Archive | 7:23 pm

The renovation begins

30 May

I’ve been quiet over the past few days because we’ve been preparing the house for the builders. Yes that’s right – I’m extolling the virtues of all things sustainable while planning a wasteful renovation at the same time. My hypocrisy is shameful.

Before the first wall came out

We bought our house last year, but there are problems with it. Like many houses from the 60s, it’s been extended a number of times, and there wasn’t much thought put in to how the rooms flow.

I guess the aim was just to create more space at minimum cost. You can see that the two back windows of the old house are hardly even disguised. They just pulled the window frames out, painted around them and added another room on.

As we try to raise young children in this space we are finding the limitations. Firstly, the only way between the front and back of the house was right through the kitchen. Dangerous? We thought so. So we knocked out a wall.

After the first wall came out

Now we are changing the whole configuration of the centre of the house to improve the flow of the space, and create a whopping great kitchen at the same time.

From the dining room

So over the last few days we have been ripping out the kitchen. Here it is before the weekend from a few different angles.

P has been sweating away with the tools (he really loves it) and destroying stuff. The kitchen is now mostly gone, and the builders start on Thursday. They will be getting to work pulling the ceiling out so they can put a new beam in the roof so we can remove the pillar between the kitchen and the old dining room and lift the ceiling up so it doesn’t hang down like a window frame.

From the dining room with the kitchen gone

They’ll be relocating the air conditioning grates, tiling the floor, moving some more walls, closing in some doors, re-gyprocking everything and installing LED downlighting.  So much in (approximately) 3 weeks! Then the 7-8 week wait for the kitchen begins.

Sorry for the departure from the garden over the past few posts. It’s so wet in Sydney at the moment that I couldn’t do any gardening if I wanted to. Hopefully I’ll be back to it shortly.

Kitchen mostly gone (from the lounge room)