Renovations

I’m thinking vivid white.

| Jessica

IMG_2685

Seeing this warm grey wall, I’m happy to go Dulux “Vivid White” on the walls. Beige, Dulux “Sand Dune” or “Hog Bristle” bring out too much brown, shown by the unpainted VJs at the top. I want to emphasize the grey. We’re going chrome fittings for everything, and warmth will be provided by the Blackbutt topped vanity unit. The grey tiles will have white grout, the white tiles will have a pale grey and the floor tiles dark grey. (Poor tiler – he had seen a bit of The Block on the TV and the floor tiles were the same – except they used it on the wall and used dark grout. He thought this was good somehow, and instead of listening to me saying repeatedly “pale grey grout for the white tiles, white grout for the grey tiles, dark grout for the floor tiles”, decided he wanted to add his own sartorial choices to the plan. I had to put him straight. Dear fellow.)

I’m a fond user of Dulux products. I use their 3-in-1 primer, sealer and undercoat, which has great coverage. One coat on already primed walls is usually enough, two coats on untreated wood. I’ve done a check on what I need and there’s plenty! I’ve just bought 4 litres of Dulux bathroom and kitchen semi gloss in Vivid White. This paint apparently resists mould and humidity, which will be important in this bathroom, as the view will be to the West and quite hot in the afternoon.

* (later this afternoon)

Having a look at the wall below, I’m particularly thrilled with the white grout. The grey really pops. It’s stronger and darker than I expected. I think the pale grey grout will look great with the white tile and it won’t be long until the whole room is basically done and I can get started on the painting. Best to do it before the fittings go in!

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Quiet

| Jessica

Today a moment of quiet as the boys head off to do a “quick job” elsewhere before coming back in the afternoon to finish off the final bits and pieces. John the builder popped in to let me know, bless him. The tiler never arrives before 8.30am. Bliss.

The builders are nearly done. Except of course the windows. It’s always the windows. There are a few more pieces of VJ to install, a few more beadings to hide the joins, and then it’s my turn to prepare the WIR for painting prior to the installation of the robe carcasses. As John said to me yesterday, laughing, “you know the story, don’t you? The painters will fix that!” I replied, sadly knowing this to be true, “yes, but as I’m the not-very-good painter, you had better do a really good job!” Preparation is key. My understanding (from when I dated a house painter) is that for new walls (not plasterboard) and new wood a quick undercoat is applied first. Then the patching and sanding happens. Nail holes are filled, joins are sealed, then everything needing sanding is sanded. Another undercoat for the tricky areas such as ceilings of bathrooms, and 2 coats of the top coat are applied. I’ll be painting until Xmas, cursing every crusty old french door and window I insisted on keeping. I’ll be painting them all white but the last paint job they had was pretty terrible (oil paint in a beige colour, messy and just painted right over old crusty surfaces), so I’ll be working my butt off to make them look even partly respectable.

We have yet to decide on the topcoat paint colour, but I recently painted my stepdaughter’s room bright white, and it looks lovely and not at all stark. I’m tempted to follow suit for the rest of the house. In truth the whole house needs another paint because the ceilings are starting to look dull and the wall colour has lost its appeal. Dark rooms look darker, and light rooms look tired. Painting VJ is a bitch though and takes forever. There are 6 rooms definitely needing new paint including our bedroom, and it’s looking more and more like I’ll need to do it all. DH is too busy at work, besides, he’s not much chop as a painter.

The tiler will be finished by tomorrow (should he ever appear) and apparently we’re deciding on grout colours today.  Next week the bathroom fittings will arrive and soon enough the trades will be back to install and finish our new ensuite. And now: finding the rest of the money to pay for all this stuff.

The trials and tribulations of tiling

| Jessica

This week sees the joy of tiling the ensuite and WIR. We’re going for a 600×600 concrete-look floor tile with enough warmth in it to match the feature grey Spanish wall tiles (rustic subway design, as shown below). The feature tiles will go on the vanity wall, with the 300×600 glossy white tiles fitted in a brick pattern over the remaining. We’re tiling all the way up to 2400mm, and VJs on the top. Our tiler, Roj, is a man clearly fond of a good meal. He works to a gentle pace, although I must say he’s picked up since the contractor has appeared on site! He has been laying the floor tiles this week, and he’s nearly finished in the ensuite and will move onto the WIR in no time. I bet. BTW, we’re not having marble on the vanity: we’re going with a blackbutt wood. It’s a beautiful wood predominant in pinks and browns, and we’re having a top-sitting basin. Should look good with the slightly old-style chrome tap fittings we’ve chosen.

