Another weekend, another bunch of stuff done at the house. Have I mentioned how awesome my parents are, travelling 600+km in one weekend to give me a hand?! (Hope any future children I have never plan on rennovating!)
Also, I thought I'd be smart and take my point-and-shoot along to take photos of the things I realised I'd forgotten. Just to come back and realise that it takes worse photos than my phone. Hmph. I really need to learn how to use my "proper" camera - a DSLR that cost me a fortune.
In truth, I did have a little perception that just by purchasing a good camera, my photos would come out amazing, without much effort on my part (I know, I know - I can hear the face-palms from here) - clearly, that's not the case, and I'm not very flash at taking details from the manual and making it work for me in practical terms. This means it's patiently waiting in it's bag, until I have time to learn - which will probably be once I move.
Back to the shitty pictures!
Here is my heater, all lovely and painted (don't mind the dust)
Mum informs me we have to light a fire in the heater before taking inside. This burns off the extra paint, bakes it onto the heater, and means I won't stick the house out. Isn't she a clever cookie?
Take note of the pile of skirting boards behind the heater there. Very soon I'll be turning the shed into a one woman sanding and painting station!
Also I remembered to take photos of my "arch":
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| Front - finished |
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| Back (hallway side) |
I swear to my mum that I will never forget the hours of work that went into this, and I will never ever remove a door frame again, so mote it be.
Bathroom update! I wanted to show off my pretty floor, but instead you get to view it with plastic taped over it. Dusty plastic.
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| Shower Niche |
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| Steven getting dusty.... |
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| ...to fit my bath! $99 for something I'm never going to use |
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| Bath Niche! |
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| Mum's handy work on the ceiling |
After Steven working on the bathroom the whole weekend, it's water proofed and ready to be tiled in a fortnight!
Now let me tell you about architraves. You know, the frame type bits that go around windows and doors. Well we originally took them off from around the doors, thinking we'd have to trim them and put them back on once the flooring goes down. Turns out that there's a little cutter we can use for that job, so I had to put the architraves back on. I was semi-clever when removing them, and wrote on each one where it was from ("B3 to Hallway - left"), and thought this would make putting them back on a breeze. Ha. HA!
I imagined the process to go:
1. Identify correct arc
2. Line up arc in door way
3. Nail on
4. Hole punch in nails
5. Putty nail holes
6. Sand, undercoat
7. Celebrate my general awesomeness
The true process?
1. Identify correct arc
2. Attempt to line up. Pinch finger. Swear. Wonder why something that used to meet perfectly, no longer does. Finally wiggle arc to meet top piece perfect. See what gap isn't even all the way to the bottom. Swear.
3. Give up on lining up, and settle on fact gap filler will fix it. Attempt to hammer in nail, whilst standing on trusty milk crate. Drop nail. Realise I probably need awesome accessories like a belt bag to hold hammer and nails. Tell mum I need cool accessories. Get lecture about how other people don't achieve great things because they think they need certain items to get a job done.
4. Whinge long enough to have mum come and look. Mum tells me that hard wood is hard. Gives me the "look". Tells me to predrill holes.
5. Locate drill. Sift through massive pile of drill bits (Steven has all the things, but has an organisational system no-one could possibly follow). Announce to no-one in particular that when I have a drill my drill bits will be in a nice little holder.
6. Predrill holes
7. Line up arc again, this time meeting perfectly. Start to nail. Get half way through and realise its moved. Pull nail out. Swear.
8. Decide nailing further down is easier, then pull top into line with final nail. Celebrate first arc on, in under an hour!
9. Attempt to hole punch nails in. Whack knuckle. Swear. Have frustrated mum show me to how to properly use nail punch. Still get Steven to do the tricky ones.
10. Take crappy pic with camera focusing on wrong thing in celebration.
All I can say is, I wish I had Mandi Tremayne's nail gun of awesome. (If you have not read her blog, you so need to! Mandi is an amazing DIY lady, mother of 4, tells hilarious stories about her kids and takes amazing pics of the whole process!).
Anyway, all the arcs are on, undercoated, and ready to go. And at this point, I'm not thinking about the pile of previously-mentioned skirting boards. Nuh-uh.
Did I mention the heat pump relocation?
Here is the wall where it was. Mum's amazing plastering skills made the holes dissapear. I probably wouldn't have worried too much about moving it, except I didn't want to be breezed upon when eating dinner, and also, this is the only wall for my prized piece of furniture - a colonial kauri pine dresser Mum lovingly restored for me a few years back. I love my dresser so much, I wouldn't have bought the house if there hadn't been a suitable place for it. Call me picky, but when I love something, I rarely compromise. So the heat pump had to go.
And here's where the heat pump is going. It'll create it's little annoying breezes over the wood heater. This will help circulate the heat, and Bird informs me that it'll actually work quite efficiently with the wood heater. Yay!
You might have noticed in the first picture of my house, the heat pump unit sitting out the front. It's a bit of a pet hate of mine, the outside part of the unit on display like some sort of ugly garden feature. Seeing as we were locating the unit to the other side of the house, I thought it would be a good chance to move the unit as well. Bird was keen on this idea, until I said I wanted the unit on the roof. I think the conversation went something like,
Him: "So you want it on the roof. I don't even know if you can put one on a tile roof".
Me: "But the unit is soooooo ugly and I might want to put on a deck some day and if it goes any further that way it'll be close to my bedroom window and I'll be able to hear the fan going and-"
Him: "Okay, fine, on the roof will be fine" *sigh*
So that's how it went from here:
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| Please ignore strange crator... |
Ugliness avoided. Happy Jess!
In the meantime, Mum has continued plastering and painting. I took a photo, but she said "don't take photos of me!". Okay Mum, you've avoided the blog, this time.
She's been itching to get the window colour on, and now we get to see all the colours finished!
I wanted gloss windows, but Mum said matte would be better. We settled on a satin, and I'm pretty glad because it's true what they say about gloss showing up everything. Including my poor undercoating skills. Woops. Mum wouldn't let me pull off the tape (sad face). Next weekend, she said.
It was also the first time we'd been at the house when it was raining! Pretty amazing for Tasmania. I even got to see snow on Mount Wellington out my loungeroom window, if only for an hour or so in the morning.
The mountian disappears in poor weather, apparently. I'm going to enjoy my new view!
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