Old habits

Today the children went back to school.  Two children at secondary school - how did that happen?  My project job finished a couple of days before we went to New Zealand so I am in a situation I happily call "self-unemployed".  If a superjuicy or irresistible job comes up then maybe I'll be tempted back out of my shell, but otherwise I have plenty to keep me busy.  Old habits die hard; I have made myself a BIG LONG LIST. (And yet here I am at the computer with a whole pot of coffee to myself.  Old habits indeed.)

My first project presented itself minutes after we got home.  Someone used the toilet and the cistern just kept on running and running, again.  Yeeesssssss!  When I got that fixed once before the plumber said that if it happened again I should replace the whole toilet and with one that uses far less water.  I usually don't like replacing things that aren't broken because it just seems wasteful (the obvious exception being things that are so ugly or poorly designed that they depress me) so this was the perfect opportunity to finally replace our ugly, beige, stained, too-tricky-to-clean, water-wasting toilet.  While I'm at it the bathroom and laundry will get a spruce-up too.  Here is our new throne. 

Image courtesy of Caroma

And in case you are wondering, that isn't a urinal on top as someone suggested.  It is a handbasin.  Hopefully no visitors will get confused.

The next major project on my list is something I'm very excited about because it is a (very modest) version of something I've long dreamt about doing. 

One of my very old habits is to look at mental real estate and plan makeovers for it.  For as long as I can remember I have had a fascination with sad, abandoned, non-residential buildings and dreamt about acquiring one, throwing some love at it and transforming it into a superb home, workroom and business.  So when I was back in New Zealand, having a great time and dreaming about moving back there, I indulged in a bit of what my partner refers to as "real estate p*rn" (rhymes with corn). 

Here is my all-time favourite mental real estate conversion opportunity: The Riverton Bowling Club. 

Here is another doozie: the building formerly known as The Tirau Event Centre.  I am soooo over events after the year I had at work last year, so I would turn this building into a lovely peaceful "Non-Event Centre".

Maybe my very own hall in Karitane.

And another bowling club, this time in Carterton, listed here and here.  Cheap as chips!

How about a whole school.

Or a country hall. (I went to a rather memorable party there as a teenager.)

Can I interest anyone in possibly the saddest building in the universe?

Honestly Trademe is just heaving with very tempting disused Scout Halls, Masonic Lodges, Bowling Clubs, banks, post offices, railway stations, churches (which for some reason don't appeal to me) and other ripe-for-refurbishment opportunities.  Obviously there are a few impracticalities to my obsession, the main one being that I am in Australia and all these gems are in New Zealand.  

But realistically the main thing my family really needs is simply one more biggish multi-purpose room; I need a workroom, my children would love their own space to hang out with their friends and we need better guest accommodation.  My daughter's dream way of solving this issue is for us to airlift a Futuro onto the back garden and I'd gladly oblige only I could find one to buy in Australia.  The Futuro at the top of this post is currently also for sale on Trademe ... and it is in Raglan.  Soooo tempted...

Anyway we discussed our "one more biggish multi-purpose room" requirements recently with a building designer who visited to give our house a "Home Sustainability Assessment" and guide us through the next stage of our renovations.  Happily she suggested we get on and do something that we'd toyed with but thought might be a daft idea: insulate and line the great galumphing hangar-sized double garage on the back lawn to convert it to a useable space.  I finally have my very own conversion project!

I've been pulling together some ideas for the project and so far it looks like this (and yes, I own quite a bit of fabric again).

My daughter has her own ideas.  Hers involve air-hockey tables, pinball machines, vintage arcade games, Dr Who posters and somewhere to play Minecraft, Portal2 and listen to TripleJ. 

I'm sure we'll be able to create a space we are all happy with.  It should be a doddle compared to fixing up a whole bowling club.

Not bothered

Today I am waiting and waiting

and waiting

for some flooring action.  Again.

Today, for once, I'm not bothered.

Slow progress but a silver lining

I have had a very quiet week enjoying a form of home detention - minus the ankle bracelet.  Every day this week I have sat at home with the furniture from a different bedroom piled up around me in one living room while all the furniture and rugs from the other living room are piled up in one corner of that room to create a clear worksurface on its floor. 

And I have been waiting and waiting and waiting.  All week I have been waiting for the floorer to arrive.  I have now learnt that the hour he will actually arrive and what he will actually achieve each day will bear no relation to what I was led to expect. But he definitely is making progress and thankfully my expectations about the quality of the job and the finished look of the products have been met.

