), we undercoated the ceiling...

Before finally installing the undercoated timber battens! Again, as if I just clicked my fingers and they appeared!

Next stage... can you guess what it is?

Painting!!! Am I the only one DYING to see it painted?

Home Office... Begin!

I know it doesn't sound like the room that's likely to be the first priority in most renovations, but the home office was definitely mine! As someone who works from home all day every day, I need somewhere to do it, and unfortunately I'm a bit too set in my ways to enjoy being parked in a corner of the dining room with the printer in another room six metres away and everything else in boxes.

It also didn't hurt that the room we had earmarked to be my office happened to be one of the smallest rooms in the house (that wasn't a bathroom) that didn't require major structural work. Made it seem so much more achievable to begin with the prospect of actually finishing it within our grasp!

So here is what we were starting with.

The ceiling had certainly seen better days, so it was going to need some serious work.

And the view from the verandah was no more inviting.

So where to start...

The peeling paint, the stained carpet... eugh!

We decided to leave the carpet where it was for the moment to protect the floorboards, and I started to scrape the paint off the window frame.

I even had a go at the wall to the right of the window with the scraper as well, as you can see from the blue-green patch on the top right of the above photo. It didn't take me long to learn that that was more pain than it was worth!

Tom got to scrape the VJ wall to the right of the windows...

And I attempted to keep the paint dust at bay with intermittent vacuuming...

And then attacked the windows themselves. They were NOT in good condition (more on them later).

Meanwhile, Tom plied me with cheese and biscuits through the gaping holes in the wall that removing the paint-peel-ey lattice left behind. You can see from the little bluey-green patches in this photo as well that I attempted some paint scraping on the VJ areas beneath the lattice gaps and on the back of the door. With varying degrees of success.

And then there was the ceiling.

It didn't take us long to decide that it wasn't the place for our little paint scrapers. You can't really see it in the photos, but practically the entire thing was peeling. Little teeny tiny bubbles of peeling paint. So either we had to scrape the lot or...

We had to get rid of it!

So we went with option 2.

And we decided to do the same with the wall that the window sits in as well.

 
So now with the room back to its skeleton, we had a fresh start. We bought some big sheets of fibro from the hardware store (and a fibro sheet cutter because we seemed to have lost ours in the house move), and started the slow process of cutting them down to size.

Now here's something. The process of putting up ceiling boards is SO much easier than it looks! I know from experience that this is probably true for almost every renovating task under the sun, but each and every board we put up shocked me. They're heavy, and holding them up in the right place while the other person nails them in is HARD!

Nevertheless, piece by piece, up they went. And we realised just in time that we should jam some insulation in there too.

It turned into quite the jigsaw puzzle, since we didn't want to have to install more timber trim pieces to cover the seams between the ceiling boards than absolutely necessary.

Piece by piece by piece. Amazing how big a ceiling can feel in such a small room!

With the ceiling sheeted, we moved on to the walls. We decided to be super careful and glue both the wall...

And the fibro sheet...

 

Before then nailing them in. And it's clear that we tackled a lot of this after sunset. The poor neighbours.

As you can see, we removed the carpet when we finished paint scraping, leaving us with the lovely original floorboards. Not polished yet, but a million times better than the old dusty stained carpet!

With the exposed weatherboards on the wall around the door covered up with fibro, we moved our attention to the opposite wall, beneath the VJs that Tom had scraped earlier. The existing wall sheet beneath the VJs was considerably further recessed than the rest of the wall, so we decided to add some cheap bargain-bin lengths of pine to bump it out a bit...

And then glued and nailed a sheet of fibro over the top.

Finally we moved on to the window wall and repeated the process there. We were running out of sheets by that stage, so it required a bit of clever jigsaw puzzling.

And there it was! A freshly sheeted room! I can't even begin to describe how much cleaner it felt! Even with the coating of dust on the floor.

So how about a before and after? Even if the 'after' is really a 'during' since we're not even remotely finished yet. At least we've moved past the yellow though, right? Give us a bit more time to throw some trim and paint at it and we'll blow your socks off! Hopefully.

Baby Steps

So we have a fully operational bathroom (see here)! What more could a girl want?

Well...

Since you ask...

A kitchen with a working oven would be nice...

But having lived for a long time without a stove-top or oven in our last house (see here), and since I work from home, the priority was actually an office for me.

According to our plan for the house, we had decided which room was the lucky candidate!

But unfortunately it looked like this.

So while we began the complex task of making it a bit more inviting (more on that to come), I set up shop in the dining room.

I divided my time between working (of course), staring at the dull mustard-yellow wall in front of me (will we never escape yellow walls?), smelling the dank, musty smell of the ancient carpet under my feet and glaring over my shoulder at this.

That is the little room functioning as an entry. It wasn't the messiness that I was glaring at (the whole house was still in a complete state of upheaval since we'd just moved in), it's the weird closed-in doorway section of wall directly opposite the front door. Here it is marked on the plans.

And here it is from the lounge-room side.

Ever since we first inspected this house before we bought it, that section of wall has bothered me. It clearly was once a doorway, since the skirting board is different from that in the rest of the house, and it's not usual for a random section of wall to be framed with architrave like a doorway.

Unfortunately an explanation as to why someone would have wanted that doorway closed in is probably going to remain a mystery forever.

But after staring at the thing for weeks I couldn't stand it any longer. So I attacked it with a crowbar.

Carefully, mind you. And in hardly any time... I had this!

So now we can walk in a straight line from the front door into the lounge room instead of having to detour via the dining room (aka my temporary office) first! Small miracles.

I know it's not the most exciting transformation ever, but it felt good to have made some actual progress.