Tales From the Box

BRDAY+13

We have walls! Or at least the faint wooden outlines of them. Yesterday and today, the framework for our downstairs external walls was erected. We now have a somewhat faint outline in which to start imagining our two story box (i know – two storeys is hard to get used to – ‘box on stilts‘ has a certain mountain panache).

The walls have been masterfully incorporated into the overall structure of the our existing house on stills – with special care being paid to the metal posts holding the house up. The builders (namely Bryan) is weaving the walls under beams – between bearers, around where the windows have been planned. Its just a mass of wood of the moment – but to us forms the skeletal foundation of The Box.

Plumbers/electricians will be here tomorrow for whats known in Lower Blue Mountains circles as The Great Untangling (other wise known in far off Nordic countries as the Erinomainen Emission Messias or Den Stor Mot Messina).

For those of you not versed with the delight of feed readers, aggregators and all of the wonderful, techy ways to read and enjoy news from a various blogs, then we at Tales from The Box have made it easier for you to stay in touch with the wonderful and bizarre occurrences of our renovation. To the right of this blog is SUBSCRIBE TO US entry field. Simply put in your email and you will get notified when our blog is updated! Thanks for reading!

If one engages with me in conversation, I can be heard describing our humble abode as a as a box on stilts (because….you know…it is!). Quite simply its a 1950′s beach house 70km from the beach (go figure…). Anyway today was a significant day – alas BRDay+7 did not feature the quiet hum of cement pouring, but more so the humble loss of one (of many) stilts. Our SE corner stilt has been replaced by a noggin support and stud wall. I assumed (in my ignorance and inept knowledge of building practices) that Ben the Builder (i.e. our builder) would build stud walls around these iron pillars. Alas I was wrong – apparently we will see the end to the metal pillars and a return to pine (so easily eaten by local termites).

Tomorrow looks more likely for cement action. The form work has been put up for the lounge slab and for the kitchen raised slab area (more about this to follow later).

BRDay+6
Our well made plans have taken into account some of the drainage issues associated with extending underneath your house. On the plans, we had a trench running across the ‘driveway’ to stop water running down the driveway and against the foundations. However the whole area underneath the current front deck poses an issue – not from the average rainfall (which has been far from average of late), but from the ripper summer storms that oft fly through (of which i am somewhat of a fan). So the decision was that a drain needs to be situated right along the front of the house, adjacent to the proposed wall.

A costly but necessary move – and while we are on costly – the plumber has informed us of our water works woes. Currently the water actually comes into the house via the laundry under the slab. While that might sound perfectly normal – the killer punch is our pipes are made from galvanized iron which are about to return to the earth (i.e. rust into the mud) which would then leak into the house. If we leave them like this, the cost to rip up the pipes with the water entry point coming in from the laundry would be huge post renovation. So we have bit the bullet and will have all out waterworks replumbed so that the water entry point is adjacent to our hot water system, directly behind where our sink will be.

However – its more cost to an already over budget project. Awesome…!

So tomorrow (BRDay+7) is Concrete Wednesday – a day for fun and frivolity as the gentle slush of liquid stone gently floods the two areas we are getting re concreted – super!!

BRDAY+1
We have action! Our topsy turvy rear slab has been ripped up and now looks just right to plant a fab veggie garden. However this area will be where the main plumbing will exit our slab from our bathroom. The house is about 46 years old yet the dirt below the slab looks relatively fresh….in a weird sort of way…

They have also started to cut into the front part of the slab to extend our floorspace in the main area of the house. This is to align the front beam with enough clearance to make it uniform with the rest of the ceiling height.

Slideshow

Today marks the first day of our renovation which is otherwise to be known as Box Renovation Day +01 (BRDAY+1). The cool dawn sun flickered on the large pile of timber nestled on our front lawn. We have had many false starts on our way to BRDAY+1. Our mortgage lender has not once, not twice but thrice stuffed up – i.e. lost our paperwork, tried to re-mortgage our house again (i.e. not realizing that we are in fact doing the extensions) and generally taken their sweet time. But all appears to have sorted itself out…

Gavin from Premium Mortgage Solutions has been invaluable. I have no idea how the average joe in the street actually deals with the banks. While we were waiting for our lender to give the final stamp approval after jumping through all of the specified hoops, we learned that the person actually dealing with our application had gone on holidays (at the very last moment). The boss then couldn’t find the application….and went away for a long weekend.

Anyway Gavin has been our proverbial bulldog in harassing the bank to just do their job efficiently. He has gone beyond what he needs to do, which for most brokers means securing the loan and signing the papers. Gavin does much much more than this. This isn’t the first time that he has stepped up so save our behinds – we had similar issues in 2003 when our lawyers forgot to process our first home buyers discount which threw out our mortgage deposit and almost made the purchase of The Box fall through. But Gavin was there…

Anyway as we start on the physical building we acknowledge Gav tireless efforts on our behalf!

So if you haven’t heard the news (because it hasn’t been announced here) our major renovations start in earnest this week. This is an exciting time because we have been planning these reno’s ever since we moved in (3 years Thursday) and have been going through the motions for the actual building since February this year. I am hoping to write post a blog every few days about the process of getting to where we are in terms of the ideas behind our slightly odd choices. So until i have any physical evidence of renovation work, I present to you….The Inspiration series!

On a cold blustery December day – I was wedded to my wife at the large and lavish Fairmont Resort – nestled in the glorious surrounds of the Jameson Valley. The day following our wedding as we journeyed back down the mountain, we drove past this house which inspired us – due to the use of colour (greys/blacks) and the use of red timber to offset the color. That and it bore very close links with our own house on stilts. I suppose we want our house to combine a genuine Australian architectural style with a sense of classic modernism – a love for all things square, simple and sophisticated.

In fact if you want to buy it – its available…don’t delay buy today!

Tales from the Box – after many weeks of quiet its about to get much louder. And this begins with a move to our brand spankin’ new Media Temple servers. More to come….

Can you hear it? Its that sound, that feeling before the rush, the calm before the storm, the serene before the buildup and every other cliche that i can think of. However much like the grinding wheels of a 100 carriage coal train that bounds down the Blue Mountains, literally metres from our front door, the process of the proposed renovation has in fact started a chain reaction of events that will result in either a wonderfully purposeful house, standing like a beacon in all its architectural magnificence or the end of all things (yeah…. i can’t really back that up). We have a verbal go ahead from council and have been assured (as much as can we can be without the rubber stamp) that things are okay with our development proposal, which means that we have settled on our builder – the son of VORAM(aka George): Linden Constructions.; which means that we have signed our lives away again with our lender under the reliable direction of Gavin ( – broker extraordinaire and all round good bloke who helped us on the way to our first mortgage).

So….things are about to happen – with the speed of a panther and the force of an elephant!

When we bought our place nearly three years ago, the first thing that my wife noticed (apart from the house on stilts) was the white blossom tree to the right of the house. We had five trees in total in that garden – but most of them didn’t flower and were quite unhealthy. One remains and always puts a dazzling show on every year from mid september onwards.