The Big Dig

After several frustrating months reviewing the prices of building work and then waiting for the builder to finally be available, they have finally started!

The first job for the builders is to dig out the area of the new flat.  Most of the basement area we're building in is already above head height so actual excavation is limited, but they still needed to dig out footings for the new walls.

Here is the progress so far, in photos.  Sorry about the formatting.  Still learning.

Roger and Steve clearing the area for the builders to start.  While they bashed stuff up with a sledgehammer I had the fun job of putting the stuff from the basement into the loft.

The footings are dug out to about half a metre on the northern and eastern sides of the flat for the first concrete pour.             

The new kitchen area being dug out. Don't worry, those piles will be replaced...

Bird's eye view of the moisture barrier and steel strengthening rods for footings before boxing and concrete pour

Moisture barrier and steel, just before boxing goes on

Boxing, just before concrete pour

Looking at the new flat from the garden.  The windows on the south side have been removed.  The big gap in the middle is where the new door will go.

Shot of the supporting scaffold and boxing on the northern and eastern walls of the flat after the first concrete pour (you can see the new concrete at the bottom of the shot)

Trenches for new bathroom drainage (hot water cylinder, shower, toilet, basin, washing machine)

Worryingly, some water in one of the new trenches.  Watch this space.

May 27.  Pipe in foreground is drainage from the new kitchen.

Big hole for existing upstairs ensuite toilet drainage, not quite sure what the hole is for, I guess they're moving the sewer drain.

New pipework

After boxing is removed, new wall framing and concrete footing on the east side of the house, and total destruction on the south side.

What will be the kitchen, one day...

Looking out into the garden on May 27

This is about 4 weeks' work so far.  Safe to say the house is going through "it'll have to get worse before it gets better" phase....

The Wellington flat project

We have a house in Mount Cook, Wellington, the capital of New Zealand.  Wellington is a small city of around 150,000 residents located at the extreme south of the North Island.  Wellington is fairly unique by New Zealand standards for being relatively densely developed.  This is largely due to topography: Wellington's location (a virtual peninsula) means that it is constrained by coastline on three sides, and it is also extremely hilly.  A local landmark is the Brooklyn Wind Turbine at 299m above sea level, and it's less than 5km from our house.  The constraints of topography and coastline combine to result in the iconic urban landscape of pastel coloured villas tumbling down hillsides.




Because of the hilly nature of Wellington, it's common for houses to be built on sloping sites.  Some of the steeper sites have staircase access, or in the case of  the cliff-hanging house, the house itself forms the stairs.  There are around 300 privately owned cable cars in Wellington to mitigate the step problem.  In any case, our house is no exception.  From the front the house appears to be a bungalow on a flat section but the ground slopes away rapidly to the back, to the extent that it is a two story property at the back, and you have to go down the deck stairs to reach the garden.  The basement of the property is well above head height at the back sloping down to around 1 metre at the front.  The development potential of the underutilised basement is one of the reasons we bought the place.

Our house is approximately 1km from the city centre in an area zoned "inner residential".  When we bought the house we were focussing on an area close to the city because we value the proximity to facilities, including shops, cinemas, bars and work.  We are close enough to walk to the city and with good public transport access too you can easily live without a car. It is areas like this that are ideal for intensification.  Intensification means getting more dwellings out of the land area.  Think Hong Kong and other constrained land areas where flats result in more people living close to facilities.  Dense cities are often great places to live since minimal time is wasted commuting.  Examples are Vancouver, often cited as the world's best place to live, New York, San Francisco, and Singapore.  Living in a dense environment is not for everyone, but it works really well where there are existing facilities nearby.  With a supermarket on our doorstep, regular bus services and the ability to walk to work, we have the ability to create a new home without gobbling up more greenfield land.  There is a good chance that whoever moves into our new flat will live a low-carbon existence and hopefully enjoy all the nearby amenities which are, of course, the reason we bought the house in the first place.  We can't provide a car park, even if we wanted to, but hopefully they won't need one.

Anyway, that's the theory.  The practice is we've got building consent to build a 45m² one bedroom flat in our basement.  It will be accessed via the garden path with a separate mains connection meaning we can rent it as a separate dwelling.

Next blog - the big dig.

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....

