Makeover edition

I thought I needed a proper make-over comparison.


Bathroom before:

Bathroom after:

Only a few things left to do now. Skirtings, windows, and top coat of paint. :-)

End of line special

Hello. It's been a while. 6 months in fact. I've been doing stuff, just not very interesting or pretty stuff. (Like fixing the septic tank.) But I've spent the last 2 days on my knees, so that warrants a post.

Ta Da! Bathroom floor.

I costed out the options, and basically, everything was too expensive. I wanted black and white checkerboard, but the roll vinyl was either too expensive, or the squares were too small. Plus, how to get a roll of vinyl in the hatchback and drive it 100kms? Too hard. So, vinyl tiles. Internet research showed Mitre 10 Mega was cheaper than Bunnings, so I drove out to New Lynn, where I was dismayed to find a really ugly choice of faux marble. In defeat I wandered off around the corner, where I happened upon a whole rack of END OF LINE STOCK. Even better, they had plain black and plain white. The problem was, there wasn't quite enough black tiles left. So I dug around a bit more and found some parquet ones. 88 tiles for $54 was the result. $3 per 6 pack. (Retail price, $12.98) Later, I managed to pick up another 2 packs of black tiles at full price in Hamilton. So add another $25.96 to the total, as well as a tube of No More Gaps to fill the floor joints, $7.49, = $87.45. Considering my initial estimates to cover the floor were around the $600+ mark, I think I did pretty well. Tools purchased: a block plane to shave down the bottom of the door for clearance, $24, and a rolling pin, $7.98, (the recommended tool for ensuring good adhesive contact). $119.43 total spend, around 8 hours work all up.

Mum thought I had been playing Checkers....

A good plan is the key!

Sink or swim

The $1 sink is in!

 

I'm so happy, I grin every time I pass the bathroom door,

(No longer sure those lime green towels were a good choice though).
I still have two "hot" taps though, since one of them is off the old sink. Had to smash the old sink to get it out, (whoever installed taps using no-more-nails can go to hell and die). Fortunately I know replacement ceramic labels can be purchased. 

The flow-on effect is that now I can top coat the walls, and get serious about flooring.

If I'd known the scale of the task....

My pantry before, (with doors removed). Stranded way off in the far corner of the kitchen. Doors difficult to open. Hmmmm. Think maybe I'll just knock up a new one out of this recycled pine I was given. I'll put it over in the other corner of the kitchen, where it's easy to access. I'll just re-use the old doors, because who wants to build doors?

Hmmmm. These boards are a little wonky. Oh well, that's just rustic, right? Uh oh. These doors have borer in them, would be a shame to put them on my lovely new pantry, and they are sooooo heavy. Maybe I can come up with a way to build some lightweight doors out of the same recycled pine? (Thinks about how to get around not having the right tools). Ok, got it! Screws! Glue! Set squares! Ok! doors built! Uh Oh. Where did that lightbulb come from???? Why is it right where the door will hit it when I open it???? Grrrrr.

Bugger it! Leave for the week to go off and work in the city. Spend whole week speculating if I can get away with moving the light fitting rather than cutting down the doors. decide that I'm going to have to cut down the pantry doors. Head home. Unscrew top of doors and borrow Dad's "renovator" power tool to cut through the glue. Cut down doors by about 10cm, then screw and glue back together again. Now there is a gap at the top of the pantry that needs covering, and hardly any pine left. Nail up the last remaining piece, even though it's crooked. I'll put some trim around the top when I do the ceiling, it'll be fine. With much difficulty and swearing, I screw the hinges in and attach the doors. One hinge is too stiff because I cut the rebate too deep. Pack it out in a hap-hazard manner. Ok, that'll do. Go to put up flyscreen over the door panels. Haven't got enough. OK. FINE. Go back to city to work for the week. 5 shifts over 3 days. Come down with a head cold on the last day, of course it's a double shift. Drag myself home and stay in bed for about 36 hours. Get up and contemplate pantry doors. Cut MDF board to fit lower panels. Looks crappy next to pine. Put wallpaper over it. It's ugly '60;s wallpaper that clashes with the wallpaper sample wall, but it will do for now. Then something finally goes right. I have just enough flyscreen left to do the top panels.

That's it. It works well enough. My one-day job that turned into four days across three weekends.

In more lighthearted news, that night when I finished work, with a head cold? Couldn't get my car into the driveway because THIS.

Ouch. Hedgehogporn. This photo went viral on Facebook. And by viral, I mean it got 50 likes.

