Finally I painted the rest of the hallway

I finally did it. I painted the rest of the hallway. Only 2 years and 9 months after I started! Sadly it only took me an hour to do, and we had the paint, so it's not like I have a decent excuse for not doing it.

Pin It

House Painting

Before we listed our house for sale we knew it would require painting. It was a fact that didn't excite either of us.

One of my brother in laws had mentioned how he was thinking about buying a spray painting unit, as he needed to stain his rather large deck. We decided that we would buy a more expensive model that would do both our house painting and his deck and split the cost. To do everything we wanted we ended up spending our dollars on a Wagner Airless 115. It wasn't cheap but for us it seemed worth it.

So we got stuck into painting the house.

(For reference, that wall is 3.6mx3m at the lowest point)

Whilst painting the house was easy, the prep work and the clean up was hard work. But it still would have taken much longer with a paintbrush.

Over the course of several weekends we managed to paint our entire house. And I have to say, it is looking mighty fine!

Of course, we couldn't do the trim work with the spray painter, so we did them by hand, but it wasn't nearly as bad as painting the entire house with a brush!

I'm going to miss my front door when we move.
Pin It

Finishing Tasks: Dog Kennel

 When we brought Gus the German Shepard home we built him a kennel and run. That was in 2007.

It still isn't finished.

I got as far as putting one coat of paint on the weatherboards before I got bored. One coat in 5 years when I have painted numerous other weatherboards on the house. The shame.

So it looked like this

Enough was enough, and out came the pressure washer. Oh my, I am ashamed of these photos. I never thought it was that grubby.

The inside for washed down too, as 5 years worth of dog dirt and fur wasn't overly attractive.

A quick two coats of paint and it is looking much spiffier. If we were going to stay in this house I had grand plants of adding some trim and lining it all out, but alas we aren't, so I won't. But it looks much better now.

Pin It

Mailbox

Our mailbox was an ugly thing. So ugly that I don't think I ever took a photo of it. I couldn't even find a photo where it was in the background. So you will have to imagine. It was an old rusted basic mailbox that in an attempt to make pretty I painted to match the house. It sat on a massive red gum pole that once upon a time held up this fence

Pretty sure that is one of the earlier pictures of our house. Pretty, wasn't it?!?

So anyway, one night I went to check the mail and it was on the doorstep. Kinda odd, as our postie is lazy at the best of times. I forgot about it and went back inside. The next day it was the same thing, however I thought I would check for the paper too.

And that's when I discovered it. Our mailbox was missing. Some idiot had taken off with our crappy mailbox! Why you would steal our crappy mailbox and not our neighbours nice mailbox is beyond me.

So, we needed a mailbox quickly. It turns out mailboxes are expensive! Just a plain one like we had was $40! A fancy one was around $250. So I turned to my good friend, ebay.

Lady Luck must have been smiling on me that day, as I found a local seller who made mailboxes and they were having a scratch and dent sale. He had a phone number listed so I rang up wanting to know if I could get the husband to pick it up that afternoon. He was a lovely man who was not only going to be in his shed that afternoon for us to pick it up, he was going to sell it to us for $100!!! The company he sells them to sells them for $299!!!

I have looked over the mailbox in many different lighting conditions, and I can't find the dents or scratches in it. It looks pretty perfect to me.

Pin It

2012 Mission

2012 is the year of finishing stuff.

So given that I completed most of last years list, I thought I would give it a go again this year. (note that * indicates it is being carried over).


1. The lounge room hearth*

2. Paint the outside of the house

3. Finish the veranda*

4. Paint the carport poles

5. Paint the gates

6. Not kill anymore plants.

7. Complete the wall art in Eliza's room

8. Finishing painting all the doors*

9. Clean out the shed properly and get rid of the crap

10. Finish the kickboard in the kitchen

11. Finish painting the inside of the front door

12. Sell this house - We're part way there, we have had the estate agent come around and do an appraisal and give us some suggestions on things we could do to increase the price. Funnily enough, a lot of them are in the list of things to be done anyway.

