What? The Stairs Still Aren't Done?

I'm sorry to report that no, our front stairs are still not done.

A full seven months ago, in September 2011 we started building our front stairs with digging the holes for our posts (see here). Then, because it took us so long to complete each next stage, when we finally got to the handrails in November, I labeled that post Snail Railings because it had taken us such a long time to put them up. But even then, we were nowhere near finished.

Because the stairs still looked like this.

A small child could easily fall through the gap between the stairs and the top rails, even though we've managed to at least get a bottom rail on since.

Unfortunately we're not quite ready to correct that particular problem. What we are ready to do is to attach some steel reinforcement bars underneath the stairs to prevent the timber from warping over time. First... measuring where to put each bar...

And then drilling holes for them...

After we drilled the hole in the first side, we measured again on the other side, drilled another hole, and pushed our reinforcement bar through from one side to the other.

We'd fortunately also managed to buy some Loctite, which is a little red-coloured liquid that you poor onto the end of the bolt before attaching the nut to it to make sure it won't loosen over time.

So each end looked like this. Thrilling, isn't it?

Oh but not before we had to grind off any excess on the reinforcement bar, because we'd bought long ones that would make two reo bars for us when cut in half. The fireworks made it a little more thrilling...

Here's Tom working on tightening the last bar...

This process is absolutely vital (and shouldn't have taken us this long to get to) to hold the two sides of the stairs together independently of the actual stair treads themselves. So as the timber expands and adapts to the weather over time, the two sides should stay held together nice and strong.

It's unfortunately one of the more boring improvements we've made lately (perhaps even more boring than re-hanging the back door to open outwards instead of inwards), but at least there were fireworks! And it may just have given us the kick up the backside that we need to finally get those stair railings completed! Here's hoping!

We Have Walls!

Well... not quite walls, but certainly the makings of walls!

I'm actually writing this post extremely belatedly. This was the last shot I showed you of the area under our house, on the long-awaited slab-pouring day.

What I failed to mention when I rejoiced that the slab was done, was that the next day we had carpenters on site! A builder that we had talked to about helping us with the renovation called that day, and said that he had a couple of "chippies" with no work to do that week, and asked if we were interested in them coming around. We agreed, and they arrived within an hour, and said they would start the next day!



Given that it took us 18 months of living in this house to get to the point of simply having the slab poured, all of this sudden progress was making our heads spin!




Allie wasn't affected.

The first carpenter day involved a lot of welding, because our structural engineer insisted that before the frame went up, all of our posts with their 'bolt-on' extensions (from when we had to re-raise the house because it wasn't raised high enough the first time) had to be welded... taking this...

To this.

Fortunately one of the three carpenters was a qualified welder, so Tom grinded off the little plates on either side of the post (that were bolted together holding the extension to the pole) and the carpenter followed with the welder to create a nice seam.

The other carpenters got to work measuring and marking where all of the walls had to go.

And then we experienced a pretty serious panic when we realised that two of our posts were actually positioned in the middle of rooms, instead of within the walls where they were supposed to be. We were pretty furious at the structural engineer who should have known exactly where the walls were going to be based on our original plans, which he had full access to. We'd just positioned them according to his plans when we hung them all. Silly us for assuming that he could read the building plans and position the posts accordingly! You can see both problem poles in in the shot above. One in the middle of the corridor, the other in line with it on the left in one of the future bedrooms.

Thankfully we managed to solve the problem by repositioning the poles along the beam that they were supporting into positions where they would be hidden within walls, and Tom grinded off the leftover little stumps in the middle of the concrete.

 

When we put flooring over the top in the future, it will be like those holes never existed.

And then, in what felt like no time, our downstairs area looked like this!

That shot above is with me standing in the future living area, looking at the front door.

This shot is taken afterI backed up a bit and turned a little to the left, showing that same living area.

Here I am standing in the garage looking at the kitchen on the right-hand side, and one of the bedrooms on the left (where one of the carpenters is standing on a beam).

And here, I'm standing in the kitchen, looking down the corridor. The bedroom from the shot above is off to the right, then there's the bathroom (where you can see the plumbing sticking out of the floor), and then there's the other bedroom further over. The garages are to the left.

This is the built-in wardrobe in that far bedroom.

And this is the view from the front yard, looking at the front door (with the window gap to the right of it now installed).

And this is the front wall on the other side of the front stairs, with the door to the garage.

I find it pretty incredible that I'm now talking about rooms downstairs! Isn't it amazing how fast walls go up?! Now we've just got to scrape together a small fortune to actually finish the thing!

One step at a time, as always. Perhaps some actual walls and doors and windows would be a good start.

Still Don't Need a Man

Last time I was left alone in the house for the weekend, I attacked the kitchen with trim, ending with this result.

It wasn't finished though, so I spent the next week gazing at the unfinished bits and chomping at the bit to sort them out. So the next weekend, when I found myself alone yet again (what's with the boys in my household conveniently having to work on the weekend lately?), I didn't waste any time. All of my previous trim effort had completely neglected these guys - our little symmetrical windows.

So obviously I had to correct that. But in order to do that, I had to get on speaking terms with this guy, the circular saw. Tom's good friends with him, but to date I hadn't been brave enough to introduce myself.

But there was no avoiding it any longer. Because of this. I needed to attach some plain trim to the insides of each window frame, to cover over the ugly exposed edges that were still visible. But we couldn't get pieces of timber that were quite the right width, so I was going to have to cut about 8mm off the entire length of each board.