Hello ensuite

 I did want to do a succession of blogs about the ensuite development, but it coincided with one of the busiest times of year and a busy time in our lives too.

To summarise the background situation: we had had the original consent amended to allow us to build an ensuite. This came through in mid November and we quickly got the builders back in.

Here's the corner of the room before we started work.  The room is huge - measures about 6m * 4m with 3.6m ceilings, and is actually so big that it was difficult to feel cosy in it.  So the plan was to build a small (1m * 3m) ensuite and two wardrobes in this handy corner. 

The before shot.  this corner measures about 1.8m * 3m. Note the pre-polished floor...

Looking the other way...

 It's worth observing the location of the radiator... too close to the new ensuite.  Annoyingly we (actually Steve) had decided to place it away from the corner near the window, but now this turned out to be too close to the new wall, so we had to move it, at a cost of $100...

Wall lining stripped away with shower tray in place.

inspecting the new framing

 As the builders started putting in the framing with a false ceiling they were able to create a big cavity above.  The ceiling on the ensuite is just 2.4m so that leaves a full 1.2m cavity to the true ceiling height.  We did briefly consider turning it into a sleeping loft, but as we have no need for an extra bedroom at the moment, didn't progress that idea, but we did ask them to put a light and socket up there for storage.

note the framing for the new loft above - big enough for a bed!

the toilet tries its space out for size

 

A blast from the past, gib in the hallway again

Just to show the great level of framing the builders do.  It seems superfluous to me but I guess that makes it a quality build

The gib starts to go up

plastering

 We bought a cool mirrored cabinet which the builders installed recessed into the wall.  This is a great idea in a small ensuite because it minimises space above the basin as it doesn't stick out into the room.  It also has a socket inside it so you can charge your electric toothbrush or whatever. 

mirrored cabinet

 With the wardrobe doors we asked for an upgrade on the builder's quote to bifold doors.  The main reason for this was that one of the wardrobes is immediately by the door into the bedroom and a bifold door doesn't take up as much space as a normal door, so the door to the bedroom and wardrobe doors don't collide.  We are pleased with this decision - it cost another $200 ish but it's the upgrades which (from experience) we tend to like.

wardrobe doors go in

 So after about 3 weeks we finally had more or less the finished product, but with Vicki and Steve coming to visit on December 28th we were under the gun (AGAIN) to get the room finished so that we could move back into our bedroom and vacate the spare room.

After some consideration we decided to be bold with the colour choice.  Steve consulted numerous possible colour charts and came up with Devil's Backbone - a sophisticated red shade.  I guess it wouldn't work so well in a small or modern room, but we think it looks good.  The painting took a long time to do - with walls as high as ours and a dark colour paint which takes 3 coats to get the correct depth of colour it took us about 3 full days to finish. 

Steve clearly loves painting

 The loft above the ensuite was great but we realised it would be really annoying getting the ladder from the basement each time we wanted to access it, so we asked the builders to make us a simple ladder attached to the wall.  This cost another $200, but I think it was well worth it.

the closet all nicely painted

the mirror on the sliding door cost us another $200

 Steve was very naughty with the paint colour inside the ensuite.  I had the veto rights on the colour but Steve was in charge of buying paint and bought a more purply shade than I had chosen.  Mine would have been more grey, but on the whole it's not too bad....

new shower and basin

mirror cabinet

So we are now all finished in theory.  There are though a couple of outstanding problems. Most importantly we have a leak under the house.  The builder is away at the moment so we can't get it fixed, so it's back to shower no. 1 for the time being.  I haven't paid the bill in consequence, but it will amount to around $16k in total - about $1200 for the bathroom furniture. maybe $400 in paint, $300 ish for lighting and the rest for the builder.  

 

On the whole though, we are quite pleased with the end result.  It was great having a second bathroom with guests staying.  The wardrobes are not perfect as they are just boxes - without drawers it makes it difficult to select items.  So I might purchase a few trays to fit inside them, if such a thing exists.  We have no longer got enough wallspace for chests of drawers so they will have to be enough one way or another!

 

The loft space and ladder is probably my favourite thing, it means we can finally clear up some of the other parts of the house where we have things like boxes of cables and wrapping paper cluttering up the place.  I also really like the paint job - Steve was responsible for walls and I did the cutting in.