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Demolishing the Old Verandah
Once upon a time our home was little, before we added a huge home to it. Building our ‘new home’ has been our focus for the past decade and blending the old and new has never been fully completed. Demolishing the old verandah is part of the process to complete the blending of the ‘two houses’, then we can finish painting the ‘old house’. A couple of weekends ago, whilst the verandah was being completed out the back, the rest of the workforce was demolishing the old verandah out the front. First step was the removal of the posts. The roofing iron had been removed years back, so as we…
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Completing the Verandah, We’re Thrilled
Completing the Verandah is so exciting! Finally a project begun years ago was taken back up and completed. We began the verandah in 2012. First cementing the piers, then bearers and joists, then laying the decking boards for the side and side and ‘front’ verandahs. Work then came to a halt as we pondered how to complete ‘section 3’ of our ‘front’ verandah. Life intervened, other building projects shifted our focus, in the meantime we made do with particleboard sheets on this last section. First tasks up was selecting, cutting and laying the joists. As the joists had been stored in the yard under sheets of roofing iron for nearly…
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Beating the Bushfires With Eaves
It was recently bought to my attention that I never did share our story of how we went about beating the bushfires with eaves. How installing eaves increased the protection our home from Bushfires. Originally we began installing eaves on our ‘front’ verandah and deck back in February 2019. This was a long project that spanned many, many months. Like with much of our building progress it had to fit around the margins of an increasingly overflowing life. Firstly PC had to prepare the boxing in, the cutting and installation of the battens in preparation for the cement sheeting to be nailed onto. Then with the aid of our…
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Walk in Wardrobe in a Day!
Our latest building project has brought such a buzz! Our Walk in Wardrobe was built in a day! We’ve been at this owner builder gig for over a decade now. In all this time we’ve never had a project decided upon, executed and completed with such speed. I’m still marveling over it a month later. We’d long intended to custom outfit our Walk in Wardrobe, but meanwhile made do with two chest of drawers. Occasionally we’d chat about design and needs. A few months ago I sought quotes from a couple of companies. One measured but we never did get that quote despite numerous attempts. The other gave a rough…
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Flooring The Last Room! Our Room
Early September we finished flooring the last of the children’s bedrooms which finished off our supply of salvaged floorboards from the Convent school. We still needed flooring for our bedroom so we followed leads for new boards, one being the purchase of second hand boards from a local demolition company, but at $3.50/lineal metre this translated to $850 for one room! PC is an accountant at a local plywood company and we began considering the option of plywood floorboards. I admit I held some biased beliefs against ply, I might have called it ‘fake timber’ and so needed to become more flexible and knowledgeable in my thinking 😉 PC’s work had a couple of…
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Flooring Another Bedroom
Inspired by the ease and quickness of flooring Jelly Bean’s bedroom, the weekend before last we continued on and laid the floorboards in the bedroom of our youngest two. Rather exciting as this means all the children’s bedrooms are now sporting floorboards, we only have our bedroom left to floor and we have done the whole house! Although we have also officially run out of the floorboards we salvaged all those years ago from the Convent school and will have to source more boards for our room. Once PC started us off, Jelly Bean 14 and I kept up a steady pace of laying and nailing, whilst PC measured and cut boards out…
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Floorboards For A Bedroom
A few weekends back we turned out attentions towards flooring bedrooms. We are ‘on the home run’ now with only three rooms, all bedrooms to go! Which is fortunate as we are also nearing the end of our floorboard stacks. All timbers piles were dismantled and boards sorted into lengths. First up we began with flooring Jelly Bean’s room, she was rather excited by this prospect and couldn’t wait to have her room floored. Poor PC had badly pinched the nerves in his neck the day before but he bravely soldiered on and mostly alone as there were other happenings that weekend. It was the same routine as always; placing green…
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Laying the Hallway
Back in May when we finished flooring the Poolroom, we instantly turned our attentions to flooring the Hallway. Whilst the hallway is only narrow and not a large area to cover and you’d assume it wouldn’t take long to floor, it’s width created it’s own issues. As per our standard practice flooring involves a rhythm of; placing green strapping to the floor for easier sliding of boards, gluing the boards, knocking the tongue and grooves together and then secret nailing. It wasn’t long though before we reached the other side of the hallway and ran out of swinging space for the hammer. Then it became time to get creative,…
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Loungeroom Receives Floorboards
After laying floorboards in our Great Hall and Pool Room we immediately moved onto laying the loungeroom floor. I’m just a month behind in sharing pictures 😉 I was particularly excited to give this room a makeover as it had become my least favourite room in the house. It was doing double duty as a loungeroom and toyroom, laying floorboards sprang a whole plan into action. The advantage of flooring rooms ‘back to back’ means that we have a great rhythm flowing. This time we broke the Crew into ‘tag teams’; Team 1 and Team 2, and whilst this ensured PC and I had regular breaks from bending over the nail gun, there…