 

Thankfully I had watched Tom working with this guy enough to have a few tricks up my sleeve. Well, the concept of the tricks. Whether I could actually physically pull them off was another question.

As you saw above, I marked where I needed my cut line to be on the board. Then, I measured the distance between the blade on the circular saw and the outside edge of the plate that sits around the blade.

And then I measured and marked that same distance from the cut line that I had drawn...

Then carefully positioned a long level in line with the extra marks that I had made.

And clamped it in place so it wouldn't budge.

And then... the part where all of that manouevreing finally makes sense... I pulled out the circular saw (took about 5 minutes to figure out how to actually turn the thing on), and then I could just rest the edge of the plate along the level, so that the blade cut a beautiful straight line exactly where it was supposed to.

And... I just can't describe how proud I was when it fitted perfectly exactly where it was supposed to (it's the vertical one on the left there).

I repeated that process for the other side of that window (and the second window), along with the tops of each.

And then I moved on to the window on the other wall (the one we had to relocate - boo). In the first round of trim-ing, I put up this cornice that extended the full length of that wall (including above the window).

As you can see in this older shot of the window though, that cornice had nothing but air behind it over the window.

So I had to address that problem. I found an almost-the-right-dimensions timber post outside, and used my circular saw trick again to cut it down to the perfect size.

And bolted it in. It sounds easy, and it's always looked kind of easy when Tom has done this kind of thing. But let me tell you, it was HARD! Bolting timber upwards (i.e. when gravity is completely against you) into a hardwood frame while perched precariously on a window sill with a sink on one side and a 5-metre drop on the other side is not easy. But I survived. Just. I shudder to think what might have happened to me if I'd actually fallen, since I was home by myself. Don't follow my example, kids.

And then I moved on to the bottom of that same window. We'd saved a bit of internal window sill trim from the original kitchen window (just as well, it's probably virtually impossible to get this stuff now without having it custom made), and thankfully it was the perfect height to sit straight on top of the benchtop.

I then repeated my board-cutting process to trim out the two vertical edges of that window frame, and then I could finally move on to the really pretty stuff - the trim. And in virtually no time (well, quite a lot of time actually, if you count the fact that I spent the next day wearing the skin of my index fingers puttying all of the screw holes and joins, so these photos were taken after that), the twin windows looked like this...

The west window looked like this...

And all the other bits looked like this.

And this. As you can see, I'm still not entirely finished, since that corner above the trim still needs an inconspicuous piece to cover over that gap.

And I ran out of putty before I could finish off the join between the trim and the cornice on this window.

So now the room looks like this. It could sure use a lick of paint, but at least now there are hardly any ugly exposed edges!

Am I totally a pro, or what?!

A Bit of Fluff

WARNING: This post contains another so-far-unseen 'Trash The Dress' photo shoot peek.

After all the manly construction work involved in putting up the trim in the kitchen, I decided that I had to balance my week out with a bit of girly art creation.

So I went and had a look at my still very unfinished office frame wall.

More specifically, I decided to pay attention to the gold frame that's been filled with black since we hung it.

I found a nice piece of orange paper in my craft supplies, and decided that it would become the background to my art, to replace all that black.

I traced the outline of the frame backing, and cut it to size...

And then came the issue of what I was going to put in front of my orange background. The answer? Feathers.

That not-very-attractive shot above is what is left of one of the pillows that Tom and I destroyed during our 'Trash The Wedding Dress' photo shoot. Here's why!

In trying to clean up after ourselves a bit when we'd finished pillow-fighting, we gathered up as many of the feathers that we could off the ground, which unfortunately involved gathering up a lot of leaves and twigs as well. So, I sifted out through the ugly bits, leaving me with this container of nice clean feathers.

Then I pulled out the Craft & Hobby PVA Glue...

Squirted a nice big blob on a plastic takeaway container lid, and dipped the ends of each feather into the glue.

I was trying to channel this Juju hat inspiration...

And got so caught up in the gluing process that I forgot to take in-progress photos. This is what I had about halfway through.

When I deemed it sufficiently feathered, I popped it in the frame...

And hung it on the wall, waiting until the next morning to take a much less yellow-tinged shot of it. But I wasn't really happy with it. Not only was the orange combined with the gold a little bit icky-looking (that's an official term, by the way), but I'd cut the orange paper slightly too small, so it was bulging out a bit at the top (you can just see that in this photo).

So, I changed the plan, and brought down the little white square frame next to it. I've been spending way too much time gazing at this particular family since it's taking too long to fill all of my frames, so replacing them with my orange/feather combination seemed like a good idea.

I held up the family against the back of my feather art and roughly traced the edges on the orange card, which was a bit difficult since I didn't want to put the art down and squash the feathers...

And then I cut around my tracings.

And popped the feathers into the frame in front of the glass, since obviously they wouldn't have fitted behind the glass. So much better!

Then up it went on the wall!

I'm very happy with it, and it's a lovely reminder of our fun photo shoot. It also brings out the little pop of orange in the art to the left of it, which I don't think I've actually ever introduced you to.

I originally stumbled across this image on Pinterest...

Source: imgfave.com via Louise on Pinterest

And decided to try my hand at drawing something similar with some coloured pencils.

It's not going to win any art awards, but I like it.

So there you have it. Very very slowly, I'm filling up that frame wall and evicting that stock photo family.