A Lady and A Gentleman of Property

Well, hello again. It's been a while since we updated this blog. Unfortunately last year ended up being a bit overwhelming, especially with a hard deadline to finish making our house livable and move in. We ended up packing at the last minute on Anzac Day, still stuffing things into boxes as the movers started putting stuff into the truck! And then trying to get some sleep, exhausted, while people across the road in the pub were living up the holiday. But we survived (barely) and took the rest of the year to just to catch our breaths.

We got the floors in and polished, and a bunch of little things finished off with a great deal of help from Andrea's dad (isn't it wonderful to have handy relatives who are retired and can spend a month helping out with DIY fixit tasks?). Not only did he help with polishing the floors, but he leveled the back patio and relaid the pavers, fixed up the shade cover over the back porch, regrouted the bathroom, patched up our front door, painted, and helped supervise and assist our tradesmen when we couldn't be there. Thanks, Steve!

So now, for catch up photos. Here's what our living room looks like today, in a very anomalous tidy state.

There's still plenty to do, like get proper mantels around the fireplaces, get actual lamp shades instead of naked bulbs, curtains on the windows, some built in shelving, never mind the hideous state of our furniture. But we have to keep reminding ourselves of how far we've come. Compare the photo above with a similar view of the house when we first bought it.

Whilst juggling so many balls, naturally one happened to drop. This time it was the blogging ball. On the bright side, however, the main part of the renovation looks to be done in time for us to move in! Progress, not perfection.

Not long now! Hopefully we will have a more detailed update soon. Until then, check out the photos on Flickr.

When we bought it:

Today:

Note: photos pending Andrea being able to clean the brick dust off her camera lense! Eek! Photos have now been included where possible.

A lot's happened in the past couple of days, some of it a big lesson on how to communicate clearly with our tradespeople. Friday morning opened with a panicked call to Adam from our electrician. We had planned earlier this week to have the builders get started leveling the joists in preparation for laying the floor. However, we didn't want them to put the actual plywood panels that would help support the floorboards in yet, as there were a few little things to finish up before that point. Unfortunately, our OK somehow translated to them preparing to put down the plywood while the electrician showed up to finish his last few bits of wiring. All this while we were both on our way to work!

Fortunately it mostly got straightened out. Since there was a good chunk of preparation work to be done by the carpenters, our electrician had plenty of time to sort out what he needed to do (primarily finishing the phone and cable connections, pinning down the earth wire, and a few bits and pieces for the alarm system).

However, although things worked out well for him, we still had one piece of work left to do as well. Even though we had the electricians chase out wall panels for our surround sound system, we had to sort installation of the speaker cables ourselves. Initially we thought we could install empty conduit connected up under the floor and use a plumber's snake or something similar to feed the cable through after the floor was installed. While this seemed pretty clever when we thought it up, we now only had Friday evening and early Saturday morning to test it out. No pressure!

We ran out of light on Friday evening. Overcast skies and the power still out at the house meant that we got pretty much nowhere before we had dinner. So literally at the crack of dawn on Valentine's day, we were switching off the alarm clock and making our way to the house to begin the Great Surround Sound Wiring Experiment. It was a grey rainy day and we began walking to the house around 6am. So romantique.

The electricians left us with plenty of PVC conduit to work with, and after a few experiments with a heat gun we found it was really easy to heat up and bend any way we wanted to get all our speaker outlets connected with where we wanted our amp to go. When the carpenters showed up to start work, we bribed them with coffee so they'd do the bedrooms first and buy us more time to finish our experiment. (This was actually not necessary, as our builders are truly Good People, but we figured it didn't hurt to sweeten the deal.)

We got all of our conduit hooked up reasonably quickly, but we were worried about whether we'd really be able to easily feed the wires through all the bends and turns in the conduit. Once the plywood was glued and nailed into place, that was it. We'd no longer have access to the wiring. So Andrea went off to Bunnings with Penny to get the new fence pickets, and Adam went off to The Hi-Fi Trader to get speaker cable.