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The lads are about in force again today as they are now doing the East Wing (which I think they had completely forgotten about). On Sunday afternoon DH and I cleared out the room and now it’s ready for them to rip the guts out and start work. It’s a simple job in there: they’re putting in some French doors (which will eventually open onto the verandah but for now open onto a small enclosed vestibule), replacing some louvre windows at the front with casement windows, and replacing one bank of louvre windows on the east side with wall. I said to DH, it’s never going to be used as a verandah so why should it be lit like one? It’s too hot and bright in there most of the year. The room will be insulated, relined, and have new powerpoints and a light. A simple job and one they should have done in a couple of days depending on the availability of the windows.

Speedy Gonzales!

| Jessica

In academia everything seems to move super slowly. This becomes the normal. By contrast, the building works here seem to be going at a lightning rate. Yesterday the plumber was in roughing in all the pipes, and today the electricians are roughing in all the lines. Some things we’ve waited years to fix are being done today, including the light fitting in the dining room and replacing a switch that wouldn’t allow our kitchen light to be switched off. It’s only 9.00am. We’ve already been invoiced for a progress payment, but when I saw what has been done this week I’m not surprised!

It’s good to be on site here making sure dumb things don’t happen. Like where the outlets by the bed go. We’ve had the bed jammed into the corner to allow easier access for the guys to get their stuff through, so the electrician assumed that’s where we’d have the outlets. Der. No. Ask. Luckily I caught them in time to fix THAT potential problem, and the switches were moved over slightly. This sort of stuff is not terribly important because we won’t see the outlets anyway, but I don’t want to be fighting with the stuff under the bed to plug my phone in.

Another thing is people assume where lights go etc. For a short arsed person like me who wants lights on either side of the vanity mirror, the globes need to be basically in the middle of my head, not above. So I had to be quite strict on the placement – not ABOVE the mirror, BESIDE the mirror. Women know this. Men don’t. As I said, I don’t care about hubby: he doesn’t wear makeup. Besides, he’s not that tall that the lights are going to give him a sallow up-glow.

Also, because we can’t afford to put lights in the WIR sections (have a look at any decent renovation show and they are all lit from within, I kid you not, this is a thing), we’re having 3 LED down lights in the little room, to correspond to each section. This will ensure we can actually see everything. The guy seems to think this will make the room very bright. Says I, YES. Mostly they won’t be needed, but at night when we are changing to go out to yet another bloody function I need to be able to see my clothes. So I’d rather more than less lights please. Besides, I’m blind.

Nearly there with the drawings

| Jessica

The architect came round last week and our plans are nearly finalised. In fact, we’re pretty happy with the front of the house and only a little uncertain about the rear extension, which I discovered was smaller dimensions than I had anticipated.

The extra size I’ve asked the architect to do shouldn’t add too much to the total cost, given that most of it will be exterior deck.

In the meantime, though, we’ve come up with a great solution for the home studio. Here’s a photo of the plans:

Studio penultimate drawing

 

The internal width of the room is 3.6 metres (huzzah!) and the length will be about 6.2 metres, although this seems longer than I expected, but the architect’s drawings indicate a total of 7.7 metres external length including 1.2 metres for the bathroom, so I guess this must be about right. There are windows at the front and side. It will be light and airy all day.

This is a fantastic size for a home studio/office/guest room. As you can see here, there is a landing at the bottom left of the drawing. You take one step down from the main house onto the landing and the powder room (with shower) is right there. It’s private yet importantly still accessible from both the main house and the studio, as it will be the main bathroom for visitors and party guests.

I’ve asked the architect to hide the toilet cistern in the wall, as there will be enough room to do this, and we can probably do the same with the vanity taps too, and possibly even a mirror cabinet. The shower recess will definitely have one of those handy recesses to hold shampoo etc.

We’ve even started to think about wall bed units for the studio. The left hand side is free wall space. I’m currently intending our sofa bed sit along that wall, but I’m tempted, dangerously so, for a wall bed unit that puts the bed out of sight until guests stay over.

Some of the ones I just investigated online are only as narrow as 30-40cm thick, which is almost as narrow as regular bookcases. Most of them come with surrounding bookcases to make it look a bit more built in, and plenty of people put paintings on the cupboard door to hide it even more.

There’s enough room to do this, but we won’t be buying them any time soon – we’ve still got to pay down the last credit card and set of school fees! Ooh, but I’m tempted…

 

The architect is coming! The architect is coming!

| Jessica

This is it. Today is the day when I get to see all the plans finally laid out on paper. I’ll let you know how I get on.

When I spoke to my mum who’s a long-time renovator and savvy house planner we agreed the costs will be about 30% over what the bank has lent us to do minor renovations. To build the studio and renovate the front of the house, I think will cost about $120,000. She agrees. We were only extended about $80,000, which has to include architect’s fees. I can probably scrape together some more money but it’s fighting for supremacy with overseas travel plans, one remaining credit card bill (DH loves me but forgets that I have to pay the bill from his gifts to me) and the last remaining school fee mega hit (huzzah, and fees are halved after July).

So near and yet, so far. I guess the alternative would be to do the West Wing first, plus update the house front (giving us our 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms), then go to the bank and ask for more to complete the remainder.

This is probably the BEST and most cost-effective solution but it still doesn’t get us the extra studio space. Yet. However, when I did some sums on what we could feasibly borrow if our house was worth $900,000, we would have nearly enough for the whole remaining shebang. It depends, of course, on the builder’s costings. Our guy is not cheap, but he is thorough, and as far as I know provides an accurate cost appraisal. And if we don’t change too many things on the run our costs should remain consistent. Problem is, as soon as you add 10% overruns, 10% GST, architect and contractor’s fees, plus council fees, it cuts everything up. So the initial $80,000 becomes about $55,000. Not a lot of money left for building stuff.

But it MIGHT be enough to fix up the West Wing, do the electrics and plumbing, add 2 new bathrooms and renovate the facade, buy a new stove and fridge, plus change a wall in the main house and add built in bookcases. Ah, compromises. At least we still have walls and a mostly working roof.

(Small Edit: I’ve not put a careful figure on our renovations but I believe it’s in the vicinity of about $3000 per square metre. I think this is too much, and when I put $2000 per square metre against the renovations it all becomes much more reasonable, also given that our house is a simple wooden cottage it’s not too expensive to change it.)

renovation compromise

 

The first better bathroom plan

| Jessica

The first of our three planned better bathrooms will be approx 2.7 metres long and 1.2 metres wide. It’s tiny, but as I said to DH and wrote to the architect, I don’t love my clients that much. I’d rather have 30cm more living space – this is the same space that will house several bookcases, a desk, a couch, side tables, music stuff and a small piano, so it needs to be large.

The bathroom, though, can be teensy tiny. I’ll decorate it in a look that will emulate the style I’d like the rest of the house to have: probably a combination of white subway tiles and dark flooring. It’s easy to find gorgeous tiny bathrooms on the web. Here are a few ideas below, with the first image being the basic plan and size:

bathroom plan

Obviously the sink won’t be ugly and the shower won’t have a ghastly base on it. It may indeed look something a little like this:

bathroom

 

Or this: bathroom1

Or this:

bathroom2

Or even this:

bathroom3

I quite like all of these images even though I’m starting to see a preponderance of marble. I don’t need marble. Or slate. What I DO want are subway tiles on the wall surrounding the sink and toilet, a larger subway-laid white tile in the shower (because have you SEEN our mould problem on the grout???) and dark, easy care tiles on the floor.

I’ll happily go for a wood-style tile on the floor too, if it ties in with the studio. And I’ll certainly enjoy a chevron-laid floor tile if it isn’t too expensive to cut all those tiles and lay them. We also don’t need much storage in this bathroom so a floating vanity would be fine, or even an old-fashioned sink, like so:

bathroom-sink

 

The only problem I see with this sink is there’s nowhere to hide the cleaning products and toilet paper, 2 things I believe are pretty important in a bathroom, especially given we have no storage in the rest of the house. So we may go with a floating vanity instead, which will give the illusion of more space, but the versions I’ve seen on the web are so ugly I can’t even show them here. What I do know is that as SOON as this bathroom is created it will be the ONLY bathroom then used, such is the appalling ugliness of our other mould-infested, rotting bathroom. Once again, so excited I could SPIT.

 

My studio room will look something like this…

| Jessica

home-office and bookcase

I found this picture of my (mythical) studio space. It’s not quite perfect, but it does give you an idea of what I’m hoping to achieve. My studio room will be 5.3m long by 3.5m wide. On the far end (pictured) you will find a bookcase with built in desk and maybe some built in filing cabinets too. It will look a lot like the picture except with those added extras. On the window side (pictured) there will be under-window bookcases, probably the cheap Ikea white Kallax ones, because we already have 3 of those, and they are perfect for holding magazine folders and coloured boxes. They look like this and go vertically or horizontally, and at 147 cm long, 77 cm high and only 39 cm deep are a bit of a space saver.

