Renovation Revisited Part 1

Our house renovation seems to go in fits and starts.  Some days I take 100 photos as so much is changing and the next – I have nothing to show.  In the two weeks leading up to our departure we were working like crazy to get the house ready for my lovely friend Michelle, who was saving our bacon by house sitting and looking after Archie our furchild.

As I patiently explained to my builder guys: “I can live with an extension cord coming out of the manhole in the bathroom that connects across the hallway, dinning room and kitchen floors so that my dishwasher works but I can’t ask anyone else too!!”   As such I was really putting on the pressure to have the house not only in general working order, but also clean, tidy and inhabitable for normal people who are not used to living in complete and utter mess ALL the time!

So this is what was happening in the lead up to our departure…. 

We (partially) installed a kitchen.  It is an Ikea kitchen that with the help of my lovely Mum and Dad we installed ourselves.  This is not something I personally would recommend to others; especially if you have an old house where all the angles and surfaces are not straight!!  

You have no idea how many doodahs and bits and bobs we have left over - I think we could build a whole kitchen with what we have left over from this one!

Outside things just started taking shape.  After weeks of discussions about footings with the engineer and builders we finally got the footings sorted for the new laundry and bathroom slab.

The pier holes for the deck were redone after all that rain we had; and while we were pouring the footings we concreted the piers.  

The bricky arrived!

And bricked up around all the new windows: 

And put the masonry walls on the new slab.

And built up the piers.

We even got to take out the old air conditioner that went through the old living room wall and patch it back up. You can't even tell where it had been from the outside!

APOLOGIES! As a result of the not so fabulous internet where we currently are I have to have to split this post in two .... but I will be back with photos of what it all looked like when we left a little over a week ago......