Queenslander

It’s the little things

| Jessica

We’ve been granted the world’s longest mortgage to extend and renovate Harry’s Money Pit! Huzzah. Now there’s a whole lotta money in the bank burning the world’s biggest hole in my pocket while we plan our big renovations. In the meantime, we’re getting a few “little things” done around the house to make our lives just that little bit easier.

Firstly: I’ve ordered a new automated garage tilt door and automated gate opener. These are from Doors Direct, and we’ve ordered a timber-batten version like the image below, because we’ve decided we can’t afford, nor really need, to build under the house:

garage door timber-battens-1200x900

Once painted it will look a treat, although I haven’t yet received the quote (but they were totally on it! Might only take a week to make and install, given their speed of service thus far). For the last 5 years we’ve been getting out of our cars, opening the front gate and garage door by hand, driving in or reversing out of the garage, then doing it all again. Time to save a bit of time. We live on a busy street and need privacy, security and dog protection, hence the fence and gate and garage door ballet that is our life (sometimes we just park our car round the corner because doing this 3 times a day gets old fast).

The other thing we’re doing right now is ordering plantation shutters for the bedroom and front room. I’m not a fan of curtains in our hot, humid climate, where material smells/fades/gets mouldy. And this is a thing we’d promised ourselves once I’d finished painting the bedroom. Well, I haven’t finished painting the bedroom, but this sure as hell will put the boot in my butt to get this done! They’re coming over next week, and it’ll be fun working out how many we’ll need, as we have banks of windows in each room. Are these counted as singular or grouped?

plantation shutters the blind space

We’re also getting quotes on the house painting of the exterior: the guys doing the job next door (who are doing a BEAUTIFUL job), are coming over tomorrow to chat. Of course, they can’t do much until we get the various outside bits done that need doing.

OH! And we’re ordering air-con for the bedroom and studio. I’ve had it with humid summers. And I don’t think I can get through another summer without some kind of night-time drying system. (I’ve found out that instead of using the “cool” setting, if I use the “dry” setting on the air con, the temperature setting can be higher and still feel just as cool as the “cool” setting, saving us moolah.) So of course we’re putting in solar. What with these dry winters and hotter-than-average-temperature summers, it makes sense to take pressure off the grid, and reduce our bills at the same time, while still enjoying some cool inside air.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll order some new ceiling fans and inset ceiling lights for the bedrooms and lounge. Maybe.

It’s the little things…

OMG. The bank just gave us some renovation money.

| Jessica

After 6 years, a mini renovation and more trips to Bunnings than I can count, it is done. We have been lent the funds to renovate our house.

Aaaaahhhh$#(%*&)@(#%&9ut18u6[0iqkmv0986i5$$$$#@&%$#$#*%# !

(That, if you will, is an image of me running about the house with my shirt over my head)

We have yet to determine how much, and Mr Bank Man is working out the details, but he has offered us enough money for us to definitely add the new kitchen, living and deck extension. With a squeeze we might be able to manage the garage and a poured concrete slab behind the garage for an extra room, laundry and half-bath downstairs. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Of course, it also all depends on whether Mr Bank Man thinks we can pay off the loan, too. Not a problem. We got this.

Ooh, I can’t hardly wait!

 

Other June Activities

| Jessica

Hubby went overseas for a time in June, and I spent his absence doing some things. The back yard has remained mostly tidy after our mammoth demolition day, although it now resembles a mud pit due to the stupid amounts of rain we received this week.

In the meantime, we had also cleaned out all the rubbish crap under the house and now we’re left with just the crap from our former lives. Now that I’ve finally sent off my taxes (I know, I know, 3 years late), I’m going to get stuck into the various Jesus rooms, and rid ourselves of all the stuff that can be sold on Gumtree. (Australian eBay, it’s a kind of garage sale for those who sell stuff from time to time.) Hubby and I were both married before, and I have lots of stuff during my time as a single parent that I need to organise, while we each have heaps of old paperwork in massive plastic boxes to clear out.