We now have flooring in the kitchen and dining room (it is that Marmoleum above).  The children now have flooring in their bedrooms (more Marmoleum).

I ended up giving the Lego pit/library/study (otherwise known as a living room) plain old painted concrete (Berger Jet Dry) as a temporary measure because we plan to hack about at that room at some stage down the track.  However we love the floor in that room far out of proportion with its cost (about $50).

Now I can see the finish line.  Just a few rooms to go and the perpetual furniture shifting will be over. 

The enforced home time has had a silver lining though.  A few weeks ago I broke one of my small toes.  It hurt so much that I got a temporary case of Tourette syndrome and swore so much I had to apologise to my daughter, but I didn't get a chance to rest it as I was too busy galavanting around with Mum.  Eventually my foot looked as if I had one of these monstrosities stuck to the side of it.  Now, after a week of home detention resting my foot on the cool painted concrete, I can finally wudge it into footwear again.  Maybe by the time the floorer finally finishes I'll even be able to walk properly again.

This is not my beautiful house

Working on our house project has made me more focused than ever before on housey things.  I've always had a bit of a thing for architecture books and interior design magazines, but now that I'm working on our own project and constantly selecting, sourcing and installing various products, I'll admit to becoming just a little obsessed.  I knew I had it bad the other day when I had a few renovations done in my mouth and I had to work very hard to resist asking my dentist where he'd got his dishy bench tops from.

The rest of the family are not immune to this.  As we get about on our daily business we find ourselves having conversations about window styles and pebble colours, roof lines and design crimes.  (The pictures throughout this post are of various weird and wonderful houses around these parts.  None of them are my beautiful house, though the very last photo is of something I own.) I don't expect we'll be like this forever as our plan is to move in and get on with our lives, and then look back and laugh at our numerous painful outings to hardware stores where at least one of our party ended up with that "someone just kill me now" look in their eyes.

Throughout this project Interwebland has been my best friend.  I have been constantly amazed by the number of people, both professional and amateur, who continually renovate, redecorate and restyle homes, then post evidence of their projects online.  Type any old paint colour, style of light fitting or floor covering into Mr Google and you'll find someone who has not only used it but beautifully photographed and documented the results for grateful folk like me to benefit from.

I'd like to be that generous but our project is very modest and simple and besides, we move house this coming Saturday so I'm a tad too busy.  Here below is where we'll most likely be moving to.

No, that is not my beautiful house.  That is my beautiful, hangar-sized shed.  Unless a miracle happens between now and Saturday we'll be shifting most of our worldly goods in to there, but given how many shed-dwelling redback spiders I've rehomed I draw the line at sleeping in there.

The hold-up is that the rolls of flooring are still sitting in the house like great galumphing elephants in the room.  The floor-layer has had an accident and busted his hand.  I haven't been hassling him because a) he is nice, and b) he knows full well how we are placed, and c) I reckon that a floor layer with a busted hand has quite enough hassles already.  But I will admit to thinking more than once "How did I get here? What have I done?"

Breakthrough

No renovating today as I had too many other appointments stacked up.  I did pop to the new house to drop a few things off though and noticed that a minor miracle had happened ... flooringdude has obviously been in there as one batch of the flooring is in the building.   Apparently it needs to acclimatise!

Hopefully by the time I next pop in there more than just the sample patch will be glowing with beetrooty-coloured goodness. 

Early on in this process we had to face the somewhat vexing question of whether to decorate the house for a) the Mandurah resale market or b) for us to enjoy living in for however long we live here - and no, given the decor in the hundreds of houses I looked at before we bought I'd say those two things are most certainly not the same.  Obviously we chose the latter option and only time will tell whether we succeed in making this house completely unsaleable.  The product above is marmoleum by Forbo in the colour Bleeckerstreet.  It's not for the faint-hearted but then I'm not scared of flooring, and besides it is only going in a small part of the house.

And speaking of unsaleable, I didn't take proper "before" photos because I was so keen to rip stuff out, but here is a wee snippet of what that wall and floor looked like before, when they languished on the market for over a year. 

Mmmmmmm, Grim as Grimsville.  Surely only a troglodyte or a very brave type would take that on.

Flooring puzzle

Since we bought our house a few weeks back, I have ripped out all the carpet, vinyl, curtains, blinds, some shelves, a half-height brick wall and a wheelie-bin full of enormous recessed downlights. 

