Oh ye of little faith!

To be fair, the paint has only its seal coat, and the Danish oil on the timber work, including the kitchen bench top extension is still a little tacky, but we got there with about twenty minutes to spare before the first of the scraggy hordes began to trickle in.

I don't understand the psychology of the deadline, what it is that makes shopping centres open on time when just the night before there was a year or two worth of work left to do, but what ever it is, it works around this place as well.

I think it safe to say that we've broken the back of the renovation, from now we'll be chugging along at a much more relaxed pace, perhaps our reporting will reflect that too!

And now for the Christmas tree.

Chaos!

Were one to categorise the degree of chaos we are currently living in, I think it would be apt to give it an "utter" rating.  We have reached something of a crescendo though, with dust having crept under every cover and a few walls still to go.

But there has been progress.  The keen eye may notice the new ceiling fans, which nicely compliment the light fittings now installed, switches and power points might even be functioning by week's end.   Of course Brendon our long suffering plasterer is almost done as well, and another two or so days of sanding walls will see me ready to start the sealer coat.

That is after I finish the temporary kitchen cupboard extensions of course.  

We are settling down to a dull roar now though with the messy stuff almost over until the new year when we tackle the ceilings, and we can see an end to the disorder.   Perhaps it's not an end, rather just the end of the prelude.

On Friday, the chaos returns accompanied by noise as well, the sort of noise that ear protection cannot reduce.  On Friday we shall be occupied by things other than building for a few days, as the scruffy horde descends, and the centre of attention turns to grandchildren, all three.

Perhaps I shall just snooze on the couch under the covers and they'll be unaware of my presence!

Itchy and scratchy.

The insulation in our roof may look all yellow and fluffy, which is exactly the way insulation is supposed to look, but on closer inspection there are some gaps. 

Large gaps. 

Our very own CSIRO says that a gap as small as 5% in the insulation layer will reduce its efficiency by over 50%. By my quick sums we have an efficiency of somewhere around minus 300% which is quite a staggering thought really and goes a long way towards explaining why, given the right conditions inside the house can become quite uncomfortably warmer than outside.  

If there's anything worse than being of large frame in a confined space, it's being of large frame in a confined space full of dust when the space is inside a roof and the temperature is unpleasantly warm, cutting up bits of fibreglass insulation while the next ten year's quota of perspiration does it's best to ensure that the little shards of fibreglass stick to any exposed skin and work their itchy way below the surface. 

Perhaps that's why when the insulation was installed in our place they got out as quickly as they could without actually doing anything particularly useful with the fibreglass batts apart from storing them in the ceiling for convenience of some future owner. 

 It's all a bit of a shame really, because having decided that one of us would need to fix the problem, every time I looked around for a volunteer she'd be off doing some important job and couldn't possibly spend an hour or so doing a fair imitation of pilates in a sauna while lying on a bed of nails. 

Realising that there's have to be compromise if we were going to make progress, I started last night, and worked till midnight pretending that it was comfortable, that I was imagining the heat, and the fact that my clothes looked like I'd just been for a swim in them would have been pleasurable if I actually had. The first half is done, and in only took an extra twenty square metres of insulation to fix. I'd do the rest tonight, but I still remember how uncomfortable it was, and I think I'll wait till the rash has gone and the itching  has subsided. 

 We had the western facing windows tinted yesterday too, so ready as we are to thumb our noses at summer, today the cool change arrived.

Progress?

If this were an episode of Grand Designs, Kevin McCloud would arrive and look bemused or even bewildered and wonder to the camera what we'd been doing for the past few weeks.

The end is nowhere in sight, he'd remark quietly to the camera and remind us all that we are leaving once again in not much more than three months time.

But like catching monkeys, slowly slowly will get us there I'm sure.   If we're really lucky the plasterboard will be done in a week, the wiring is almost complete now, both repairs and new bits, and surely there can't be more than a few days of carpentry left.... can there?

Well actually yes there can.   The third bedroom has a "woof" or two in the floor just where the robe has to go, and that means dismantling at least part of the bathroom downstairs before we can start.   Even simple renovations have their problems it seems!

Joan, you can come, we will have a bedroom and buckets of white paint for you to splash in.

With Santa coming in a few weeks though, the building industry goes into panic and shutdown at the same time, so we'll have to see what we can do about a kitchen into the new year I suspect!

Oh well, back to the sander.

Tally Ho!

Going Nowhere

Our little project is not entirely under control at the moment if truth be told. 

The living room is full of bedroom, the dining area full of study, the study is around here somewhere, and the bedrooms are pretty much empty of anything useful, except that whenever we need to find something that we absolutely can't do without a minute longer, it usually turns up under some sanding dust in one of them.

I suppose if I could only stay motivated to keep sanding for more than a nanosecond at a time I'd be making some visible headway by now, but every nanosecond generates an hour of clean up and cleaning up is one of those mind numbing tasks that leads to thinking. 

Today's thinking led to trying to discover what the living space might look like if the dividing wall was removed, except that once the wall sheeting was gone, the frame was riddled with electric wires running across and back and Trevor our electrician won't be back till Saturday, so we'll have to wait a few more days.

Today's thinking also led to discovering that cleaning up after removing a couple of gyprock walls takes even more time than after sanding. 

Progress?

A few weeks in and the list we have on the boat seems to have paled in to insignificance compared to the list of jobs in the house.

The first wardrobe is in at least, the second ready to go, and the third, well the parts are in the boxes with the funny writing on the labels although with a bit of deduction we think we can spell "Ikea" in Mandarin.

Perhaps we shall have three habitable by the time Santa comes, but that's a bold prediction.  It's about economics you see, it's far more economical to have Brad the gyprock guy in once than once for every room, so sadly the plan to finish each room before starting the next has involved into a plan to start every room and leave the place in a complete state of disarray for as long as we possibly can.

We've crossed one thing off the list though.  "Airline Tickets 2012"

If the disarray is still with us by the end of March, it is safe to say it will be here until September!

Unbuilding Dicky Beach

Ahh Joan, before the white comes the colour!  

The old wardrobes have magically disappeared, although it's fair to say there are rather large marks where it's been.  It's not just the colour that tells us a little of what has been before.  If one were to take out all the drawers in the old robe, and lie on one's back looking up at the underside of what may have been a dressing table, one would have seen carved ever so carefully in the chipboard, a heart with "Vanessa" scratched within.

Of course if one had taken to the structure with a big hammer and a crow bar, there would be no need to lie on one's back....

On another note, we've spent more time than we care to admit I suspect, poking around in a well known Swedish furniture store over the past year or so, acquiring bits and bobs for the boat.   

This became painfully apparent when once again we trudged south to a store from the very same chain, to start the reconstruction process for the house, and we discovered the cafe was on the wrong side of the entrance hall.  Not only that, but the tables were square not round, and as we popped in to start the day with our "free" coffee (for members of the "family" of course), we should not have been surprised that the prices had a dollar sign, not a "€", but we were!

Seven trolley loads, four hours and 450kg of more stuff from the collection point later, we had all the pieces we needed safely on a truck hopefully to re-appear in our driveway after a few days.

Then we can do the same in the other bedrooms, then fix the electrical stuff, then the gyprock, then perhaps, we'll bring out the whitewash!