Tales From the Box

BRDAY +51

I feel bad for not noting the half century of the box renovation. We have reached day 51 since work first began and today marked another big day.

With the promise of a cooked lunch featuring both processed meat and chunks of cow, the tradies were in early, hoping to polish off the work for today and perhaps leave a bit earlier than the post 6pm finishes of the last few days.

On the agenda – to complete the cladding, fit the temporary stairs (using the old ones from the front deck), finish the sarking, finish the stud walls upstairs, rip out more of the old masonite interior walling upstairs and cover in the old front door. This was in addition to the delivery of enough Gyprock to sink a battleship, plus the entire house being insulated (celings and walls ).

The lunch was a welcome break however with the frenetic activity around the box – work continued until the sun was low in the sky.

How much stuff you do own? Can you fit it into a box? Can you fit it into a room? A car? Two rooms? Three?

Its an interesting question when you think about how you leave your footprint on the world. Anyway – i have been thinking a little about this over the part few days as we have packed up our entire living area and shifted it into two rooms, that being our bedroom and my study (its mine – jo never uses it thus i am claiming ownership!).

Currently I have sitting next to our computer, our 68cm konka (top brand that) and every kitchen thing we own, as well as all of our dvd’s, towels, electronics and assorted other stuff that is in our living room.

Next to these zipped rooms is emptiness. No kitchen, no lounge or tv (thus no foxtel). Nothing – and for that matter never again will that room that has seen so many good meals, good company and good movies see that again. Its destiny is a much more tranquil one as the main bedroom.

-//note//- i was going to name this post CoDec but i thought that too geeky. I am trying to not default to geekdom at every available opportunity – its mightily difficult though…

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Chaos…but in a controlled way. Today saw the most eventful day in the history of this renovation.

Early in the morn, when the air was still crisp and the birds still singing, our three brave tradies entered the house and removed the ceiling of the current living room, kitchen and hallway. What tumbled down from the ceiling cavity was something akin to snow, except that it wasn’t…. it was more like belly button lint. About 10 square metres of it – enough to line the floor a foot thick across the house. Oh and there was two dead rats in the roof – awesome!

Then these plucky men turned their attention to the eastern wall (wall that the kitchen was on). Within an hour this wall was completely gone, and a cooling breeze not to mention a marvellous view was on show for all (inlcuding the neighbours). The old internal cupboard was totally removed and the two windows that will be in this space were both framed up.

Attention was then turned to the area where the stairs will be. Bryan seemed to take particular delight in sawing the hole out. After some messing about the adjoining lower wall (i.e. the back of the downstairs bathroom), the stud wall for our new bedroom was up and our tradies were on their way as the sun was settling into the western horizon.

Windspray – conjures up feelings/emotions of the sea – those days when mother earth seems to sigh, and with it a moist cool breeze wafts over your skin, calming you to sigh along with her…

Well it is 39 degrees here today (well over 100F if you are a from that part of the world) – and we are in a record drought conditions with bushfires burning across 4 states.

But if you were to glance at the lovely cladding that was installed today you would be taken back to the first line of this post. Windspray. Our cladding has indeed arrived and is being installed as i write. Windspray is the colour of the colorbond range of corrugated iron cladding that we are opting for.

The corrugated colorbond is becoming quite an Australian signature – with its use very popular in contemporary Australian architecture. Of course much of this can be attributed to Australian architect Glen Murcutt who is renowned for the use of corrugated iron in his works.

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A change to the box as the lower storey begins to be filled in for the first time. Wall board is up down the bottom outside and upstairs, Bryan is ripping off the fake wall paneling (well its not ‘fake’ because it is in fact wall panneling but it is not very good and pretends to look like weatherboard slats when it is actually some sort of metal which is about as thin a coke can). We went for the insulation which i know sounds odd to those of you in other countries where insulation basically saves you from freezing to death. In this house we have never had any wall insulation – and the roofing insulation is the consistency of chewed cotton wool.

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Well the holiday hiatus has finished and the downstairs bathroom is whipping along at a frenetic pace. The wallboard has been installed and the next day the tiling began! How is that for efficiency! The fixtures are being installed as we speak – so tomorrow I should be able to bring you some pictures our vanity and toilet (or you could just check out our other bathroom as we have used the exact same scheme – yes – we are lazy designers).

The open ‘area’ which is featured in the slideshow is actually our laundry which is taking shape.

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After completing a stupendous, stand up job of the upstairs bathroom, George and his minions have started in earnest on the downstairs bathroom. We liked the design of the upstairs bathroom so much that we thought – why complicate things – so we have gone for the same tile/basin/fixtures combination. The space we allocated for the downstairs bathroom was the downstairs laundry – the only part of the original house that is downstairs (three downstairs in a sentence – yay for me). The size of the space we were working initially was roughly that of our current bathroom – given that we are losing about 1.5 square metres due to the staircase cutting through the old laundry.

However we had some issues – we had to incorporate some sort of laundry into the design. We had planned to have it an all in one – washing machine/dry in the bathroom. But George persuaded us that a separate laundry with a tub (we has planned for no tub). So we have a rather interesting mosaic of walls up at the moment with will form our bathroom.

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Like most other males, I love my technology. I have a relationship with my computer which i cannot describe. My Ipod has transformed my music listening. I can’t imagine life without my HDV camera and “my” digital SLR is an extension to my body (ask anyone).

I also love to cook.

Food that is… I love to cook food. So to combine these two activities would be tremendous. I have envisaged a nice (not massive) LCD screen opposite my cooking area – slickly mounted on the wall opposite. However I have ran into a small problem – one of the drawbacks to the wonderful age of digital TV is accursed set top box. Though its a necessity – in our situation, a big ugly box next to our TV won’t do. I have looked at LCD which feature integrated tuners, but they are all built for very large TV’s, not the size that we need/want for our kitchen area.

We also have the added fun of having to rewire our telephones. However Telstra charges $300 for a visit and won’t make do with the current setup (i.e. Telstra worker who was out here a few months ago said that they will have install connection boxes and some such just to begin with).

We have a local guy coming into to give us some handy hints. Someone told me once – when Google can’t solve it – it is beneficial to call a professional.

Yeah – google is pretty impressive….

BRDAY +34

Well if you haven’t realised, we are in holiday break mode for our renovation. Alas we initially hoped to have everything finished by now, but because of a lot of uncontrollable factors that hasn’t happened. So we enjoyed our first Christmas in a somewhat vacant future lounge room as well as enjoying some much deserved cricket. After having nearly the entirety of the front lawn covered with building materials, the Boxing Day @ The Box cricket pitch came up a treat.

BRDAY + 20

If the neighbours were slightly confused with the banging and general wash of noise echoing from our property, this morning they were left in no doubts as to the happenings in and around The Box.

Monday saw some 10 different tradies on site doing everything from bathroom work, demo, framing, pouring concrete, rewiring power, plumbing both inside and outside the house. Thus all adjacent roads and footpaths became a parking lot in the middle of the day.

At the end of the day – all one could do was marvel at how far things had come in such a short period…and how much mess had been created in the process.