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:

A minor change can yield a big improvement!

Over the weekend we didn't feel that we achieved as much as we had hoped. There were a lot of chores to do around the house - washing, cleaning etc. I gave the oven a thorough clean - it was terribly grotty. I removed all the shelves and racks and soaked them for a few hours before scrubbing with steel wool back to shiny chrome. The inside of the oven also got a complete overhaul, as well as a thorough clean of the kitchen cupboards and the remainder of the house. The venitian blinds in the bedroom were also filthy - I had bought a tool from Spotlight to use on the timber slats to dust them, but I found this was pretty ineffectual, so ended up vaccuuming and dusting them individually which was time consuming... We have also had a return of the insect hoardes, so some of the weekend was devoted to stocking up on insect killing apparatus - we need to bomb for fleas and cockroaches again this week - apparently it is a job which takes ongoing maintenance... Next weekend we will spray a pyretheum barrier around the house to prevent reinfestation. At $14 x 3 pack, the process of bombing is really expensive, given we need nearly $60 worth of bombs to do the whole house :( Welcome to the tropics...!

But in amongst all of this we also managed to find the time to get some renovations done!

Ola used the router and cut a series of long, straight grooves in to the chipboard on the floor upstairs. He is cutting in deeper than we had originally planned, but considering we will be painting over the surface, we have decided it probably needs to be quite deep to give the finished effect we are looking for. This process is a lot slower than we had hoped as he really needs a good, solid piece of straight timber to use as a guide, in order to route the groove against this line. What we need is a long piece measuring more than 4 metres - this is the width of the room, so it sounds like we will be off to Bunnings this weekend...

I have continued to prepare the main wall in the Dining Room & Kitchen for paint. I used the sander to knock down the sample patches I had painted on the wall when we were choosing our colour, using fine grade sand paper on the electric sander. Then I used the floor sanding head with 180 grit on a long handle and sanded down the wall to take away the shine that was still present within the existing paint. Then I washed the wall down with a strong sugar soap solution - due to proximity to the kitchen, this wall was quite greasy and needed a good clean. Next steps are a coat of grey undercoat and then on with Antique White USA - remember we are covering a deep ochre coloured wall with white, so preparation is the key.

The final but most effective piece of work done this weekend was the removal of the hutch on the kitchen bench. Ola said it had to go from the day we moved in, but I hadn't been able to completely see his vision. He was right - it looks so much better gone!! Basically the hutch was designed to sit on top of the bench and to house the microwave, kettle and toaster. As we don't have a microwave and I have taken to using a whistling kettle on the stove top, the hutch was more or less empty. It also closed in the kitchen away from the dining room and restricted the amount of sunlight that would fill the kitchen. As you can see from the before and after photos below, removing the hutch has made the whole area feel more open plan, sunny and user friendly. It also opens up the bench space to sitting at, whereas before there was really nowhere to sit and enjoy. Removing the hutch was quite simple - we took out a few screws and broke the silicone seal between the hutch and the wall. In terms of time and effort it was really a minor change but the improvement factor was huge - just the kind of outcome we enjoy!

On the downside, there is now a section of wall which is not tiled, but we will address this once we decide what to do with a splashback or retiled section.

Ola also prepared the shower in the ensuite for a coat of flowcoat, which we will do next weekend. This involved stripping back the waterproofing agent which the previous owners had applied over the tiles on the floor in their attempt to stop the shower from leaking. The decision was taken not to flowcoat last weekend as we may have to sleep in a different room if the smell of the fibreglass fumes is too strong and we weren't prepared for this last weekend... Looking forward to seeing what happens on this front this weekend...

Upstairs - the great carpet removal!

We began with carpet - carpet on the stairs and carpet in the upstairs rooms. Old carpet, threadbare carpet, light coloured carpet with marks from age. Not nice carpet! So we decided to rip it up - completely. Underneath is chipboard - we have decided to paint this to look like floorboards. It will continue our white on white colour scheme and is a much more cost effective option for the time being. Basically we will use the router to dig a series of long, straight grooves in to the chipboard to represent the individual floor boards lying up against each other. Then we will use a combination of grey and white paints to give a limewashed, whitewashed look to the boards. These will then be finished with a coat of Intergrain Ultra Floor which is a water based Polyurethane in a satin finish. We are not looking for a shiny, glossy floor finish with this - we are hoping for a smart, painted not polished appearance. We will also be painting the stairs in the same finish. For the time being this will suffice - we may eventually look for timber veneers to lay on the stairs but this can come in time...

So - up with the carpet! Under the carpet was a layer of very old, disintegrating underlay and a lot of dust and dirt. As Ola said: "now you can see why we don't want carpet"... The little timber slats with nails on them are still fixed to the edges of the room and to the stair treads - these are coming off with a crowbar and a hammer. The chipboard underneath is in reasonable condition. The floor itself seems to drop part way across the rumpus room, there are some repaired cracks in the wall to testify to this shifting of the extension over time. There is not much we can do about this at this stage except be aware of it.

Here are some pics of the work in progress:

Starting to remove the carpet in sections - the underlay is the black roll...

The room has dropped toward the left hand side of the sliding door...

The carpet as it was...

Rolled up and ready to go.

Threadbare carpet

Rolling away the old carpet and underlay - exposing the chipboard below.

A chipboard floor.

The pieces of chipboard have lines in between them already - this will be enhanced by our work with the router.

Chipboard steps

Need to remove the panels of timber with nails before sanding and painting these stairs.