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...