WEEK 30 – We have a kitchen!!! (16-20 Nov)

WEEK 30 – We have a kitchen!!!

I can’t tell you how excited I was to see my very own cutlery drawer piled high on the many many items of cabinetry ready for construction! For those who hyperventilate a bit when attempting to build Ikea… best you don’t read this post!

Our custom polyurethane cabinetry was all manufactured at a factory and set to us like a great big lego set ready for them to install. It was amazing just how it came together. It truly was a wonder to behold! In one day, two guys built an entire kitchen, laundry cabinets and three bathroom vanities! We are starting to plan the interior furnishing and how to do this adequately without spending a fortune. So to celebrate the kitchen being installed, I secured 4 white bar stools, just 6 months old bought from Domayne for $160 each... for $22 each! Can't wait to see them in their place.

In other delights this week, Super Jay is back to stone clad our fireplace. This fireplace project has been an incredible matter of coordination. When looking at a blank wall, every single trade needed perfectly exact dimensions, that had to come together precisely to make this work! The trades involved all the below:

• carpenters to frame it
• bricklayers to leave a gap for the flue to run out the wall
• electricians to wire in TV power behind it, as well as isolation switches and gas, and feature downlights either side. (Raston Group)
• gyprockers to apply villa board (and cornicing... except for above the fire place... but they messed that up, sigh)
• Fireplace installer and supplier (Lincs BBQ Hornsby, and Banjo their installer)
• kitchen cabinet maker to construct cabinetry to go each side of the fireplace to house the DVD player, speakers etc (Brindabella Kitchens)
• Flooring company to supply 'bench tops' to go above the cabinets
• Super Jay to stone clad around the fireplace (Jay Papandreas, Jayscape)
• Stonemason to create a stone shelf above the fire below the TV so the TV doesn't melt with the huge heat output
• painters to paint the outside niches
• another electrician to install the TV (which we had to select well in advance, right down to the dimensions of the sound bar we want to use and pre-selecting the TV mount so the right spaces could be left in the stone cladding! 
• I feel exhausted just thinking about it!Hopefully it will look great and there will be many cozy nights by the fire to enjoy it and make it all worth it 
  
   The kitchen arrives - it filled the whole three back rooms of the house. Like Ikea on steroids.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   And within a day... almost completed, just a few doors still to go on... and a bench top, appliances etc.
  
  
   Poweder room vanity (excuse the flash, it's quite a dark room)
  
  
   Laundry cabinetry in my super-sized laundry, custom made for three very dirt loving children!
  
  
   Double sink vanity in the children's bathroom. They even thought to mount it extra low so the kids can wash thier hands - cute!
  
  
   The vanity in our ensuite - I love this layout... to the left side is the shower tucked away and to the right is the WC.
  
  
   Day 2 of stone cladding
  
  
   Day 3 of stone cladding (a half day as even Super Jay had to knock off when the heat hit 42 degrees!)
  
  
• To give some sense of how chaotic the whole fireplace saga has been... I needed to pick up some stone for the shelf between the fireplace and TV above. After about 4 phonecalls to source supply of this, I secured some nice stone, drove about an hour in the summer heat, with three kids in the back of the car to the warehouse in the city. Crank the aircon and put on a Disney movie to keep them calm while I collect the order from the warehouse door a few metres away. Too easy, right? Wrong! The stone they supplied is not actually tumbled on both sides, it has ugly machine marks underneath so it will be seen underneath the shelf. Cue a dear old man sitting with my two howling daugthers while I carry the baby around the warehouse inspecting alternative stone. We finally find some that looks more suitable with a rebated edge. I phone Super Jay to confirm it will work, the movie has ended and the dear fellow is losing the fight to entertain the girls...  I can hear them screaming from the warehouse! I drag the new stone to the car, drive it back to the build site and proudly present it to Super Jay, who apologetically explains that the rebate is 60mm not 75mm so it just won't do. Wah! I spend the afternoon phoning alternative stone suppliers, who all tell me they are booked out until February and can't supply me with a custom stone shelf. I finally find a marble supplier who can have it to me within 3 weeks. While waiting in a doctor's surgery with the three bears, I juggle giving the baby some puree, keeping the girls quiet and taking calls to get agreement between Super Jay and the marble mason on the exact set out of the holes to be drilled in the stone. So when I say "this fireplace had better look fantastic!" now you have some sense of what I mean. Take that episode and times it by the 11 trades involved in the creation of our fireplace and I feel like a lie down!
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• In other news this week, we also got a garage door and a front door - officially a house that locks!
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   The garage door looks great, and I think the white plantation shutters ordered this week, ready for install mid Jan, will really lift the facade with nice light contrasting tones.
  
