Reno update

My brother and the Manfriend knocking out the back wall of the house

Hanging plasterboard whilst seven months pregnant. So much for putting my feet up.

This will be the kitchen. The room at the back with the washing machine will be the laundry.

This is our back shed. For realz. We tore it down on the weekend and it is SO GOOD not to have to look at it out the window. God knows what kind of people were living here before us.

This will be the kitchen.

Our house is getting close to being finished-ish! I say finished-ish because what I considered finished has changed considerably. When we first got pregnant I wanted the entire house done, inside and out. After a few months it was clear that wasn't happening, so just having the inside of the house finished was enough, as I could live with a shitty yard for a while. Now, I am happy to have a functioning kitchen, bathroom and baby room.

Living in a dusty, building site with no kitchen or laundry and a half-functioning bathroom whilst seven months pregnant is getting a bit old.

Despite being set on doing all the work ourselves, we have had to suck it up and get a few tradies in to help. For the past two weeks, Josh the builder and his apprentice James have been there, and good Lord, do I ever love Josh. He is 23, gorgeous and a super-fast worker. I love coming home everyday and seeing the house looking more and more completed. Architraves on! Flooring laid! Plasterboard hung!

We have plasterers coming this week and the painter coming next week, then all we have to do is install the kitchen and laundry, sand the floor and carpet the bedrooms. Woo!

Reno sweet reno.

Constance 1956 Vintage Caravan This is so, so far from what our campervan looked like.

Back from our camping babymoon in NZ! It was super relaxing and cruisy, which is just what we needed. The Manfriend drove for most of it so I crocheted like a ninja. We ate loads of yummy food, went for walks, went to a country fair and saw some freaking amazing sights. Seriously, the south island of NZ is the most underrated place in the world. Within a 100km radius you can find crazy landscapes and natural springs, massive plateaus and rainforests, fjords and rivers. Gorgeous.

I will post more photos of our trip when I get around to uploading them.

It was a bit disheartening coming back to our half-finished house and realising that we have a loooong way to go to get it finished before the baby comes in FOURTEEN WEEKS (omg.) The Manfriend is super-busy at work with a big project that will finish in three weeks, then he is going to go nuts on the house to get it done. There still isn't a single room that is totally complete, or even close. This weekend I'm going to get carpet sorted for the bedrooms, spackle, sand and paint the hallway and study. Grrrr.

Meanwhile, I start back at school tonight which is VERY exciting. I'm surprised at how much I missed it. We are learning CAD, which is a bit overwheming but hopefully the Manfriend will be able to give me a hand. I'm looking forward to never doing manual drafting ever again as the whole thing was too much for me. I think when Lee and I are working together I will end up doing most of the drafting and designing, while he does the actual building and contruction, so I better make sure my CAD skills are up to scratch.

xx

Baby rooms.

I cannot wait to get stuck in to designing and decorating the baby's room. Calling it a nursery sounds weird and makes me think of wet nurses and nannies, so it will just be called the baby's room. At the moment, the room itself has no flooring, unsanded walls that need painting and a bare bulb as a light. We have a fair way to go with the house but will get it finished in time (goddamn it!). The room itself is pretty big but quite dark as it only has one small window. This will probably be good as it will stay nice and dark when the baby is sleeping, but I don't want it to feel like a dungeon. There are loads of lovely baby room images out there - here are some of my faves.

Source: ohdeedoh.com via Emma on Pinterest

Source: ohdeedoh.com via Emma on Pinterest

House update.

We ripped up the floor in one of the back bedrooms on last weekend. Whenever we do demolition work, I always get a bit nervous that we will find a huge nest of spiders or dead animals or bones (macabre much?). Or treasure. Treasure would be good.

Instead, we found dirt. Cue disappointment. No biggie! It means that we need to pull up less flooring than we thought, which allows us more time to do fun things, like read the Dulux Colour Atlas and watch Dave eat.

The masterlist of stuff to do for the house is enormous and intimidating, so I like to just think of the next few things on the list instead.

  • Finish pulling up boards in bedrooms
  • Restump and rebuild sub-floors
  • Lay the cables for the wiring
  • Put down chipboard flooring in bedrooms
  • Order carpet
  • Pull out bathroom
  • Sort out waste pipe for bathroom toilet
  • Put down chipboard in bathroom
  • Plumb in shower fittings, toilet and vanity taps
  • Tile bathroom
  • Tile giant mirror
  • Install showerscreen, toilet and vanity
  • and so on and so forth...

I can't wait to get stuck into it.

Bathroom ideas.

After we rip up the floor in the three bedrooms, we are getting stuck into doing the bathroom. I'm in the process of collating inspiration boards and ideas for the space - it is very exciting at this stage! I'm going to move the window up, change the door to a sliding door, rip out the bath and put in a toilet and shower. I am addicted to subway tiles as they manage to look a bit industrial and mental-hospitalesque (which is a good thing) but can still look quite traditional at the same time. The outside of the house will be fairly traditional, so we don't want that terrible 'Victorian exterior and hyper-modern interior' than can happen with this era of house. Subway tiles will help to marry the two styles.

