almost done

Since Oscar joined our family two weeks ago we are adjusting to some serious sleep deprivation, so this post is just going to be some pictures of where we're at...

view from the street

An improvement, no?

We need to paint the newly erected front fence on the weekend, but on the whole my very biased view is that the house looks gorgeous.

There are actually small shrubs planted behind the fence too, which should add a bit of charm once they grow enough to be visible from the street!

Please excuse the dark photo, every time I remember to go outside and take a shot the sun seems to be in an awkward spot.

yard in progress

I hope you are admiring how nicely the deck and the fence have been oiled. The 8th month of pregnancy turns out to be the perfect time to undertake this kind of task, so long as you don't intend to walk or move for about a day afterwards...

More photos of the back yard to come, but for now I can tell you that all the plants are in the ground and flourishing, the junk is gone, and were waiting on some turf for the middle area.

sparkly floors

Still a liiiitle bit of work (fridge, dishwasher & range hood to be installed, spashback tiled, skirting boards under cupboards, painting...) to be done in the kitchen, but you have to agree it's going to be beautiful. We're so happy with the American Cherry cabinets, and the floors are just stunning.

Below is the upstairs third bedroom/study. Again, a liiiiiitle bit of painting to be done, but almost there.

The front downstairs rooms are also lacking in a bit of paint but looking gorgeous, and while the staircase photo below isn't crash hot when you look at it properly it's perfect.


Enough gushing for now - will post some more photos soon once we have done some more painting and unpacking. We also have to chase up the kitchen guy as he has a bit to do that will make it much more special than it already is, can't wait.

kitchen & render & staircase

As you can see from the title of this post it's been a busy few weeks. The kitchen is well on it's way to being installed, as you can see in the photographs above and below.

The floor to ceiling cupboards with the "boxing rings" in them are the pantry, and then the cupboards to their right are firstly for the television and associated electronic bits and bobs, and other appliances and kitchen gear. The television will hide behind wood veneer doors that can slide our and back so that it can be pulled forward when we want to watch. I love a hidden TV, I hate the way the dominate a space otherwise.

Kitchen cupboards will be Dulux Whisper White veneer, as will the island, but the floor to ceiling cupboards will have wood veneer doors so that they we can differentiate the space and they are more built in furniture than connected to the kitchen.

Now to the staircase, we are incredibly happy with it. Now that I've seen it I have no regrets about ditching the old one and getting this copy made. The brushbox treads match our new floorboards, so will be polished, and the pine detailing will be painted.


Finally, the render. So glad to have banished the scraps of lime green pain from the house forever. The painter has started painting the sides of the house, but the front still needs doing. And in this picture you can also see the balcony.

We're edging closer to completion... sometimes two steps forward and one step back, but we'll get there. And hopefully soon.

ugly

The outside of the house continues to get worse before it gets better. There is scaffolding everywhere, including on top of our neighbours' roof (which has unfortunately been the source of a few issues.) Weather permitting, the rendering will be finished by the end of this week which I hope provides some kind of visual improvement!

Inside the house the floors are being cut and put down, which looks good even in progress. Rahul has spent the last two day undercoating various surfaces in preparation for some serious painting over the next few weeks.

We'd hoped the inside would be finished in the next week or so, but reality has intervened and now we're aiming for four to six weeks from now. Not too bad really!

the gyprock is completed

We are still missing a staircase, but once the floors are put down it can be installed.


We are using a coloured render on the exterior of the house, which should mean we never have to paint. Finding the right grey is challenging, but it's safe to say that the bottom colour here will not be the one we use! It reminds me of Posca Pen.

coveting (kiddie edition)

A Giimmo dinosaur night light.
A Mod Tots Monkey. Their site has the coolest art for kids I've seen. I am partial to their monkeys and monsters but they also have a range of robots and other beautiful animals.

While my window shopping is completely out of control I am showing remarkable restraint when it comes to actual purchases. Possibly because at the moment I think the baby would appreciate us spending money on a house for it to live in...

amusing

Just saw this cartoon on Making It Lovely - so glad that my new George Nelson light is an investment piece that will see me right through to old age!

a blessing in disguise

Last week (when we actually managed to persuade our electrician to turn) it emerged that we would be unable to use down lights in one part of the new living area due to the placement of an air conditioning panel. Which means that right above our dining table we can install a pendant light instead. I have loved this George Nelson Criss Cross pendant forever, but as we are sticking to a more traditional look in the front rooms of the house I didn't think I'd have anywhere to put one. And now we do! We just need to get the electrician to come back again some time this decade...

The pendant lights in the front of the house are equally as beautiful, designed and made by Lisa at Shady Designs. She does a fabulous job and I can't recommend her highly enough. They are giant drum shades with black linen on the outside. One shade has Catherine Martin for Porter's Paints wallpaper in "Sparrow" (we went with the cream and red colourway) on the inside. The other has a solid gold wallpaper with flecks of red through it. At the moment they're sitting in the living room, and they already look beautiful, I can't wait to see them actually hanging.

While things are happy on the lighting front, the gyprockers are making me want to cry with their unexpected absences. We were assured they would be completely finished by the end of the week, which meant that the floors could go down on Monday, but now I am a bit sceptical.

early june

All the doors and windows are finally in, and the gyprockers have almost finished their work.