However, I’ve actually done a few little things to make our lives easier. Firstly, I bought that Wagner paint sprayer, and while it’s not at all perfect, it certainly made my life painting the ceilings a lot easier. I’ve painted the spare room ceiling, which means the room is now nearly entirely finished bar a beautiful Indigenous art work and a couple of round mirrors I left in Melbourne:

2017-06-11 20.01.17

2017-06-12 16.29.18

I painted the bookcase you see there a fresh white gloss enamel and covered the back in a rather divine, if rather floral, wallpaper I bought from Bunnings. Mind you I used PVA glue to attach it because I was too impatient to return to the shop to buy the forgotten wallpaper glue so there’s seriously no going back!

I also (you may have espied), COLOUR CODED the books. Yes. I hang my head in shame. I can see why it works so well in these spaces. I apologise to all who I have previously dissed in the past.

I also did some furniture restoration. This was great fun, and I learned a bunch of new skills too. I re-upholstered a drop-in seat with some beautiful blue cloth, and repaired and painted the small chest below. It was in pretty terrible condition, but after some repairs to the back and a new leg, some sanding, paint, and new drawer pulls, I’m very happy with the end result, even though the bottom drawer doesn’t open (because NOTHING was square)!

2017-06-28 12.30.51-2

 

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2017-06-03 12.56.04

I painted the ceiling in the hall, not that one can tell as there is zero lighting in the hall. And I have finished painting the lounge room and entryway. Huzzah! Our lounge room now looks bright and clean, and the ceiling is a whole lot cleaner now that it has had a full coat of bright white paint:

2017-06-03 14.32.20

I love Australian Indigenous art, and the wall painting is “My Country” by Nellie Marks Nakamurra. Our rather dilapidated 17-year old couch is from Freedom (originally cost me $3000 back in 2000, now a new one costs: $3000. If that.). It needs a good oil and spruce but the leather is finally starting to split in parts, and I’m SO looking forward to saving up for a new one! The cushions on the left next to the vintage lamp are from West Elm, the old tapestry one on the right from Laura Ashley and the fishy one from C.A.M.

It’s now August and rather warm, and I’ve not yet talked about July yet, so I’ll publish another post very soon.

To those in the Northern Hemisphere, I hope you’re enjoying the last of summer! And to my southern hemisphere friends, I hope the winter has been mild and wet, because I feel an El Nino coming on!

 

So it’s 4 months between posts.

| Jessica

Don’t judge me. It’s not that I haven’t been working on the house: it’s that I hightailed it to Melbourne as soon as my teaching year was over and spent a blissful six weeks just hanging with my homies. AKA my family. We actually like to hang out together. I know. Odd. (Also took the opportunity to redecorate the beachhouse for presents for mum and dad. Which now looks AWESOME.)

Anyhoo. So remember when last year I was moaning about the house being too noisy? Well it still is, but an amazing, wonderful thing happened. My daughter moved out. Yep. She and her partner were handed a house across town and she leapt at it. So she’s been gone since Australia Day/ Invasion Day and guess what I’ve been doing? !

Painting, y’all. Painting. While I wait for the agonisingly long time it’s taking for my iphone to upload its photos to my dear old, tired MacBook (now that’s a design story for another time), let me tell you what I’ve been up to these last few weeks.

At the time I was moaning and bitching about the noise, we got a bunch of real estate agents through to look at the house. Turns out we could get a good price for it, but there is an ever so slight correction in the overheated Australian property market and I think to suggest we’d make $1,000,000 on our little home (and land) is a bit of an overreach. And now we’ve had a bit of a mind change about wanting to sell, because life, the agents keep bugging me and I’ve had to ignore their calls.

And then I went away for a long, long time. So I’m back home, daughter’s out, and now WE HAVE A SPARE ROOM. In truth it’s not really a spare room because my step-daughter needs it, but she has to share with visitors now. Sorry not sorry.

So of course, being one to grab an opportunity when I see an empty room, I PAINTED it. And now it’s beautiful. I’ve complained before about the length of time and effort it takes to paint VJs, haven’t I? Suffice to say, once again hideous. But the result is stunning. The room is south facing, which in Australia means the cold side, but which in hot QLD means the comfortable side. I painted the walls with 3 coats of Dulux Vivid White, and finished the woodwork with 2 coats of Dulux Natural White Enamel. God it looks good. Then, and this is where I give myself the biggest pat on the back, I McGyver’d the ceiling fan. It was an old rattan-inset wooden-bladed thing. Dusty, a horrible cream colour, it had a horrible amber glass light shade and was ERGLY. Parts of the blades were coming apart because old, and really it needed to go. But we can’t afford to do that right now, because then there’s a whole thing with lights and electricity we need to deal with and we can’t afford it. So.