I'm also thinking of tiling on an enormous mirror along one wall, which will open up the space and be a bit of a feature. Ideally, it would wrap around the two walls and include a medicine cabinet which pops open (technical term) but is sunken in. I have the idea fully-formed in my head, but hope it translates well in real life!

Here are a few bathrooms that I find inspiring, although most of them are quite literally five times as big as our tiny space!

I freaking LOVE this floor tiling. Wonder if I could make it work...
The chunky silver hardware looks awesome against the tiles. Might be over-capitalising though...
This makes me feel clean just looking at it. Hygiene-fest.

Property mogul.

Looking from the front bedroom into the back bedroom. Note the attractive green linoleum and reinforced architrave.

We bought a house! It only took two weeks. We have it pretty easy considering our criteria is that it must be cheap and in poor condition. I can't imagine how hard it would be trying to buy your forever house.

It is a three bedroom semi-detached on a big corner block in Coburg. The agent we have been dealing with is a bit rubbish-she doesn't seem to know a lot of the processes around buying a house and is terrible at returning phone calls. Anyway. The previous owner was an old lady who is in a nursing home, so it was sold by the State Trustees. Houses sold by the State Trustees can sometimes be a little bit cheaper as they aren't as keen to make a massive profit as regular vendors, and more often prefer to just sell it rather than negotiate.

It is in fairly poor condition but is structurally sound and has loads of potential. The thought of living in a half-renovated house (again) is daunting, but I kind of love it. We will be doing all of the work ourselves this time without help from Mum and Dad, so it will be a steep learning curve.

On to the tour....

The fireplace in the living room has been bricked up and "decorated" with butterflies. The terracotta tiles are going to go.

The laundry is huge- nearly as big as the back bedroom. We will move it over and put French doors in to a deck in the backyard.

The floor is separating from the wall in the front bedroom. We will need to restump and lift the floor before carpeting.

Mmmm, lovely tiles.

Bathroom is teeny tiny. We will gut it and retile and rip out the bath and replace it with a shower and toilet.

I am going to the estate agent to sign the contract this afternoon. Yay! Settlement is on July 18.

House sold!

What a massive few days. The house was passed in at the auction on Saturday, due to no bids. It was pretty depressing sitting in the front room of the gorgeous house that we built ourselves, looking out at 120 faces with not one person bidding. Apparently that is what is done now: by not bidding, the emotion of the auction is taken off the purchaser and put back on the vendor.

Imemdiately after the auction, four different parties came in and made offers. We had a mini-auction, with us sitting in the front room and the potential purchasers in the other rooms, with the agents running back and forth between us. Crazy times.

Anyway, after a sleepless Saturday and Sunday night, we eventually sold it to a lovely German lady for above our reserve, which is so, so excellent. I don't think it has hit me yet what has happened- the house is so full of memories and love. Even though it was only two years, I felt like I grew up in that house. It was where I learnt to cook, where Lee and I raged at each other and watched Mad Men in bed. It was where we lived with my best friend in one room, washed our dishes in the bath and used one tiny gas cooker for all our meals. I started my new job there, turned 25 there, made heaps of new friends and covered the bathroom in hairdye.

Au revoir, 153.

Auction this weekend!

Our house is up for auction this Saturday at 1pm. Gah!I have such mixed feelings. I want to live there forever, but it is so big and hard to clean. The location is incredible and neighbours are lovely. In a way, having the interior stylists prop it for us has been good as it feels less like my house and more like a display home, which helped me make the break. I really hope a big, sprawling, loud and messy family move in and fill it up. It is made for big family dinners and art projects spread out on the floor and napping in the hammock and gardening and walking to the shop after dinner to get ice creams.

What a journey it has been... here are some of my favourite memories of Project Beaconsfield Parade.

  • At the auction when we bought it, I was so nervous and sweaty that I though I'd fall over. Mum and Dad were in Adelaide so we had to bid on our own. I hadn't been to a house auction before, let alone bid at one! Probably the most nerve-racking thing I've ever done.
  • Our old kitchen with the lumps in the floor and the old pantry converted to my walk-in robe. I loved that- our shower was a garden hose gaffer-taped to the wall, but I had the luxury of a walk-in robe.
  • After we first moved in, Lee and I had a burst of enthusiasm for renovating and demolished the whole bathroom in an hour and dumped it in the front yard.
  • We used to draw and write all over the wall in the kitchen as we knew we were demolished the rear wall.
  • Learning how to use most tools properly and how to build walls,  lay floorboards, build a deck, paint, assemble scaffolding, tile a bathroom...
  • Whenever a major milestone was completed, like we finished painting a room or pulled down a wall or laid the floorboards, it was really invigorating and exciting.
  • Spending so much time with my parents (they came over every weekend to help). I learnt so much from my Dad and was constantly impressed with his work ethic and attitude, and it was lovely chatting to mum as we did the shitty apprentice jobs together.
  • The last weekend we spent in the house, Lee and I literally worked two twenty-hour days cleaning and finishing things off. We were so exhausted and cranky that I was in tears as I scrubbed walls and scraped paint and repainted architraves. I collapsed onto our mattress- the only bit of furniture left in the house- and had literally the best sleep of my life.

I am having a massive freak-out out over whether we will get a good price, whether the sun will be shining for the auction, whether anyone will bid and where we are going to live next, but I guess it is all part of the journey.