The Great Surround Sound Wiring Experiment was a failure. Due to the time crunch and the uncertainty, we didn't want to risk testing out the plumber's snake tactic, and we found that the cable itself would get stuck at the second major curve in the conduit. So we ripped out our PVC artistry and fixed the speaker cables into their wall plates. Upshot: speaker wiring is already done and just needs face plates. Disappointment: our sound system won't be as flexible or reconfigurable as we want.

The other issue with getting the plywood subfloor done was that we also needed to make sure we could hook up the gas line to our second fireplace. When we purchased the house, the front room's fireplace was wood burning and the second room was equipped with a natural gas burner. We had friends who had a gas fireplace sitting in their shed that they weren't using. Since a gas fireplace can be quite costly we were really pleased to find they were happy to just give it to us (thanks, Manuel & Gabi!). So Saturday morning we came over and picked up the very heavy fireplace insert and drove it back to the house to get ready for installation. Fortunately we were able to get a plumber on short notice to extend the gas pipe over to the other fireplace.

Since we had such an early start on Saturday we let ourselves sleep in a little on Sunday. After noon, Penny came back over to help us with our new fence pickets that she and Andrea had picked out at Bunnings the day before. Since the carpenter had to come back on Monday to finish a few hours' work on the subfloor, we managed to sweet talk him once more into installing the pickets on the fence and putting together a new gate (see? truly Good People). We pulled off the old unloved, knobby topped pickets, and painted primer on the fence. Since the cheapest pickets were untreated pine, we got to try out some of our nifty borax-based pest control solution. It's much safer to work with than arsenic and all it involves is dissolving the powder in warm water and painting on to the raw wood. After the pickets dried we painted primer on those two, and finished up just as it started to sprinkle again.

Penny also did us a great favour by picking up some special stove blacking and beginning work on restoring both our fireplaces to their former glory. It's amazing what a difference it makes when some rust is scrubbed of and shiny new black paint is applied.

The week ahead is an exciting one. On Monday the last of the subfloor will be in place; only a few small pieces remain to be put down. It's already looking like a real house again! And of course with the help of a nail gun the new pickets will be installed on the fence. Then Tuesday our renderers start. Initially we had planned to start last week, but at the last minute our builder recommended a renderer he'd worked with before who gave us an awesomely low quote that we couldn't refuse.

Also coming up next week, since the subfloor is in we'll need to arrange delivery of our timber floorboards. They will need to sit in the house for at least a week so that the wood can acclimatise to the environment there and reduce the amount of stretching or shrinking it might do after it's installed to prevent the boards from buckling. We also need to order our new window for the kitchen.

Once the rendering's been completed, our next two major tasks are to have the cornices installed and arrange to have the electricians come in and install all the faceplates and switches. Hopefully then we can have lights again!

Even though it was a harrowing weekend, things have really turned the corner. On the plus side, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. One thing we learned though, was that once things get rolling, they can move really quickly! Clear communication, good planning, and staying on top of all the little things are really important to preventing panicked crying sessions at 5:30 am on Valentine's Day (of course the same can be said for relationships, too).

A week like this one makes you understand how randomly lucky you can be. We woke up at the start of the weekend with what at first seemed like "normal" reports of bad bushfires that usually plague the Australian summer. Then the body count just kept getting higher, and higher, until the news media began declaring it the worst natural disaster in Australia's recorded history.

We found some extra room in our renovation budget to help out those who have not only lost their homes, but family members, pets, possessions, and a sense of safety and wellbeing. Hopefully you can, too.

Unfortunately, since we are nowhere near the worst fires (even the ones in NSW are quite a way away from us), there wasn't much else we could do other than exercise the credit card. So we pressed on with the last pieces of demolition and clean up work that were pending before the walls could be rendered.

