More carpet removal and a new kitchen bench!

We have had some success of late. First we found a second hand building supplier in Wyong and sourced 2 x great timber floorboard panels for our new kitchen benchtop from them and when we went back to collect it we found that they also had a fantastic replacement front door there, which we also acquired. The front door has 2 x leadlight panels and is complete with door furniture including hinges and handle as well as keyed locks - all for only $200! We thought this was a bargain, so we snapped it up. All it needs is a coat of paint and to be mounted in the door frame, so this will hopefully be up by the end of the week. The old doors were acquired by the previous owners in Bali and really don't suit our style - they will be going on eBay soon!

We have had Jayme staying with us, so he was a great help yesterday, working with Ola and coming up with some great ideas... Together the guys pulled apart the floorboards which were t&g and framed. Once the frames were removed, the boards came apart easily as they weren't glued. They gave the boards a clean with the wire brush and measured up to replace the main section of the existing laminex kitchen bench. It looks like the boards will be a pretty good fit, we will lose some of the length of the bench but this shouldn't be too much of a problem. In order to prepare for the installation of the new timber, the existing laminex of the bench top had to be removed, so Jayme got stuck in to this:

Simultaneously, I decided to remove all of the remaining carpet. When we first moved in we had challenges with fleas (and cockroaches) so with 2 x dogs and a sandy, beach oriented lifestyle, we always intended to remove the remaining carpet. We also prefer the look of polished floors, so this was inevitably going to be the final solution... Anyway, with a bulk rubbish collection booked for Friday 14th January, we decided we should make the most of it and remove all the remaining carpet, underlay and carpet grippers in time for Friday morning. I was thrilled when I peeked under the carpet in the lounge to see that the boards were already polished but when I started to remove the carpet in one corner of the lounge, closest to the front door, we found that not only are the boards unpolished, they are also completely unfinished and are running in the perpendicular direction to the rest of the boards in the main living area... This is not ideal, and Jayme figured out that this section (at the front of the house) was probably not part of the original house, hence as a later addition, compromises were made in terms of materials. This explains why the previous owners had the house on the market with stained and marked carpet, a fact we were quite surprised about... Anyway, I think even unfinished boards look better than carpet, so we have removed it from the lounge.

Here are some pics of the carpet removal in progress:

The next step will be to remove the carpet from the bedroom and that will be the last of the carpet in the house.

Today we are planning to continue work on the kitchen bench and hopefully install the new kitchen sink we bought last week.

More updates soon... Tara

The kitchen comes together.

Well now that I am finally getting back up to date, I am really impressed to see how far we have come!

Building on the previous post which shows the walls in various stages of undercoat, I am happy to be able to share some photos of the kitchen and dining room with their final paint colours on:

The cut in sections are the final wall colour which we have now begun to roll on.

Upstairs: the routing is now complete. Ola went to a huge effort to finish running in the floorboard lines and they look great. The whole area is now very dusty but is waiting on a good clean and a sand before paint starts to go down, which is really exciting.

Back to the kitchen: for the time being, we have decided not to replace the whole kitchen but instead to paint the existing cabinetry which currently looks terribly blue but will come up well with a few coats of paint rubbed back in an antique look. Instead of the current blue laminex bechtops, we have decided to replace the benches with solid timber and replace the current stainless steel sink with a traditional white porcelain "farmhouse" style double bowl sink. We bought the new sink yesterday and with Jayme coming to stay with us this week, we are hoping to be able to utilise his engineering skills to figure out how to mount a 50 kilo sink to an existing set of cabinets with a new benchtop... We are also planning to replace the stainless steel dishwasher with our new, Electrolux machine in white, and will do this as we replace the benchtop.

The 2nd hand building material supplier that we visited yesterday in North Wyong had some fantastic stuff. We are looking to invest in a new front door and replacement glass panel for the front entry, but more on that later...

It has been WAY too long...

Wow - this post is certainly long overdue... Coming toward the end of the year, there just didn't seem time to get any renovations done, and hence no blogging... Then Christmas came and went and finally we have had the time to get some more work done on the house... So now seemed a good time to resume the blogging and continue the photo journal.

The painting in the main area of the house is coming along well. We have finally removed all traces of the horrid orange colour that was on the walls and hidden the teal blue which was used on the window frames. First step was to apply 2 x coats of undercoat. We used Taubmans Tradex which is a cheaper product, but we found it to be really good. Decent coverage and reasonable washability which is rare in an undercoat product. The shade of undercoat was a blue grey colour, so at first the whole space felt like a prison cell. Here are some shots:

We have also made a start in the lounge room - we were dealing with the orange and blue colour scheme in there also. We have been undercoating this and also we have decided to remove the carpet once the paint is on the walls:

Ola working the finishing sander over uneven paintwork

Tara busy on the roller - undercoating the orange paintwork in the lounge:

Painting supervisor hard at work:

Chief foreman keeping the project tracking on time and under budget: