The final assault begins

Ok well those of you who are friends with me on Facebook will know that today was Day 1 of Bathroom round 2. Very exciting! This is the LAST major building work planned to get the house how we want it.  It also means that we are one big step closer to finishing the house for the end of the year.

Now some of you will remember that we had our bathroom redone a while ago when the kitchen was being done (http://aoldhouse.blogspot.com/2009/06/real-destruction-begins.html). But this episode of bathroom renovation taught us many things including:

• Black is not a good color for tiles, especially in a hard water area
• There is a special kind of wood you are supposed to use on bathroom floors (marine ply for those of you interested)

and most importantly:

• YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR

So having not paid very much it wasn't entirely surprising when the shower started to leak and stain the kitchen ceiling and the floor tiles started to crack in half due to the water soaking into the ply ad swelling. Joy joy joy!

So older, wiser and with some money in our pocket (but not for long) we've got back in the lovely builders that we used for the last major works. They were really great so we thought why not! 

Today is Day 1 = Destruction Day. I left to a bathroom fully intact and without a care in the world and have come home to this:

All of our furniture is crammed in the front room!

This is why I love that my husband is an engineer. He can draw things like this and they look like they are supposed to!

This is the final look we have taken as our inspiration. So lots more light and just brightening up the whole space.

Let us know what you think and I'll try to update this every day there is decent progress.

The stairs are 99% done

Well the to do list seems to never get any smaller, but we have had some major progress. The most painful job in history is almost done. We have two more coats of oil on the handrail and then the stairs are finished!!!

Here's another handy tip for future renovators. Pay someone to paint your staircase for you. It is by far the most frustrating, slow and tedious job you'll ever do. The most difficult part is that you have to find a way to get all the edges and bits done while still using it as a stairway. Not the easiest task believe me....especially when you need to put on at least 4 coats of pain.

 Anyways here are some pictures showing before and during photos.

 Before

 During 1

 During 2

Bathroom step stained to match the rest of the floors

After photos will have to wait until I fix a technical error with my camera lense!

Oh and despite the above grumbling and the sheer amount of time it took we are really happy with the results.

Photos as promised

Here are the photos I promised. Lot's of photos below:

Look No Stairs!

How to get up and down v.1

Fixing some old problems

The new partition wall

Looking at the house from the Kitchen

Bathroom doorway ripped out and being flipped

How to get to the bathroom from the bedroom v.2

Just because it was so yummy the dinner hubby made me last night

Day 24: They're still here

This is a dual purpose post. Firstly, I'd like to apologize for not doing more updates in the last 20 or so days. It's been tough with having no power to the sockets upstairs and everything else in life going on.  Also, there hasn't been that much to get excited about. Most days it was actually quite hard to see what had been going on.

So I'd like to think of this post as a new start for the build. We hit a slight bump in the road with the new partition wall being put up and being taken down and then put up again. Yeah you heard me folks...it if is supposed to be structural you better make damn sure that you know what's a joist and what's plywood on an engineer's drawings...all I'm sayin'. So yeah we think the builder has now gotten the message that we're paying attention.

Lots has happened in the last couple of days. Most of the electric and data cabling has been done. They have rectified quite a lot of the mistakes of the last builder. Let's just say long story short quite a few bricks were involved in the sorting out of the problem. It is now Saturday and they have ripped out the stairs (pictures of ladder contraption we are using to get around in next post) and the bathroom doorway has been destroyed because it needs to be moved for the new stairs. Let's just say that it's so alfresco I'm crossing me legs till the builders go. Plus we've got a proper partition wall, some plasterboard and insulation in. Now the stairs aren't going to be back in till Wednesday so I'm going to be pretty far along in my future career training as a high wire act by the time they go in.

Lot's going on and they are still working away. So here I sit in my cold backyard on top of a pile of bricks typing this because they are destroying more of the inside and plastering. Quite frankly that dust is enough to choke a mongoose and I'd rather shiver. Pictures to come.

Backyard progress

Well as you can probably guess we've been spending a lot of time in the backyard and by a lot of time I mean like every weekend for a month. This is pretty amazing in itself because in order to do that it meant that we had to have decent weather. In fact we had really nice weather so it was actually really nice to be productive outside. Here is a before picture of the garden just to remind you about what it looked like before we got started:

 Just a small selection of the rubble sacks we ended up with. I liked to consider it a modern art piece...

Here's what it looks like now. So lots of progress, but still lots to go. Despite getting rid of what must be 1.5 tonnes of gravel I can't believe we still have to seive the dirt to get rid of more. I think they are breeding there are so many of them. Good news is the fence is going soon!

        

The view from the far back corner up towards the house. Wow!