The Big Night In

On top of dismantling the kitchen last Saturday and squashing his finger with a crowbar, Hugh also managed to sing, play and have great craic at the school's "Big Night In" - a rock concert mainly organised by the kids. Anyone who wants to can play, and it is a night of aspiring bands and young rock stars. Here's Hugh singing with one of the bands:

Floor preparation

It's been quite hard to get much done during the week, but we at least finished off the floor by putting down coats of varnish in the mornings and evenings.

First coat:

Second coat:

Final coat:

But when that coat dried, it was a crazy colour.

So we put down a 4th coat which turned out a lot nicer. Maybe a bit too shiny, as one of our friends has described it as an indoor ice rink, but it will dull down over time.

It's kinda hard to see in the photo of the whole room, but the windowsill has been gone since we took the tiles down. We have started to make a new one using the finest materials we could come across in bunnings - skirting board. Hopefully it'll start to look like an actual windowsill when we finish it off, but for the moment it's pretty unusual looking. Very narrow, and most definitely a horizontal skirting board.

But now we have new wires for sockets woo!

And Hugh has sealed the crazy patch of oily madness in the ceiling from when we had the ceilings raised earlier in the year, and we filled in the teeny holes all over the plaster, so now the place is set for the ceiling dude to call by tomorrow and fix the place up. And of course for plastering the giant patch of brickery in the corner.

Tomorrow we will remove the kitchen from its current house. It should take a bit longer than removing our own kitchen, as we won't be doing it with a sledge hammer.

Sunday

On Sunday morning we were really racking our brains trying to figure out how to coordinate all the parts so that we would have it ready for installation on monday. First off, we had 2 plasterers over to remove the concrete range hood. It came off pretty easy, but took a big chunk of ceiling with it, so now there's a hole in the ceiling and a dodgy section of plaster on the wall. They have covered it with black plastic so giant spiders don't come to get us in the night.

Next we had a plumber in to take out the old taps and put in new ones. The new sink is going to be almost in the exact same spot as the old one, so thankfully it wasn't a huge task. 

The gas man called to look at installing a pipe for the new gas hobs, but he said he needs to wait until the cabinets are installed before he can do his part.

So now we needed to get a ceiling guy to fix the hole. Then an electrician to move the sockets around, and when they were finished, the plasterers would come back and plaster the whole room to get it perfect for painting. It made sense that if we could line everyone up to start their tasks on Friday, we could do the floors now. This was at around 12 o clock, so we raced down to bunnings and got everything we needed. 

First the lino had to come out.

Leaving loads of glue:

We got a glue dissolving paint and then used little scrapers to get the worst patches of glue up. It was like shaving the floor. Very time consuming. 

And then we had to seriously fly though the sanding, as we have small kids next door and didn't want to have loud machines going all night. So we gave the drum sander 3 passes to get all the glue off. 

And then 3 passes with the edge sander to finish it up. 

And there we have it, beautiful sanded floorboards. Richard was over at this stage and gave us a hand with washing in preparation for staining:

At around 10 o clock we put down stain and went straight to bed. Our weekend was much harder than our working week!

Saturday Renovation

We are aiming to get the new kitchen installed early next week, and to that end we have started getting the millions of jobs done that are required. This is what we got done on saturday:

Firstly, it's about time we threw out our collection of expired mustards in the fridge.

Then Andrew popped over and we removed the first floor cabinet. All our plates and stuff are balancing precariously around the house in the meantime. 

The next to go was the wall cabinet. We spent ages trying to delicately take it off the wall, but it was proving tricky, so we smashed it to bits with a sledge hammer. 

This was my favourite part - removing the 60s-tastic curtians and the filthy old blinds. 

Agh, Hugh smashed his finger with a crowbar! 

But the show must go on, so John popped over to give a hand and we quickly took out the remaining cabinets, cooker and here he is angle grinding through the sink. Who needs to disconnect things carefully eh?

And finally, we took the tiles off the wall. Some were easy to remove as they had been put on with regular tile adhesive, but most were stuck on with thick concrete. What were these people thinking? It took quite a bit of elbow grease to get those ones off, and John smashed all the concrete off back to the bricks, so we can plaster properly. 

In the meantime, Hugh and Dave have dismantled everything in the utility room.

What a day! 

At this stage, we realised that we would ideally like the kitchen installed on Monday 4th, so that left us 8 full days to have everything ready, including the electrics, gas, plumbing, get that thing taken off the wall, sanding and varnishing the floor, plastering and painting. And floor varnish needs 5 days to dry with noone standing on it. Start your stop-watches! 

Current Kitchen

Here's a reminder of what our kitchen looks like at the moment. There's quite a bit of work to do before it's ready to receive the new kitchen. At least it is the same shape, so the plumbing is in the right general area, as is the cooker. But we need to run a gas line in for the gas hobs, get more sockets, and of course gut it and paint everything and sand the floors. And remove that strange thing that is sticking out above the cooker.

Start your stopwatches!

New Kitchen (ish)

So it turns out that new kitchens are incredibly expensive, but check out this beauty that we found on gumtree. Everything you see here in included for $2000 (except the dishwasher), which is a good $20,000 less than the cabinets alone come out as new. It pretty much exactly fits our kitchen space, and is not far off the colours we wanted. And our floor is the exact same, so bar the blue splashback, this is what our kitchen is going to look like in a few weeks time!

More wall

Things are progressing well in the lydon building site. We have started on the second side of our top level wall. We discovered that steps are bloody difficult to build without being a total safety hazard, so instead we are allowing space for slopes between levels. This also means we can push wheelbarrows around, which will be very helpful once veg production is in full swing.

Danananananaannnana

We've having some fantastic visitors at the moment. Dan and Anna have been here for nearly a week and Phil has just arrived for a few days. Lots ,of delicious food and festivities for all!