The wood-heater - a labour of love?

With the wood-heater kindly lifted in to place by our strong and friendly neighbours the next task to hand became: how to build a hearth when a 120kg heater is in your way? A puzzling challenge but not insurmountable... We tested the strength of some of our floor tiles by tilting the heater and trying to position it on to them and each tile cracked under the pressure. After laying them all out on the hearth space we actually decided the tiles were not the way to go and we preferred the samples of the Travertine that we had picked up... So on Sunday it was off to the tile store again and we picked up the remaining quantity of Travertine. Did I mention it has been raining really heavily around here lately and as it turned out the Travertine was stacked in the yard outside of the shop so by the time we came to pick it up it was soaked through. We headed home with it and laid it out to air dry:

I had to sneak in a pic of the foreman overseeing the drying of the stone - or was he trying to camouflage himself in?

By the way - here is a lovely shot of the succulents I was recently given by some friends who are leaving the country - don't they look great on the front steps:

Anyway - it turned out that since the weather was 96% humidity (what with all the rain etc) the tiles weren't drying so I decided to bring them in the house.

To accelerate the drying process I turned to the heat gun which was working a treat:

But after the first tile the trusty heat gun died a sudden death and it was back to square one for me... Since we have ordered our new stove/oven/cooktop (but haven't received it yet) the days are numbered for my existing oven. So I threw caution to the wind and turned my oven in to a mini-kiln:

Within a few hours I had dried out all the tiles and could see their true colours which was lovely!

The next step will be to glue them to the fibro board we have on the floor. We are going to try to tile around the heater and gently lift and tilt it to slide the tiles under-neath the feet. It is going to be touch and go as the unit weighs an awful lot and the cute little feet mean that the pressure and weight is concentrated on to a small and sharp cast iron point but we are going to try anyway.

So I painted some curing agent on to the fibro in preparation for the actual fixing of the tiles:

At the same time, Ola had been measuring the position for the flue and together we managed to map out the pathway for the flue up through the ceiling, through the floor, up through the rumpus room upstairs, through the ceiling upstairs, in to the roof cavity and to the colourbond of the external roof. With all the rain we have had we haven't been able to cut through the actual roofing iron but we have started to cut the holes to fit the flue:

It is actually quite tricky to measure from the floor up and position the wood-heater in place and then measure for the location of the flue up to the ceiling, then through the ceiling to the floor above and then up to the ceiling above and then through the ceiling in to the roof cavity to then conclude that we do not have any trusses in the way to obstruct the passage of the flue to the outside. But we managed and as it turned out there weren't any roof beams in the way. So we then worked from the top down and cut the hole (above) in the ceiling and measured down to the floor. We then started to cut in to the floor with the view to cutting straight through and to the ceiling below when we hit the unexpected - a floor beam... It was big and solid and we then realised that it is a structural component that the flooring was fixed to... So there was nothing for it but to remove a section of floor which exposed this:

The offending beam is the one with the small section bored out of it - this was our test drill hole which identified that the beam was in fact there...

So we have called it a day but tomorrow we will reinforce this floor beam with some supports to either side and then cut through it in order to make way for the flue. If the rain will let up for a couple of hours tomorrow we might even get the flue through to the outside.

In the meantime I need to finish the hearth which could be another challenge in itself... According to Wikipedia (who never lies), Travertine is actually quite a soft stone so it remains to be seen if we will be able to position the feet of the heater one at a time on to the stones as we tile around the unit...

Oh the joys - it will be great when it is done though!

Until tomorrow, thank goodness for long weekends!

Wall down - wood-heater to go in!

The builders had a productive morning and took out our beam with a minimum of fuss. After all the thinking and deciding and planning it felt like it was almost too easy in the end... We went off to work in the morning and came home to find the loungeroom had doubled in size!

Here are some pics of our new, super sized loungeroom and the beam that saved the day:

 

Many thanks to our builder, the wonderful Luke Ferguson for taking care of this aspect of the job for us.

Our plan had always been to put in additional heating because contrary to popular belief it really does get quite cold in our neck of the woods in winter! We decided on a wood heater and then went shopping. Initially we had considered a 2-door one that would go through the wall between the lounge and dining rooms but ended up changing our minds. We then considered a second hand one and were lurking on eBay trying to find a bargain. We ended up giving up on the second hand approach after seeing the prices the second hand units were fetching - almost retail, even on heaters that are 10+ years old... It seemed crazy so we decided to go for a brand new heater. We ended up choosing the Mega by Nectre woodheaters. They are Australian made (thanks Adelaide) and they make the heaters with your choice of a pedestal (no thanks) or cute little legs (yes please). The other benefit is that it is Australia's largest slow combustion heater and puts out an impressive 40kW of heating power! Just what we need when the weather gets chilly!