 

bookcases expedit

We may even put a long white laminate bench over the top of them to style that section, and perhaps another bank or two of drawers.

I will definitely have a Persian rug on the floor, but the size I want will be quite expensive (even at auction), so I’ll have to make do with a cheaper Indian one for a bit. The windows will be casement, not sash, in keeping with the rest of the house, but I quite like sash windows, so we’ll see about that – we may end up with double glazed white aluminium ones, which actually look fine.  The ceiling will look exactly as you see it. It will be a skillion ceiling, and I’ll have LED downlights, which will save on power. While I’d LOVE LOVE LOVE solid timber floors (none of that click-flooring nonsense), we probably can’t afford it, so I’ll have vinyl timber-look tiles instead – they look and feel better than expected and are a cheap alternative to my preferred choice, plus they help keep noise down.

vinyl flooring

We already have an attractive sofa-bed from Freedom in a neutral brown-grey:

Freedom Sofa-BedPumice-1

It will be easy to decorate this sofa as it looks great with most colours from beige, grey tones to warm reds, bright yellows, greens and blues. I’ll just need to decide how to decorate the room, given that I’m going with neutral bright white on the walls. It will sit on the wall opposite the windows (not shown) and be a good place for students to dump their stuff. I also already have some attractive lamps from Ikea, which are the cheap versions of the expensive designer brushed metal ones cashing in on the steam punk thang:

Floor lamp Ikea

 

As for cushions, well, I have them all. Lots and lots just waiting to be re-purposed to my new room, in all colours and designs from Marimekko to young-designer-market made. I also have lots of wall art needing new homes. Some of my wall art is quite dramatic and features Melbourne icons:

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As you can see, lots of white, black and red, which, although perfect in a work office, might be a little dramatic and cold in a home office. Last year I decorated my DH’s work office in similar colours, with a deep grey feature wall and lovely soft lamps. We shopped at Dare Gallery (side table and dining chairs), Freedom (lamps and occasional chairs), Matt Blatt (table and coffee table), Far Pavilions (shelving unit) and The Desk Place (desk) for furniture items. The room looks amazing, and we bought quite beautiful Aboriginal art for that dark space, but this home office will be lighter, so I can’t really keep art on the wall where it might fade in the sunlight. There will be some natural wood features in an occasional chair and free-standing mirror, too. I do like my brown furniture even though it’s completely out of fashion.

The front of the room will have its own entryway with a “cricket bat” front door, with casement windows on each side of the door, looking out onto a small porch landing and the front yard. I have no pictures of this – it only works in my head. But I can dream!

Hating the waiting!

| Jessica

DH hates the way our house doesn’t work. He wants to come home and put his feet up and suck down a beer on the back deck, proudly surveying our patch of paradise and admiring our pretty little cottage, all decked out in a fresh coat of paint, and garnished with a pretty, easy-care garden.

We don’t have a back deck. But my architect who is coming over this afternoon has some ideas about that.

The long times between decisions feels like this process is taking forever. Not a bad plan when we don’t have enough funds for all the jobs we want to do round the house.

But we’re both quietly screaming with frustration. We’ve been here more than three years now, and neither of us are coping with the Hades summer conditions or the insects or the traffic noise. DH wants the house to look good on the outside while I want the inside to be more functional.

While we get a good amount of breeze through cross drafts we can’t really manage the heat or noise pollution. We have no sound privacy and noise comes up through the floor. Our West Wing is mostly unliveable. It needs gutting, rewiring, insulation and reorganising. DH and I have no ensuite or wardrobes and crap window furnishings in our bedroom. Our single family bathroom is unfit for use due to black mould. Our plumbing needs a complete refit due to leaking pipes and we need a new electrical board and new fittings.

Our daughter’s room is too small in the long term and our kitchen is tragic. Pretty but tragic.

We can’t do anything about the garden until the building plans are finalised. So every few weeks DH gets out there with whipper snippers and the lawn mower and attempts to beat the weeds into submission, while the diggingest dog puts ankle-breaking holes in strategic spots.

Our entryway is too small, the back stairs are on their last legs and there is no ceiling insulation in the verandahs.

Argh!

But as I explained to DH, my income has been bound by PhD studies, with little chance to improve my position until it was finished. Now that it is done, we have a much better chance of improving the house because the dissertation is out of the way. I can work more hours. Also, it’s the last year of 2 lots of school fees. Phew!

But the waiting….. Ugh.