Progress

Last week the most significant thing that started was that the electricians began rewiring the house. When we pulled out the timber panelling and trim, we necessarily had to remove all the switches and power outlets, because they were not already correctly channeled into the walls. We put together a plan for where we wanted all the power outlets, switches, alarm sensors, and anything else related to the wiring. The first thing the electricians did was chase the bricks, cutting grooves where the wiring and wall plates were going to go.

The next thing was to put pieces of conduit into the grooves for the wiring. That way, wires could be threaded through the conduit from under the floor. When the wall is rendered with cement, this means that the wires can still be moved without damaging the rendering. Finally, wall plates are put on the walls where power outlets and switches will go after the rendering was done.

We also had to do one major piece of work ourselves. The front part of the house was originally divided into four small rooms: two bedrooms and two living areas. We didn't really see the point in having two small living areas when we could have one large open space. However, you can't always just randomly remove walls. First we had our builder check whether the wall was load bearing at all. It wasn't holding up anything significantly structural, but there were some rafters above the ceiling that rested on a beam at the top of the wall. This meant we'd need to leave a lintel in place to help keep those rafters supported.

Our builder removed the top 3 courses of bricks and installed the lintel for us. Then it was up to us to remove the actual wall. For safety purposes, and also because we wanted to preserve the bricks, we couldn't just take a sledge hammer to the wall. Sunday was spent cleaning up all the demolition waste in the back yard and tearing down the wall, brick by brick.

It was very hot that day, nearing 30°C (almost 85°F), and right around noon the neighbourhood had another major power outage (there had been one a couple of weekends before as well). Fortunately we had some friends to help us get started. We invited a few people over for our first "renovation party." Friends brought over a small barbecue, and we bought some food (after a lengthy walk to the only nearby shop that had electricity). They helped us stack all the timber, carpet, and other bits and pieces from the demolition into the skip we rented. We were lucky to have such helpful friends, although they got to go home early and rest up while we had to keep going well into the evening, finishing the wall demolition.

Although it went relatively quickly to remove the wall one brick at a time, there were still a lot of bricks, and we didn't end up going home (very tired and very sore) until 8:30pm.

Lessons Learned

• Sometimes an early start is a good thing. Removing bricks in a dark house with no electricity sucks. We had a 7 hour day that started after noon.

• If you can trick your friends into helping you, it really makes a world of difference. Even if they ony just make your lunch for you (and we got even more out of them!) A hearty round of thanks to last weekend's lifesavers, Carl, Snega, and Dave M, whose help and company made a tough day much more pleasant and drastically reduced a large workload.

• Safety is paramount if you are doing your own work in a construction zone. Cleaning up the timber we had to watch out for nails and splinters. Adam hit his hand quite a few times chiseling out the bricks in the wall. And we both slipped on one of the boards covering the joists (with a near miss for a broken thumb). We'll be nursing our bruises for the rest of the week, and that was with being relatively careful.

What's Next

The next few things on our list mostly involve our tradies. The builder will need to start getting the joists ready to lay the floors. While that's going on the renderer will start work on the walls.

There are a few things we'll need to do as well. We found a borax-based product at our new favourite shop, The Natural Paint Place, that we can paint onto our joists to discourage further termite activity. Borax is harmless to people, but if termites eat it they will be poisoned. That should keep the wood under the floor from being gnawed on any further.

We also want to clear out as much as possible all of the brick dust and rubble that collected on the ground, to encourage good air flow under the floor boards. We also still need to pick out our cornices for installation after the walls are done!

One little indulgent thing we decided to do alongside the electrical wiring was to get extra chasing, conduit, and wall plates for our surround sound system. That way all our speaker wire can be run tidily under the floor and plug directly into the wall. We found that The Hi-Fi Trader have custom face plates with banana plugs on them that are just what we need.

The final thing we need to do is get ready to have the floorboards and the window delivered. The boards will need to sit in the house for at least a week in order to acclimatise. And we will be replacing a leaky, dodgy large window over the kitchen. it will take several weeks for the custom ordered window to be built and arrive.