Wardrobe installs

We have been busy over the last few weeks with non house building stuff. We did manage to install wardrobes in the boys rooms.

Christmas Break

A few days off over Christmas has been a great opportunity to get inside the house and do some jobs. We are still a long way from being able to say the house is finished but there are certainly a lot more finished areas. 

We started off on the painting front, painting a couple of bedrooms.  Two bedrooms =  two happy boys. This involved final plaster, sanding, painting walls and ceiling, prep work on skirting boards architraves, doors and painting them in enamel.  Massive job and came up a treat.  Built them each a bed. Now to build some wardrobes

Did a bit more plastering and cornice work on the cupboard near the front door. Looks pretty good. Now for a coat of paint and some doors.

 Also did a big pile of finishing carpentry around the Kitchen, Scullery and in Nans open area including kick boards, trims and extra skirting

Validation

Just Because

3-Dec-2015 Update

It's been a few weeks without a blog post but the work hasn't stopped.  Far from it.

External Carpentry

 Bird board sealing and painting

Finished off some extra detail on the southern end of the house and a section around the Laundry that needed some more complicated joinery to finish.  Resulted in a much nicer finish overall.

Work is ongoing on gap sealing and painting the birdboard.  Like everything on this house it is a BIG job.  We are about a quarter of the way through and probably looking at 4-5 full days to complete which equates to about 2-3 full weekends.

Backdoor surround

Framed up a door surround then sealed against the cladding to make a nice finish

 Gardening

Before

After

Spread some more mulch around along with some sheep poo. re potted and planted out a few plants.

Brush-cutting

The bulk of the block has been slashed/brush cut ready for bush fire season.  This involved cutting the weeds back to about 50mm high or less.  Next year we either need to get a small tractor with a slasher or some four legged lawnmowers.

Miscellaneous

Added fan blades to the fans in the boys bedrooms.
Cleaned a bunch of stuff out of the shed
moved some tools from the bottom shed upto the top shed
installed the new work bench to the shed.

Storage

Big day of carpentry on Sunday.  We left a recess in our entry passage during the build, with the idea we would come back later and build in storage and frame up around it, add a double door frame and some doors.   

The lack of storage in this recess has led to boxes of stuff being randomly stacked there.  So the time has come to do something about it.  We started out creating a built in shelving unit from pine and melamine sheeting.  With the aid of the nail gun and some glue this went together really quickly.

 The next step was to frame up around the opening to crate a wall for the door frame to sit in.  We then added some plasterboard before taking a well earned beer.

Before

Building the shelves

Framing up the doorway

Plasterboard goes on

Paving

Paving- one of my least favourite jobs.  It's not that I'm bad at it,  it's not that it is particularly technical and difficult to achieve a good finish but simply it is hard on the body.  With the weekends efforts of around 50 Square meters laid I will be walking around like an old man on Monday.  

The key to paving is preparation and string lines.  Spend the time to get the area level and compacted and lay string lines with your edges and it is difficult to do a bad job.

 The Finished Patio Area

The primary area of paving to complete was on the west side of the house for an area that will become our outdoor entertaining spot.  A timber framed patio will be built over this in the coming months with shade cloth over the top to keep the sun off.

The pavers we are using were recycled from a street in Cottesloe.  They are heavy duty full thickness bricks so twice as heavy as a regular paving brick.  Combined with the fact the packs of bricks are nowhere near where I was laying them meant a lot of effort to get them on the ground in a nice tight herring bone pattern.  Beers well earned on Sunday afternoon.  Two beers down I could almost convince myself I wont hurt for days....

 Saturday Progress

Granny's Path

In addition to the entertaining area we also completed a path for granny out into her garden to her rain gauge.  Timely as we had 22mm of rain Friday night and a further 6mm Sunday night.

The rain was a blessing for the tanks.  20mm ~ 10,000 litres which is 2-3 weeks of usage over summer.  Every bit of rain now coming into summer is a bonus.

Dog Fence Extension

The weekend was spent building/extending the dog fence

Dog Fence Extension

We identified the need early on for a larger dog run as having them tightly constrained to the front of the house  with restricted room to poo wasn't pleasant for anyone.  The extension takes in the area along the front of the rock wall that we have set aside for a future lawn area.  The idea is the lawn will feed mostly off the underlying leach drains and provide a green buffer in the event of bush fire. We will look at establishing this next winter.

 Guitar chair

 The finished product in the music room.  Matches in nicely with the floor

Grey Water Recyling

Grey water recyling drum minus lid as it is still in testing but so far is working a treat.  Water is diverted from the washing machine into the drum and gravity feeds down into the orchard.