In bathroom news, the gib is up, and gib stopped. It was painful. And I forgot to take a photo. I'll take one when it's painted. Maybe when the coveing is up, Scotia? Architrave? Whatevs. I'm going to watch 3 or 4 episodes of Ripper Street, and eat chocolate cake.
Because I deserve it.

UPDATE: That 60's wallpaper drove me crazy real quick. So...

Ahhhh. That's better. Patchwork to match the wall. Also, cake!

Bathroom Advancement

I have a hot water cupboard, with a door!

(Soon I'll have a ceiling too).
The door is a wardrobe door that came out of a skip, but because it's narrower than an average door, it's just right. 

As a bonus, it also has a mirror.

Dead Bodies

I have come to the conclusion that there is a dead body in my house. A well hidden dead body. Possibly the smell has been disguised using some kind of science, which I am unaware of. It's somewhere near the kitchen, I think. It's possible that, when the roofers did their job, they hid a body up there in the narrow space between ceiling and roof in the extension.
How do I know it's there?

The dead flies of course.

I shut the house up on Tuesday. When I returned the following Sunday, all seemed well at first glance. I unloaded the car, put the groceries on the kitchen table, went to turn the hot water cylinder back on. The usual sort of thing. While in the lounge, I recognized the faint buzz of a fly in it's death throws, coming from one of the windows. I though nothing of it. Back in the kitchen, I was unpacking the groceries, putting milk in the fridge, etc. But when I turned towards the sink, I was greeted with the sight of a fresh battlefield.

Bodies lay dead or dying, writhing, buzzing. Some few stumbling around in confusion, but lacking strength. They seemed to radiate out from the kitchen window above the sink. The windowsill itself was a scene of horror, of grand magnitude. Flies had thrown themselves against the glass in an attempt to escape, until their bodies could no longer take it.

This was highly disturbing.

I can only assume they had hatched out of their maggoty forms sometime between Tuesday and Sunday, and lacking any food or water, became weak and death-prone. But, WHERE DID THEY COME FROM? I left no food out. I emptied the compost bin and rubbish before I left. The pantry was closed, and was flyless. No sign of any bad smells. No, the only conclusion is that THERE IS A DEAD BODY SOMEWHERE.

There are gaps everywhere in the kitchen. Between walls, ceiling, cupboards, and floor. These flies have crawled out of some hidden space and infested my food preparation area.

This has disturbed me more than the weta that climbed out of the gap between the wall and ceiling in the bathroom while i was having a shower. And that looked like this.

Roof!

It's taken about 4 months, but the roof is finally finished. Weather has been mostly hopeless. I love my fire so much. How did I ever live without one?

The rather scary, half naked house. Tin was salvaged from the mostly-good centre section of the roof, to re-use on the carport.

Despite having cleared out the massive birds nest in the roof when I moved in, in a little over a year, the starlings had managed to rebuild their home to massive proportions. At least another large rubbish bag worth of nesting materials came out of the rafters, including a turkey feather.

It took the roofer and his assistant 2 separate days to get just the iron on. I say separate because the weather packed in, and we had to wait a week for it to clear. The second day was spent on the difficult front section. He had to come back for a third day's work a month later. Why? Because the barge boards (also called fascia boards) needed to be replaced. So I called a builder and got a quote. $5,500. Ah. NO. I don't think so. If the roof cost $8,000 then I'm pretty sure there is no way in hell that replacing some bits around the edge should cost that much. We did it ourselves in the end. It was tricky, and time consuming, and I ended up buying a new ladder that cost more than the materials, and borrowing some equipment off a neighbour. In the end it was about $250 for wood, nails, and paint, and $280 for the ladder. We also ended up replacing only a small section of the sofit (that's the bit under the eaves), since it makes more sense to do that when I do the weatherboards.

So here is my lovely new roof, with lovely black guttering across the back (extra large), very stylish.

Here is my lovely new barge boards and flashings installed. They are narrower than the old ones, since the price difference was $13something a meter, or $5something a meter. You do the math.

So there we are. Although I have the guttering for the front of the house, (a freebee leftover from someone mum works for), it's not going up for a while, because there are powerlines in the way making it difficult. I have to investigate having them put underground. $$$.

Goals for the summer: Bank balance recovery. And getting some boards on around the bottom of the house. Maybe renovating some windows too. Dad got one out of a renovation across the road in exchange for some beer, so it might go in the kitchen.

Also, I should mention, I got insulation in the roof. I bought it at a cost of $830 (10 bales), and it was installed for a box of beers. It is awesome having an insulated roof! I should get on to doing the floors too.