I spray painted it with 2 cans of British Paints White Satin Spray paint. I glued and clamped the dodgy fan blades back together, and replaced the light shade with a simple round white one from Beacon Lighting. Sometimes, I amaze even myself. The darned fan looks like new.

Then, and this is where it all gets a little bit exxie, I bought a double bed for the daughter-of-step (and visitors), and now we have a beautiful guest room decorated in shades of wood, white and blue. It looks amazing. I’m about to decorate with a mirror wall, (no, NOT that sort of mirror wall), in which all our old mirrors and some new ones will be artfully placed on one of the walls to give the impression of even more space in there. I’ve bought a bunch of cheap vintage mirrors in gold plaster frames, and we already have some regular wooden ones, so one whole wall will be devoted to this decorating extremism.

Also in my painting adventures, I finally painted the woodwork in our ensuite and WIR. While it was all given undercoats etc, I hadn’t quite gotten around to finishing it all off. So I used the hottest ever recorded months of January and February to do this. Because I’m a masochist. And because I like sweating into MY EYES. But the effort was worth it (of course).

The NEXT thing I did, because my daughter moved out and we gave her all the crappy stuff under the house we no longer wanted; well there’s this thing in Australia we have called the nonburnable rubbish collection (AKA the hard rubbish collection, AKA the “we collect your shit so you don’t have to take it to the rubbish dump” collection). Yep, you guessed it. I’ve been clearing out the basement. When I say basement, what I mean is the ground floor of the house that is open to the elements and only has timber battens protecting all the stuff from the weather, thieves etc. It gets wet, and dusty, and dirty and all the things are not really protected.

We offloaded 2 broken fridges, some old broken chairs, a bunch of old electronic equipment, heaps of broken Ikea shelves and stuff, and then I cleaned nearly all the corners under our house. And swept the concrete. And now I feel lighter and cleaner. It feels SO GOOD, y’all!

I have to reconfigure my workspaces under there (I have 2 workbenches: 2!), and clean up some more bits and pieces, but OH BOY was it good to finally do this.

So in the next few weeks, I’ll be painting the ghastly 2nd bathroom a fresh white, cleaning out and painting the Oh Jesus room, and painting the rest of the house interior. Only 5 rooms to go, and the entire ceiling.

Oh yeah. Remember how I fell off that ladder last year and had a cry? Well, we offloaded that old thing and bought a brand new 2.4m ladder with paint tray, and a trestle board. Imma painting the ceiling now. Even though I don’t want to.

Y’all, my iphone and MacBook have decided that uploading 700 photos all at once is a bit difficult, so I’m going to suggest you take a look at my Instagram account, @brivegashome and you’ll see all the great photos there of my house and such. Because it appears the world will end before I get to upload any pictures from my phone!

Have a great week and I’ll be posting more frequently now.

Cheerio!

Jess

Um. In which I confess our house is too noisy.

| Jessica

I think I’ve finally cracked it. I love love love our crazy house. I love its weird nooks and crannies, its period charm. I especially love my WIR and new ensuite bathroom. However, I reached the end of my rope recently when I returned home from an extended stay in my home state, where I had been sleeping in quiet bedrooms like a very happy baby. The traffic noise on our busy street just got to me.

DH and I are having trouble getting enough deep sleep, as our house, on a busy road, is made of wood and tin and has air cracks everywhere. Typical of a stilt home. We can’t get our bedroom quiet enough for a good sleep. So on the weekend I started looking in earnest at houses on quieter streets, with the requisite number of box rooms for our myriad children. I think I found one. It’s a mostly unrenovated Queenslander in very good condition, with a near-new (albeit dog ugly) kitchen, good sized back deck and three separate living spaces. Less backyard, but that’s not a drama. So this week is VERY OVERDUE TAX week. I have to do this to see how much I have earned, so that banks won’t look at me funny when I say, no, I’ve not done my tax in three years! (This is a distressing but typical thing that I do). Also, given that I have a company, I will be compiling SIX tax returns. Bad, bad me. But it must be done.