So we bought our little heater and then had to figure out how to get it home! Enter our new trailer which came in to our lives via the Local Paper - the Central Coast Express Advocate:

It's a beauty and will really come in handy for all the renovations we have planned. I am surprised we coped for so long without one, actually!

So installing the wood-heater became the objective of the long weekend. We even collected wood from our local wood supplier www.thewoodshed.com.au and were very impressed with the quality of the Box and Ironbark - thanks Jason and Trevor :)

With a good supply of wood at the ready and a trailer for transportation, we trundled off to Central Coast Bricks to collect the heater and flue kit on Saturday morning. Then it was off to the local tile suppliers to choose the tiles for our hearth. We had decided to go for a light white/cream colour and took some samples of Travertine from one store and then ended up buying a few boxes of a floor tile from another store. We tend to believe that choices are a good thing!

So we arrived home full of excitement and realised we were going to struggle to get the heater off the trailer and up the steps in to our house. The unit weighs about 120kg and with only Ola and I on lifting duty it was never going to happen. We rallied the troops and called in favours from some lovely neighbours and got the wood-heater in to the loungeroom:

We also found ourselves with a lot of components of the flue kit, since it needs to go through the ground floor ceiling, through the upstairs and then through the roof:

It's kind of like Ikea but with no instructions... How hard can it be?

Knocking down the Wall!

We are knocking down the wall between the lounge room and what was formerly the study/bar room. First we removed the bar as we have no use for it and we intend to take out the wall between these two rooms. The problem was that we found the wall was a supporting wall, so we have had to engage a builder to do this for us, from an insurance perspective... But in true DIY fashion, we figured we may as well take off the existing plaster, cornicing etc to spare the builder this task and to save money as well! I have to give the credit to Ola for doing all of this work, as he was working like a tornado and I was busy in the kitchen and before I knew it, he had the job done!

Here are some pics of the job in progress:

 Starting to remove the Gyprock and Blue Board - making a little bit of a mess...

 Thrilled with the progress - this demolition stuff is fun!

 Took down the large format photo of our local beach - next step is to remove the sandstone feature wall...

 Little Indiana always comes through and inspects at each stage of the project - a true foreman!

 Under the plaster board we found old wall paper. This was probably in place in the earliest iteration of the house, back in the early 1960's. This wall would have been the divider between the lounge and the bedroom in the earliest version of the floorplan. Fascinating!

Indi comes through for another inspection!

 And that's a wrap - all the plaster and wall lining is removed. The cornice came off in one solid piece which is great. This means we can probably re-use it, which is a good recycling effort! Now we have a large pile of mess to deal with but essentially the frame is ready for the builders to remove tomorrow.

So the work was done and dinner was sizzling away in the pan and we were starving and so looking forward to sitting down for a lovely meal. Did I mention it was the coldest night of the year so far, so we had the heater cranking... As Ola stood back to admire his work, suddenly - the power went out in the whole house...
What happened?!?! Did we blow a fuse?
Quick, light some candles, find the torch...
Check the metre box, all seems ok but a very strong smell of sulphur...
We had to accept that we weren't going to get any power for the night so ate a semi-cold dinner by candle light and brushed our teeth by candle light and went to bed! It was FREEZING!
In the morning, our fantastic electrician came over by about 7:30am and found that there was a fault in the Energy Australia barge so while he was here he put in a couple of new power points and will be replacing all our ceramic fuses with safety switches. In the meantime Energy Australia are on their way out to (hopefully) accept liability and replace the barge.
As it turned out, the fact that the power went out was a complete coincidence and had nothing whatsover to do with the fact that Ola had played with some wiring when he was taking out the plaster. Quite a relief!
More updates soon...

It's been ages!

Hi there - long time no post, I feel very slack!

Lots has been happening. Where to begin... Well, we have ordered a new freestanding cooker/stove/oven which is coming in about 5 weeks. We have also bought a new fridge from some friends who are moving overseas. So both of these items have been the catalyst to progress the kitchen reno along further. The new design has been developed and we are going to have to start moving things along in order to be ready for early July when our new appliances are ready... We also sourced some new solid timber cupboard door fronts for the kitchen cupboards, so these will tie in nicely with the new look.

We are in the process of buying a slow combustion wood heater also, which will go in the lounge. Hopefully placing our order tomorrow.

This week the wall in the loungeroom is being knocked down, so more on that and some exciting photos soon.

I am going to be posting a lot more regularly now, so watch this space!