Upstairs floor

Upstairs has been a real labour of love for both of us, but really mostly for Ola. It has become his Sistine Chapel and it looks incredible - we are thrilled with it.

Basically we started with some strong colours and challenging textures and stripped it all back to a more appropriate palette.

This series of pics show where we came from and where we are at today.

When we bought the house - note: this is the previous owner's furniture!

 When we started work:

Part way through:

Layers and layers and layers of paint - all the effects are drawn by hand:

And the finished product:

We are just finishing the trim - 2nd coat - and then we are moving upstairs out of the mess downstairs and in order to give us the space to make even more mess downstairs!

Tiling in the bathroom

Once the bath was located in place, Ola had to build a cement bed for it to rest on:

We are very pleased with the new bath - it is quite deep - we are glad we were able to fit it in to the relatively small space we had within the room.  We couldn't fit a separate shower, so the set up is shower over bath but we are happy with that.

Next step was villa boarding the walls in readiness for tiling:

 Our tiler has been working tilessly (sorry!) to get both the bathroom and the laundry finished before he goes away on holidays, so we are glad to see a lot of progress on this little room:

Current status:

Laundry & Bathroom

Once upon a time there were a laundry and a bathroom. They were pretty ordinary, but they were functional.

But we decided we could improve on the status quo and decided to rip them out, re-do them and while we were at it, switch their positions around. The bathroom became the laundry (with a toilet) and the laundry became a bathroom. The other thing was access to the new bathroom was from the wrong side, so we closed up the wall and created a new door from the other side, so the 2nd, 3rd & 4th bedrooms could access it easily.
Here is the project in progress:

Some picturesque shots of the rubble which was the tiling and fixtures.

Then there is the new pipes for which Ola had to dig through concrete to re-lay:

Then we had the framing:

And we still had to remove the old corner spa:

Then build a new sub-floor for the new bathroom - the old concrete floor was lower than the floor of every other room in the house - go figure!

Wiring is in for new lights while we are in frame up.

Then to make a frame for the new bath:

and here:

and framing for the sliding pocket door:

More updates tomorrow- it's getting late now...

A new oven & sanding floors

It has been such a long time since my last post, there is so much to catch up on. Where to begin... How about June...!

So, we removed the old oven and replaced it with a freestanding cooker. The new cooker is incredible, we are thrilled with it. It actually has 3 ovens and 5 x gas burners. It is a Belling from the UK and I cannot fault it. There have been a few hiccups due to operator error but nothing to do with the actual unit. Plus it is black and very sexy!

Removing the cupboards to make room for the new cooker was like peeling back layers of an onion with old wallpaper and remnants from old tiling still obvious on the walls. We lined the back wall with bead board for now but we will be doing a tiled splashback when we put in the new kitchen.

When we re-shuffled the kitchen layout, we created a larger space for a fridge and we really needed a double door fridge. Some lovely folk who were moving to Canada (hi Ginnie!) kindly sold us their fridge before they skipped the country, and we were fortunate enough to make friends with them through the transaction. We were then lucky enough to make friends with the lovely people who bought our old fridge, which is kind of random but excellent at the same time!

Here is us installing the new fridge:

Then the next step was to sand the floors. I had heard it was a terrible job and yes, it was messy but it wasn't as bad as I had expected.

First we sanded upstairs, where we have been working with the chip-board to turn it in to faux floorboards:

 Then we did downstairs:

More updates in the next post!

Pulling apart a perfectly good kitchen!

Last week I had a perfectly good kitchen. Well, OK - it was BLUE which is not my favourite colour for a kitchen, I must admit. And the rangehood and cooktop had stopped working. And my benchtops had been partially removed in January leaving me with a less than ideal work surface. And the flick mixer tap has started to spin around 360-degrees like that small possessed child in that horror movie - was it Child's Play...?

OK - so it wasn't really working for me any more - that is true.

But on Saturday I cleaned the house from top to bottom (as I do on Saturday's because I know how to party) and finished by mopping the floors. The blue tiles in the kitchen were mopped and sparkling by Saturday night. If I had know that within 24 hours they would be at the local tip, I probably wouldn't have bothered mopping them at all!

So here's how it all came about:

We had bought a new fridge and a new oven, neither of which fitted in to our existing kitchen. As you do. So we figured we were going to completely remodel the kitchen to accommodate these new appliances. It seemed logical at the time, just go with it...

The ultimate plan is to completely redo the kitchen and knock out the wall which currently seperates the kitchen and the bathroom. The bathroom will be relocated and the kitchen will double in size. This will be tied in with installing bi-fold windows across the back wall to open the new kitchen on to the entertaining area. This stage of the renovation will happen when we redo the roof, which will involve the creation of 9-foot ceilings throughout the dining and new kitchen areas. This will probably happen next year. For now, we simply wanted to redo the existing space, install a new sink, rip up the tiles and polish the floorboards in the kitchen, replace the doors to all the kitchen cupboards, reconfigure the cupboards to create an island bench, create a space for the new fridge, take out the existing electric cooktop and rangehood, remove existing fridge cavity, install new rangehood, install new freestanding cooker and get the gas connected.

Because that's what you do for a temporary fix to a hideous kitchen, isn't it? Hmmm.

Here are some shots of the kitchen in the process of being dismantled:

Love those baby blue doors!

We then cut off the return of the bench, which effectively created an island but as we tried to move it we found that the tiles on the kitchen floor were that fraction higher than the timber floor of the dinig room which meant we couldn't get the bench to sit evenly and therefore wouldn't be able to get the fridge to sit evenly in its new home.

It was at about this time that we came to the conclusion that we'd have to remove the tiles from the floor.

The first few came up quite easily which gave us a false sense of simplicity. It wasn't until we had gone beyond the point of no return that we realised someone with a much heavier application of adhesive had done the bulk of the work and we were on our hands and knees chiselling the pieces of tile off the floor for several hours.

Here's some action shots:

After broken nails and several cuts and bruises we managed to get them all off. The clean up from this job was pretty massive, as breaking glazed terracotta tiles is really messy work. We managed to get most of it up and got the rubbish down to the tip.

We then had to collect our new fridge and washer and dryer so didn't finish working until late on Sunday night. The fridge is currently in the garage as we haven't finished making room for it yet, but it will be coming inside on the weekend.

Another update after next weekend!