  
  
  
• And before I sign off, a little bit of cuteness from the kids who are the reason and motivation for this long journey and the beautiful home... an over-representation of Denver, but he accompanies me to the build site almost every day, so he deserves extra credit!
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Week 29: A diversion - the Great Australian dream of a big backyard (9-13 November, plus about 4 weekends leading up to then)

Week 29 – The great Australian dream of a big backyard.

Week 29 inside the house was a continuation of more tiling and more carpentry, so this is the week I will explain what is happening outside the house. All I really wanted in a new home was a backyard for the kids to play. 

The downside to building your home is that the site generally gets completely trashed, it is just mud and muck and builders rubble when you are handed the keys. I couldn’t imagine the feeling of arriving to our new home and the kids so excited about their back yard and just finding a mud puddle there (though I am sure my little grubs would love that too!).

We were very fortunate to have such an exceptional Site Supervisor that he let us have access to the site on the weekends to get the backyard landscaping done. This is such a blessing and opportunity, and one I am very grateful for. It has also been a pretty extraordinary challenge in logistics!

The process roughly looks like this:

•     Coming up with a garden design (as we didn’t require a landscaping plan for the complying development process)
•      Selecting and coordinating landscaper trades. Upon receiving the first three quotes I had a small moment of horror, then got creative finding young guys who are starting out to do the work at much more competitive rates, it just means I am more involved in the project management closely. As an upside, I am kept entertained by awesome dreadlocks and dance party music while he digs (bless Lachlan!), stories of diving with sharks (Tom-can-crete the concreter), hearing the dreams of a kid who always wanted to play with diggers (James Wheeler, great guy!). It brought youth and fun and humour to the process, lovely to work with guys who enjoy what they do.
•     Remove all the builders junk (unfortunately, the site cleaners only do the front yard, so this meant us cleaning up the junk mostly by hand!)
•     A big bobcat to get rough levels across the back yard and did out for the retaining walls on the high side (24/10)
•     A little baby digger to level the narrow walkway down the side of the house (where the washing lines and wheelie bins will reside).. (31/10)
•     Stump grinding the roots that were unveiled in the process – a stump a good 1.6m wide! (24/10)
•     Digging posts, then laying sleepers for retaining garden beds around the rear perimeter fenceline, and also building a cool bench seat around our tree that will double as a lovely sandpit for my little ones. (25/10, 31/10)
•     Importing (read, hours of barrowing!)  turf underlay/top soil that is nice sandy stuff our beautiful turf will love.(14/11, 21/11)

   And still to come in the next two weekends... 

•     Installing irrigation on a nifty timer system so it will stay watered (twice a day for 10 minutes!) when I am not on site, to ensure our baby grass grows up strong ready for when we move in (next weekend 28 Nov)
•     Planting 55 Lilly Pilly Resilience plants in the garden beds (next weekend 28 Nov)
•     Installing an awesome climbing frame and cubby house for the three little bears Christmas gift (next weekend 28 Nov).
•     Laying turf (the following weekend 5 Dec) 
•     Installing steps (5 December), which will later be tiled along with the alfresco in a nice travertine pavers by Super Jay (of the wall cladding fame… from 7 December)

Here are some progress photos over the last 5 weekends of work (roughly 1 weekend of excavation, 2 weekends of retaining wall gardens, 2 weekends of topsoil import and levelling), then there are two more to go until the back yard is complete.

 Site clean did not quite cover the back yard... so we had to clear this up by hand! It gave a nice opportunity for a 'before' shot of the yard! Quite a slope and a lot of rubble.

 The bobcat arrives. It was so fun to watch James playing robotics with his favourite machine. You could tell how much he loves this job, trained up by his Dad.

 A tight squeeze to get the Bobcat around the side with the scaffold in place!

 You remember that rotten old fence? He pulled the old thing down in about 2 minutes!