Because Harry’s Money Pit, beautiful and quirky that it is, is suddenly getting too noisy to manage. And a home needs to be a nest, a place of rest, and a sanctuary. With traffic roaring up and down the hill all day, this ol’ house is not the oasis of calm I need it to be.

If the banks (plural because we will schlepp, I can promise you) give us their blessing and their money, we will spruce up the exterior with a new paint job in that white and black thing I was talking about. We will replace all the window hoods with fresh new tin, and repair the back deck cover and put on a new UV rated perspex canopy, and fix one of the unrenovated side exterior walls. We will spruce up the interior with a fresh paint job on the ceilings and woodwork where needed, and insert a new wall in the Oh Jesus room.

In the garden we will get a proper gardener to come in and trim the two trees of overhang, and repair the turf at the rear, as well as clear the yard of detritus. We will pave both walkways down the sides of the house with cheap concrete pavers so the walkways are easy to access.

In the downstairs we will clear out most of the stuff and put it into a storage facility, or, if new house happens first, into the new house.

If we don’t move I’m tempted to do all this stuff anyway, blow the budget! It’s all needed.

 

 

Well, hello!

| Jessica

Oh my word, has it really been 2 months between blog posts? Well, sometimes life gets in the way.

It’s been 2 months since I fell off the ladder and I finally figured out why: the ladder is a bit crap, and the floor is uneven at just the spot that I fell down. When painting the second coat I discovered this and got my daughter to hold the ladder for the 2 minutes it took to paint that section. Then I got the hella off of that ladder. There are jobs I gave up attempting: I’ve given up trying to paint the ceiling. It’s nearly 11 foot high and I just can’t manage it without buying some serious scaffolding equipment. I’ll hire a professional painter. I’ve also (for the time being) given up trying to paint the windows and architraves. Not that I can’t: it’s just a messy business, what with sanding and filling and gapping and all that stuff and I just can’t bring myself to be bothered right now.

One needs a break from hard yakka.

On the fun side: I’ve been slowly upgrading our bedroom furnishings. Our bedroom is SO much more inviting now, and it still has 2 chairs, 2 bedside tables and 2 large chests-of-drawers in it, plus a queen-sized bed. I’ve added a Chinoiserie stool similar to this:

china stool

I bought that lovely dove-grey Belgium linen doona set I was coveting:

belgian linen doona

I paired it with a beautiful set of duck egg blue Sheridan sheets in 700-thread count Egyptian cotton (on sale, of course!). The picture below is actually of white sheets, but it’s appears about the right shade with a cursory glance.

sheets

The blue and grey complement each other very well. The grey could be paired with just about any colour as it is quite a neutral stone, but a blue themed bedroom (SO restful) is my preferred look.

IMG_3455

These photos were taken before purchase of new blue sheets.

In the next few posts I’ll show you some photos of my newly painted lounge-room, and the adventures I’ve been having with French-polishing. Adios for now!

 

 

 

Yet. More. Painting.

| Jessica

DH (darling hubby) is away for the week so I’m taking the opportunity to paint some of the rooms long overdue for a new paint job. I’m doing the master bedroom, lounge room and step daughter’s room this week. 

In the lounge room, we replaced an ill-placed set of French doors with a new wooden wall which until yesterday was completely raw. (Don’t worry, we’re repurposing the doors.)

I undercoated the new wall with Dulux 3-in-1 prepcoat and today gave the whole room its first topcoat in acrylic low sheen Dulux Antique White. It’s brighter than the Dulux Sand Dune half strength coat that was here when we moved in, but still works a treat with our brown furniture, and looks chic and sort of French. 

I’ll confess I’m a lazy painter. The original wall paint is only 5 years old and aside from a brief dust down I didn’t bother washing the walls. Naughty, I know. My experience tells me washing VJs is a huge waste of time. They are so crusty and wonky from previous shonky paintwork that it looks fine with a fresh coat of paint. In fact, because I fix the gaps it usually looks better. 