Then I had a uteload of new power points and various other handy electrical bits installed.  I had the many facebrick walls (more appropriately called brick-in-your-face) either roughly bagged or smoothly plastered.  I  had the interior of the house painted.  I had the existing beige bath and shower box resurfaced so they are now gleaming white.  I bought a houseload of new light fittings.  I bought new curtains and curtain tracks and selected blinds.  I had the roller shutters mended.  I had various locks replaced or fixed, though not without first being locked out. 

I also excavated 16m x 20m knee-high front "lawn" to unearth the reticulation system in preparation for delivery of a truckload of mulch.  I trimmed various trees so that they don't cause the gutters to grow roof gardens.  I trimmed various shrubs so that the postie can visit without losing an eye.  I removed piles of inorganic rubbish from the garden and in the process I found that our garden is home to a bobtail lizard who looks like this,

and a quenda, or bandicoot, who looks like this.

I also had the gobby glue residue ground off the concrete pad ready for new floor coverings to be installed.  But there I hit a very puzzling and frustrating double-brick wall and sadly I still have a) a big chunk of my renovation budget sitting in the bank, and b) a whole house with bare, unsealed concrete floors.  This situation has not resulted from a lack of effort on my part; over the past few weeks I have developed cauliflower ear and callouses on my fingers from the number of phonecalls, texts and emails I've made to various flooring folk begging them to measure, quote and sell me their products.  I'm starting to wonder if they are just fronts for drugs operations.

So at crack of dawn today I started the whole sorry process again at yet another flooring retailer.  I left all my contact information and exact details of what products I want to get installed.  I've been waiting hopefully all day to hear from them about when they can come and measure and quote - and install.  This is my top priority as we can't move in until this piece of the puzzle is in place.

However if they want to swing by tomorrow they are out of luck.  There will be no renovating tomorrow because then I get something more far more important and exciting than even a houseload of floor coverings - though how this particular thing has managed to arrive so quickly is also somewhat puzzling.  See tomorrow, I get a teenager!

[Pics at top of Katrin Sonnleitner's version of a persian rug from here.  Best of luck getting that in Mandurah!]

The wonders of child labour

When we took possession of our new house, the extensive paved areas around it all looked like this shot above.  Weeding that was certainly on my list but way, way down as my priority is to get the house to a stage that we can move in to.

But through the wonders of child labour by a very determined child who is madly saving up to buy herself a laptop, a large part of that paving now looks like this.

What's even better is that she's taken on the ongoing maintenance contract.  Who needs Hire a Hubby when you can hire a daughter.

Decisions, decisions

Desperately trying not to count my chickens before they are hatched, but we are seconds away from taking possession of our own pile of WA sand and our own double-brick 'n' tile, alu window, 3x1 with auto retic, side access, evap aircon, solar HW, powered shed and alfresco.  Like how I've mastered the local lingo?

Basically that means we have bought a cheap, tired little puppy of a house in the city that a few years back was deemed to have some of the least affordable housing in the world.  Our new house is certainly no mid-century modernist dream-home; soon after starting the househunt here I realised that that simply wasn't going to happen in Mandurah.  So we have formulated a new plan: we have bought a house that is well located (walking distance to school, beaches, shops etc), ripe for a style makeover (it has every shade of brown decor you could ever hope for) but structurally sound.  However the main attraction of the house is that it is also an ideal candidate for a sustainability makeover as it has a good basic layout - and that took some finding.

My job over the next few months will be completing the first phase of turning this sow's ear of a house into a silk purse - and with the sort of budget that some folks round here use to cover the carseats in their his 'n' hers Hummers.

I've already been weighing up the priorities and making lots of decisions:  water-saving toilet vs a few more metres of marmoleum, Bosch Activewater dishwasher vs Cloth fabric curtains, roof space ventilation vs Featherston chair, induction cooktop vs custom-built hoop pine ply bookshelves, PV solar panels vs Trippen shoes from Ricarda (OK, that last one is a fib but I'm still allowed my dreams).  Then the big decision will choosing an architect to help us achieve the next phase of the plan (recommendations gratefully accepted).

But there is one decision we are all happy not to have to make.  When the four of us head to Perth for a grand day out and get peckish, two people inevitably suggest "sushi!" and the other two suggest "dim sum!"  Thankfully we don't need to arm wrestle over it as we have found a place that serves both.  On a conveyor belt.  Yes, robo sushi on the high road and robo dim sum on the low road, trundling past with no tricky decisions required.  Edo Shiki, we love you. 

If only all my decisions were that easy.