Knock Knock!

Part of our plan for the house renovation includes acquiring a few doors, namely the following:

1. 1 pair of French doors to become our new front door (since we'll be closing off the current front door in order to make room for our ensuite)
2. Another pair of identical French doors to become our new home office front doors - these will be on the same wall as the other French doors, opening onto the front verandah (which we will be opening up to actually be a verandah again)
3. A new door for our new ensuite

So, in our travels to demolition yards, we've been keeping our eyes open for options to fit any of those locations.

French Doors:
We've discovered that it's actually quite difficult to find two matching pairs of nice French doors, so our choices were fairly limited. We actually purchased two pairs at a demolition yard, and then as Tom was loading the doors into the ute, I discovered another pair in a different area of the warehouse. Of course the second pair were more expensive, but we decided to go with them instead. I think the two pairs ended up costing us about $800, but it's well worth it, they're gorgeous.

They're currently being stored alongside the bathtub in the old bathroom (that's going to be demolished eventually).

And here's a close-up

Ensuite Door:
We've done a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on this decision. Obviously the sensible thing to do with the ensuite door is to get one just like one of the other doors in the house. The existing doors are:

This is the internal door on most of the rooms - the bedrooms and the rooms that will become the bathroom and laundry

This pair of doors are currently the entrance from the lounge room into the sleepout. That area of the sleepout will eventually be closed off and become the office

Another factor to throw into the mix is that the area that's going to become the ensuite has a fancy window that it would be sensible to match:

Another part of the problem is that the ensuite is going to be a very small room, and the wider the door is, the smaller the shower has to be. What's more, anything other than a narrow door will impinge on the bedroom too much, since it needs to open outwards. So! Armed with that set of requirements, I'm surprised we found any options at all.

Because of the bedroom space issue, we decided that we'd really like to have matching double doors, so that when opened, they'd reach out into the bedroom space less. But then finding any double doors that were less than 450mm wide each proved to be extremely difficult, and at that rate, they'd be 900mm wide and take up MORE width of the wall than an ordinary single door! We did find one single door option that was 600mm wide, but it had really ugly yellow stained glass in the upper area of it which we would have had to replace, the timber detail on it was very plain, and it cost about $300 as it was, which was pretty steep.

Then, prompted no doubt by some kind of Divine intervention, we just happened to stop over at a mini demolition yard on our way home from the dump one day, and discovered two of these:

They are 400mm wide each, so two of them would actually take up exactly the same amount of width as the other plain internal doors in the house. While it would have been ideal to have them even narrower so we could have more space for the shower along that wall, we have to settle for what's actually achievable at some point

Here's a close-up of the design in the glass:

That kind of filigree-ish design really appeals to us, so we immediately fell in love with it. Common sense then stepped in though, and I started wondering about how well it would go with the existing fancy window in place. Not only is the design very different, but the glass itself has a feathery pattern rather than simply being bevelled (like in the decorative window), like so:

So, attempting to be very mature and grown-up about the decision, we left without buying them, and mulled it over for a week or two. Although I still can't really reconcile the difference between the design on the doors and the design on the window, they will still look so pretty, and match our tiling concept so well. We just couldn't pass them up. What's more, Tom managed to negotiate the price down from an already cheap $190 for the pair to $150 for both, so we're laughing!

Can't wait to install them all, but that's going to be a while away yet.

Love,

Bec

The Lifting is Complete

Just a quickie this time, to show off a few photos of the house in its final position now that the lifters have finished.

This was the letterbox that graced the front of our last house until well after we finished the landscaping. Tom had nikko-penned our last street number on it. When he installed it here, it took a few days to put the new numbers on it, so the poor postman got very confused.

Our only access into the house at the moment

Tom playing with his new toy, spreading rocks along the driveway so that we can actually use it as something other than a boggy swamp.

It's hard to imagine our front yard was ever anything other than mud. I've bought gumboots though, so I'm all set!

Allie peeking from behind one of the old concrete posts

The underneath of the house

Our backyard. Looks like a tornado has hit, doesn't it?!

Well a lot has certainly happened, but we're nowhere near the finish line yet. I'm extremely keen to get the support posts concreted into the ground, because that is when we'll be allowed to reconnect the electricity and plumbing to the house, which in turn is the time we can move back in again. As grateful as we are that Tom's family have let us stay with them for a while, we miss having our own space!

Nevertheless, I have to keep reminding myself that impatience definitely isn't helpful with this kind of major undertaking. Mistakes get made when you try and rush things, as we've learnt the hard way before! So.... slow and steady we go!

Stay tuned for much much more to come.

And HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

We have lift off!!!

This is the official week of our house lifting, and man is it dramatic! The house is undergoing three movements in this process:

1) Raising about 1.8 metres higher (so we can build in underneath it later)
2) Moving closer to the side boundary
3) Moving closer to the front boundary

This process has been accomplished over the course of four days, and now it sits perched up on its stacks looking just a little bit forlorn.

The little back balcony stripped bare.

Removing the front stairs

The stacks

The destruction of the back balcony (and stairs) well underway

The house before it was moved sideways or forward

The house after it was moved. See how close it is to the fence now!

The bobcat in operation pushing the house into its new position

The naked back area, now moved forward

The now much smaller front yard

OK... I need gumboots.

The house as it stood on Wednesday night.

More pictures to come showing it raised to its final height of 8.485m (just a miniscule 15mm lower than the maximum height restriction of 8.5m). Whew!

The Lifting Starts!

7am Saturday morning saw the house lifters arrive, with the announcement that they would be shutting off our water in order to start stripping off the underside of the house to attach steel beams. With this news, I frantically started filling every available (unpacked) container with water, with the following result:

As it turns out, I leapt to action a little too enthusiastically, since they didn't actually end up switching off our water in the end. Oh well.

Along with the news that our water would be cut off, we were told that when the bobcat arrived, he would be removing our stairs. Given that we had been expecting to have the whole weekend available to remove our essential belongings from the house, the prospect of removing everything without stairs was not an attractive one. We therefore sprang into action again, and immediately started loading up our respective cars with clothes and kitchen equipment. This was accomplished in record time, although unfortunately this too turned out to be slightly premature because no stairs were actually removed that day. I'm not entirely sure what lesson we should be learning here. Is it to not pay attention to anything a tradesman says? Or to simply expect most of our efforts to be slightly futile when they're involved?

After all that frantic activity, it was time for a well-deserved break for breakfast.

Tom looking guilty at being caught at leisure

Equally guilty?

Tom couldn't waste the opportunity of having a ready and waiting audience, so proceeded to explain the process of raising the house to us, using an empty 'Up & Go' poppa.

Our giant steel beams had arrived the previous day, and we were interested to see how they would be fitted, given that they weighed 25 kilos per metre, and were about 10 metres long! A bobcat is very useful, it seems.

First step though, was assembling the 'stacks' to hold up the beams (and consequently the house), during the raising process.

And then the steel beams go up.

And of course, naturally, Tom was sitting at his leisure observing proceedings...

Just kidding, he was working very hard making phone calls.

While Daniel (brother) contemplated the world and life in general.

And so the process has begun!