Every cloud...

So a few weeks ago, it was glass recycling day and we had put our box out as usual.  It was 11.30pm and I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard what sounded like someone putting their own glass into our box.  This happens quite often when people collect more glass in the fortnight than they can fit in their box, and why would we mind, as long as they don't overfill the box so much that it doesn't get collected.

Anyway, moments later I heard a loud crash and jumped out of bed, ran to the front door and looked down the street to see - nothing.  I didn't realise straight away what had happened, but what we think happened was that someone picked up the neighbour's recycling box, and threw it at our house, the result of which was three bottles from the box smashed one of our front windows and landed in the lounge, and the box and the rest of the bottles were left on the front lawn.  Don't ask me why - if you wanted to smash a window surely a  single bottle would have been easier.  And why not use our recycling box, which was closer to hand?  And since both of the neighbouring properties front right onto the road whereas ours is set back, surely it would have been easier to smash one of those than hurl the whole recycling box a few metres?  Who knows, but anyway, that is what happened.

By the time we realised we had been victims of crime we had no chance to catch the villain and all we could do was hope no-one would try to climb through the window during the night and steal anything.  I hardly slept all night for worrying, but it was fine and I got a glazier in first thing to repair the glass.  The repair cost about $200 and I was pleased to discover that glass doesn't have an excess on the insurance so we put in a claim.  Now all we have to do is remember to paint the new putty "a minimum of 3 weeks and a maximum of 4 weeks after installation".  Quite a narrow window of opportunity there, pardon the pun.

Now for the silver lining.  We had been meaning to repair a few of the windows at the back of the house but hadn't got around to calling a glazier to assess the situation.  I had no excuse this time with a glazier on site so got them to glaze in a couple of the windows to the basement which had been boarded up since we moved in.  Neither window can be opened now since neither had sashes but were just holes, effectively, but that's ok, since we never open the windows in the basement anyway.  The cost of the repairs was $400 and as I said it was something I have been meaning to do since the boarded up windows made the house look untidy.

And here are the before and after shots.  Funny thing is it looks so natural not to have boarding that you can hardly see what you're looking at in the second photo.  Trust me there is glass in the bottom of that sash, it is just so clean you can't tell.

As with all of our projects, you solve one problem and it highlights the next worst problem:  now it is becoming blindingly obvious to me that the walls need repainting.

Carpets!

The arrival of carpets in our house seems to have been a long, long time coming.

Basically it is the very last thing you can install during a renovation (apart from unfixed soft furnishings).  This is because obviously, you don't want to be dripping paint on a lovely new carpet or having builders trampling all over it.
So... our journey (hate that word - subverted by TV weight loss shows - but it seems appropriate in this context) to carpets was:

- Strip carpets (2010)



- Strip horrible office-style ceilings (2011)



- Re-gib ceilings (2011)



- Plaster and re-cove ceilings (2011)



- Repaint rooms (2011-2013)



So... the above done we could move onto carpets.  We were advised to go with nylon as it lasts better than wool and won't stain (we'll see!!!).  So despite being in the country of wool - nylon it was.

The hall, ensuite, laundry and kitchen diner will stay as floorboards and the bathroom is tiled.  So we had three rooms to be carpeted - the two bedrooms and the second lounge/bedroom.  Each room is around 4m * 5m so pretty big, and the total quote, for a mid-range quality carpet and top range underlay was $4,000.  This was about $500 cheaper than the next best quote though still a sizeable whack.

The big day arrived!  I had built up lots of TOIL so took the day off to shift the furniture around ahead of the carpet fitters.  It was exhausting.  Not only was there obviously a lot of lifting but because all of the shifted furniture had to go somewhere (the kitchen diner) there was literally nowhere to sit down all day.  Not a bed, not a sofa, and the chairs were all covered in clothes (the wardrobe in the bedroom was also carpeted so we had to take the clothes out).

Here's the before shot showing the kind of flooring we had.

The floors looked like this before - painted brown, paint speckles

 We had problems in each room - the old hearths were made of tiles and we wanted to keep them, but because they were raised higher than the floorboards the fitters filled the area to make the ramp less well-rampy.

What they did to the old tiles to flatten it out.  Still under there - just

luxury underlay

underlaid

We had to take off the doors in several of the rooms, including the closet.

carpeting the bedroom.  Check out the awesome flow into the closet

Finished product - front room

Loving the carpet

The final job was to get in a "guy" to plane off the doors we had to remove to fit the carpets and rehang them.  That cost us another $350.  But included the two bifold doors on the wardrobes.

Verdict - we are loving the carpets.  A bonus is that the rooms look clean.  We could never make them look clean with the paint spattered floorboards, even if they had been multiply mopped.  Only trouble is that now the furniture doesn't look good enough!  Hmmm.  more expense to come...

Painting the final room

So after 3 years we have finally finished painting the inside of the house!!!

The last room we had to paint was the front living room.  It had interesting wallpaper in it but which had been  ruined by the holes drilled by the airfoam guys - so it had to be painted over.  We started with a coat of undercoat.  Bunnings weren't terribly helpful about how to paint over wallpaper.  I think you're supposed to strip it off rather than painting over it.  But it was in pretty good nick so we figured painting over it would probably be ok.  In the end we just went with all purpose undercoat sealer.

Steve spent weeks then painting different colours on the walls to pick the best one.  We decided on blue since the curtains were already made and they are shades of grey and finally settled on a colour called Twizel.  Probably after the the colour of the lake at Twizel which is a lovely milky blue shade due to the rockflour.

We are getting much better at painting (annoying in a way, since this is the last room we had to do), and we have figured out that it's best to paint the coving and skirtings first (if they are a different colour to the walls and ceiling) because it's much easier to cut in against a protuding piece than try to paint a protusion without getting paint onto the flat walls and ceiling.
It took us about three full days to paint the room, one day for the undercoat and then two to do the room.  Fortunately this shade covered the undercoat really well and two coats were more than enough.

Here's the paint job against the lovely curtains Mum made.  Next up: carpets.  Annoyingly as soon as you solve one problem, what is still to be done becomes really obvious.  In this case the paint spattered floorboards desperately need covering up.

And since we now have a red room, a green room and a blue room we can probably open a B&B....