Tales From the Box

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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.

Today we introduce the two builders who have been reveling in the creation and destruction of our renovation. Bryan and Chris have been on site over the past fortnight smashing up slabs and putting up frames. As well as being a couple of great blokes, they enjoy the odd (see daily) Mc Donalds meal and a game of cricket with any and all implements from around the building site.

We at Tales from the Box salute you!

BRDAY+18

Foundations are important. They help us remain steady and upright. The back slab – the one with all of the attention last week – has some problems. Nothing dramatic – however the slushing of the concrete has yet to occur as the aforementioned slab needs to be further strengthened with some increased metal and a bit more concrete than we had thought. Poor Brian (thats Brian with a i not a y) spent half a day on Monday cutting and inserting metal bars and generally making the whole slab area ready for concrete – but due to the friendly advice from the engineer which wasn’t confident of the load bearing capabilities of the old exterior concrete brickwork.

So the whole area was dug out, brick wall removed, doubling of metal bars and tying in of the bathroom, kitchen and lounge slab pieces.

Over the next few days we should see some big changes, namely to the side walls and to the various plumbing /electrical works around the house.