I’m also painting my stepdaughter’s room, as she shares the VJ wall, which is single skin. Her room is still bright and fresh with Dulux Vivid White. A morning spent gapping her room with various timber bog and selleys no more gaps and her first coat of topcoat goes on in the am. 

However, I’m kinda doing this arse about. I’ve bought a Dulux semigloss acrylic in Vivid White for the ceiling, but I’m putting off doing the ceilings. Because it’s a shitty job. Also, I have to sand the lounge room ceiling a bit because the last painter was even lazier than me and didn’t remove the flaking paint. I also have to gap the bedroom ceiling because that too had a set of French doors removed, and the architraves were pulled back from the wall to fit the new wooden VJs. 

So today I gapped one wall and painted another. I’m a bit slow. Tomorrow I need to give the lounge its final coat, then do the first coat in the bedrooms. A long day, but I only have until Friday to do the 3 rooms plus the woodwork. Ugh. 

Photos to follow. 

Cushion overload

| Jessica

Hello folks. Sorry about the long silence between posts. We’ve been enjoying our new mini renovation and taking some time out to relax and get some chookies. (Backyard hens for free range eggs). The black Australorp Josephine is already laying well but the other 2 are just not doing anything yet. We may have to wait a few months until spring.


I’ve slowly been updating our bedroom’s soft furnishings. I may have gone overboard just a tad this afternoon:


5 new cushions. Sad, I know. I encouraged my hubby to come along for the ride. He flat out refused! Can’t think why…😉 The grey velvet on the left, the stripe on the right and the silly white faux fur cushion were bought from Freedom Furniture; good buys for AU$33 each (buy 2, get 1 free). The watercolour style cushion on the left from Adairs was AU$50, and the gorgeous slub velvet on the right from West Elm was a breathtaking $75. Worth it! My hubby said to me just now as he prepared for bed: “I’ll be in the bedroom removing the cushions. As Scott of the Antarctic said when he stepped outside: ‘I may be some time'”. 😂

While I still love our navy and white colour scheme, I’m looking forward to updating our bed linen soon with a soft dove-coloured quilt cover in Belgian linen, matched with darker grey Euro cushion covers. We’ll update our current lamps with new mid-grey linen lamp shades, and replace our very sad old white rattan ceiling fan with a new low profile white one. Now that the weather is finally cooling down I’ll get stuck once more into some house painting. The bedroom walls will be a simple Antique White (Dulux), matched with Natural White wooden trim and a Vivid White semi-gloss ceiling paint. Gloss paint is typical for these old Queenslander houses with their wooden beadboard ceilings, but it’s not too shiny. Because we live on a busy street we often have to keep our blinds closed so it’s important that the room feels light and bright. No grey walls for us!

The bedroom used to look like this: 

There were 3 entry points and too much furniture:


We removed the French doors near the chair and moved the bed to that wall. The wooden chest is no longer in the bedroom. The French doors on the other side were also removed and are now awaiting repurposing for a future renovation. The opposite side opening, flanked by the chests of drawers, leads into our walk-in-robe and ensuite. 

The room is already much larger and better organised and I can’t wait to add plantation shutters to the windows, which will really streamline the room. Finally, I’m hoping to find a large watercolour painting of clouds, much like the cushion I bought today: 


Peaceful and lovely. With that, I’m off to bed to see how my husband has fared with his cushion battle. Good night all! 

Australia Day and paint

| Jessica

   

 Just a few more days and we can declare the new ensuite and WIR finished!

The final days are for the electrician who has to return for the extractor fan install, plus a couple of little touch up jobs. I’m sueing the painter. Nah. But I need to patch and dress some final paint patches, which I will do after the fan is installed.

It’s been a long and sometimes frustrating process, making sure the vision we have is accurately reflected in the building works. Drawings and Pinterest boards aren’t always enough. Builders will make design decisions on your behalf, often without consultation at all. This is unacceptable but understandable given their desire to do a quick job. Even placement of lights and features need constant supervision.

There are elements of our renovation I would change if I had my time over, but they are small things. In general I’m happy with the final result.

Above are 2 images of the bathroom, which represent the conclusion of my design concepts. It’s come together really well.