 Denver's first ever viewing of a truck at work....

 This is an excited face! Little boys and diggers - go figure!

 Our newly levelled yard - not such a slope now!

 Uncovered a massive stump from the old silky oak we removed - so much for it having been stump ground previously, it still measured 1.6m diameter! Gonski!

 Digging holes for the cemented posts for the retaining walls, which will discreetly hide this stormwater access too.

 Then came Peter on his much more maneuverable mini-digger. Just 900mm wide and able to cut and level the narrow side of the house (in about 40 very expensive minutes!)

 Lachlan's retaining wall posts with string laid out to carefully level them. They will function both as retaining wall and garden bed.

 Sleepers laid for the garden beds, just a matter of bolting them on.

Moving in 20 tonnes of turf underlay/top soil... on a day when we received about 30ml of rain! The poor guys were drenched!

 And the next weekend of another 10 tonnes of topsoil - flattened with a 150kg cement roller to a nice firm base, ready for turf to be laid. Tomorrow's job is to use those sleepers against the tree and transfrm them into a great sitting bench and sandpit inside.

 I love how much more level this is now!

More to come!

WEEK 28 – Tiling Bathrooms (31 Oct – 6 Nov)

WEEK 28 – Tiling Bathrooms (31 Oct – 6 Nov)

You know the builder means business when he has the guys working on the weekend! Saturday was more gyprocking, plus waterproofing of the bathrooms, Sunday was my guy fitting undertile heating to the bathrooms – not to mention all the landscaping works out the back!

It was pretty cool technology for the waterproofing – a thick rubber sheet that is blown with a heat torch to melt into position and can be then walked on immediately, rather than waiting 3 days to dry like the old method.

The tiles, from Abruzzo Ceramics, were delivered by a stylish Italian man in his 70s, wearing a collared shirt, with a cane and bowler hat!! How is that for European authenticity to our tiling! They were remarkably careful and diligent – checking all the fine print with me, verifying the tile samples were correct. 

Unfortunately, the woman at the store who assisted us with the tile selection was not so thorough. We ordered 600 x 600 floor tiles and 300 x 600 rectified white wall tiles. One would assume that a 600mm tile would line up with another 600mm tile – right? Apparently it is not quite that simple when floor tiles come from Italy and wall tiles were manufactured in China… they end up a good 10mm difference in width – enough that they won’t line up L Having paid a lot extra to do beautiful floor to ceiling tiling, we are pretty disappointed about this. Nonetheless, we had pretty outstanding workmanship from the tilers and the end result still looks great, even if the tiles had to be offset not neat and tidy rows and even if they did grumble about how hard it is to lay such massive tiles!

Josh was the final decider on the tile selection – Duomo Cinza (based on a bianco marble and the colour translates as ‘Ash’) where my first choice was a more conservative, beige, travertine look http://ceramic.pt/pdf/Cat_Ceramic_DUOMO.pdf. The rooms are more ‘grey’ than we had imagined, but I think they look really classy (which is lucky, as it is a decision he would have had to own every day for the next few decades!!). In ten beautiful years of marriage, I don’t say this often enough, but… he was right. I love them!

First 'torch-on' waterproofing membrane (0.5 days work)

 Waterproofing around our shower niche

 Next, we laid the underfloor heating, it covers everywhere except where the vanities are and not under the shower.

 Switches for the lighting and thermostat for the underfloor heating.

The tile delivery - Duomo Cinza in very bright light (it has more beige veined tones in other lights)

 Uh oh - 600mm does not equal 600mm! Solution was to offset them like this, rather than uneven rows

 Wall tiling going up

 A better shot of the feature tiles used on the floors and up some walls.

 A beautifully finished niche inside our ensuite shower

 The very talented Han, head tiler.

 Grouting over the feature tiles

 Final day of wall tiles around architraves in the kids bathroom

 Bath hob - oh my giddy joy! I can't wait for our 1800mm long super sized bath, with oodles of space to line the kids up in the tub (or a soak for me after hours!)

 The gorgeous smart tile finishes - so much nicer than the traditional chrome waste. And from those cuts to give fall to the drain you can see what hard work was involved for the tilers using a 600 x 600mm porcelain floor tile! Sorry guys!

 The white porcelain niche in the kids shower.