Since I took these photos the old stairs have been pulled out, to be replaced with a new "copy" set, without all the dents, holes and missing chunks of wood.

We are loving the bi fold doors in the back extension.

Although at the moment the view of our garden is nothing to write home about.

Coming this week: cornices, exterior scaffolding and rendering, and hopefully some floors.

also

Today the floors are being ripped up in the front of the house. Tomorrow we will examine the damp problem in the downstairs hallway (and hopefully remedy it), and we will be visited by the electrician, the plumber and the carperter who will be installing windows. Action time!

birthday gifts

My birthday is still two months away, but given that it's a "special" birthday Mum and Dad decided that they should gift me something I will keep. We visited Wilson Street Gallery a few weeks ago and it turned out that one of the curators was a parent at my school when I was a little kid, and she remembered Mum and Dad. So we not only got a tour of the gallery, but we were able to see the works she had in her own apartment.

I fell in love with Peter Norton's photographs of flowers suspended in ice. So for my birthday I will be receiving a canvas print of each of these beautiful images to hang together in the newly created living/dining room. It just makes me even more excited to get the space finished and move all of our belongings in there.

outside

From the front our place is currently an eyesore. Thankfully it's less alarming from the back.

The extension is really taking shape now. The roof is on and the electrician has started work inside, and once the doors and windows arrive and we are at lock up stage we will be able to properly connect the old part of the house and the new part.

This should all happen within the next three weeks or so, after which the next step is to get the gyprock up and timber floors down and polished.

The front of the house needs some serious TLC. As you can see in the photograph we've removed most of the balcony with the exception of the corner that connects the electricity to the house. We have to get a special category 2 sparkie to come and connect that.

We also have to put some kind of footings in under the front porch, because at the moment it's just being held up by clay and some bricks. Apparently they didn't know much about foundations in 1900.

Interesting times...

just another few thousand bricks

The extension feels like a (windowless, roofless) room. It's amazing getting a real sense of how the space feels, although I am sure my perception will continually change. Some days the space seems big, other days I worry it's too small. Its so hard to relate to an empty cube!

The gap in the photograph above will be filled with bi fold glass doors that open onto a decked area, and then ultimately the back garden. The back garden will obviously need some work, given that at the moment it is a big puddle of mud with rubbish all over it.

The photograph below shows the doorway which will open to our courtyard.

balcony

After literally 18 months of begging Theo to pull down the balcony on Saturday afternoon I was greeted with my wish. Theo had two carpenters here and suddenly decided to declare the balcony an OH&S risk (the side panels were literally about to fall off onto our doorstep below) and dwn it came (to a captive audience of people lining up waiting to vote across the street.) I am sure the now exposed lime green walls are being admired by all and sundry.

bricks and beams

I've been a bit slack posting photos and then all of a sudden today we have some bricks and beams and bearers (and almost some temporary floors!)

I love having a better sense of the space we'll be working with in the extension. I'm even thinking of breaking out the sidewalk chalk and marking out where the kitchen will sit, and a proposed couch location. The boys are out there at the moment putting down some chipboard so we can walk around and play house. Exciting!

Concrete

Last week, after hours of George's digging, we were finally ready to pour the concrete that will be the base of the footings for the back extension.

I really like the KEEP OUT sign. Very homely. Martha Stewart would be proud.

In case you've never seen a concrete pump in action, here's a little video for you.

Next will be the bricklayer and I have a feeling that kind of work will be exciting to see. To me bricks mean that something is really happening. Like walls.

In other news I am trying to track down a person or company who restores old staircases. Any Sydney recommendations would be appreciated.

Bounty

I forgot to mention something BIG in the previous post. George dug up a gun an a helluva lot of ammunition. It was buried under the concrete floor of the shed he ripped up, which makes me think it was used for some kind of killing spree. This is the video he took of his discovery. I particularly enjoyed the soundtrack which I think was just whatever was on the radio at the time.

Anyway, we put the gun in a box and dragged it with us everywhere we went between Thursday and Sunday night, when we finally made it over to Balmain Police Station and handed it in. It was very dramatic walking into the police station with a big box and announcing "We've got a gun" but once the cop eyeballed it he wasn't too worried. We were kind of hoping they would decide to come and excavate the back yard to look for more evidence of crime, thus saving us the hassle of doing it ourselves*.

Sadly this was not to be, but the cop did say that he would do some kind of criminal record search for previous occupants of our address, and then they're probably melt the gun down into some kind of scrap metal.

*By ourselves I obviously mean George.

Trenches

George has been busy ripping up concrete, digging trenches and painting walls with bitumen paint as you can see in the picture above.

He's kept a little bit of the original back structure as a kind of shelter for the mini fridge, power tools and the radio, but that will eventually by torn down.

This is Rahul admiring George's fine handywork.

Demolition Day #3

Not unlike the ruins at Pompeii!

Seriously, I can't believe the pace this demolition is moving at. It's all due to George, our labourer who is visiting Australia from Greece. Our communication is obviously limited, but I gave him watermelon, so I think he likes me. He also gets along amazingly well with George II (our neighbour) and I imagine he will also like George III (our brickie.)