Pin It

Paint Work

Paint and lattice is back on. I am loving the dark veranda poles, the contrast with the lattice is awesome. Now I just need to paint the rest of the guttering.
Pin It

Bedroom Robe Doors

This was actually completed last year, to just scrape in the list of things I wanted to complete for 2011.

It started out as a pretty boring task, remove doors and chisel out the hole for the flush sliders, so that I could paint them. It was meant to take a day.

It took three weeks. Which meant I had to look at this for three weeks (and this is the cleaned up version).

Why did it take so long? Well I started by using a brush to paint them. Huge mistake as the brush marks were visible, and unlike every other door in our house that has a textured finish, these ones have a smooth finish. FAIL #1. Sand back doors.

So I decided to spray paint them for a nice smooth finish. Added bonus was that we had a friends spray kit at home already. Fantastic. Until the paint ran as neither of us had much of an idea of how to spraypaint doors (top tip: use an airless system or a mighty big compressor. Neither of which we did). FAIL #2. Sand back doors again.

So we were starting to run out of options (and baby sleep time), so we went back to our old faithful: rolling. Which was a success, thank goodness as I was contemplating paying $300 for new doors at this point and sending them to a professional painter.

So now we have this view:

In our next house I am having a better system.
Pin It

2011 in review

Given that a certain little baby turned our world upsidedown, inside out and made it spin backwards, we didn't do too bad at getting our list completed.

Here is what we wanted to achieve (from here):

1. Paint the front door. Done!

2. Tile the fire place floor thingy.

3. Install a bigger air-con vent in the lounge room. Done! I don't think I ever blogged about this, but I ended up giving up. The aircon people were right, it couldn't be done with ease. In the end the husband put the other vent inline with it on the other side of the room. It works well actually.

4. Paint all the doors in the house. - I sort of completed this one. I need to paint our bedroom door and the sides of the laundry cupboard door, and thats it.

5. Do something with the front of the house. - In progress here, here, here and here.

6. Finish painting the skirting boards in the office and have the carpets replaced. Done and Done.

7. Hang the artwork I brought last March in our bedroom. Done

Not too shabby, I have a couple that are carrying into this year. Stay tuned for what we want to get done in 2012. It's going to be H.U.G.E*!


* Possibly an overstatement. Pin It

Paint it black

(as a 'I-didn't-really-need-to-know-that-fact' fact, I love that song, and it may have slightly inspired my choice of paint colour for our house).

I finally got around to painting the timber on the side of the front door. Not that you can see it behind one of the plants, but it's there.

On a side note, do you think I need to paint the bits around the door at the top?
Pin It

Let the light shine in

We are one step closer to finishing our veranda renovation - we removed the tin. It was actually a lot harder than we thought it would have been, as they were all linked together or something. I can't say I was paying that much attention due to sitting under a tree watching the husband work baby wrangling.

We are still debating if to have a bullnose or straight angled roof. I am leaning towards straight just because it would be cheaper, but bullnose would look better. We need to add some more timber beams to the frame and paint it, so we have time to make a decision.

I never realised how much light was being blocked by the roof, our hallway is so bright now! Apparently the flashing is going to be a bitch to fix, so we are on the quest to find a man to finish it. Suits me, as I want this done for Christmas and the weekends are running short. Of course, that means we need to find a man who can do the job quickly.

Pin It

What's left...

So, now the concrete is laid, we need to finish the front. On the list, there is

• new guttering.
• replace the roofing iron.
• paint the veranda poles and the surrounding trim from blue to grey.
• put the lattice work back up.
• build garden beds for the front of the veranda and the front of the master bedroom.

Sad thing is that I want this done before Christmas - which is only a few short weeks away!

Pin It

Concrete!

We finally have concrete!

It has been a little while since it was laid, and now it looks a little something like this. On one hand I kind of wish that we had it coloured, but it doesn't really matter.

There is a few things left to be done, but that's a post for another day.
Pin It

Site Supervisor

Seems we have a new site supervisor in our house.

Luckily the concrete was poured to her satisfaction, you don't want to get on the wrong side of this little miss!
Pin It

Babies+Renovating=Not Productive

We knew that having a baby would suck up a fair bit of our time, and that renovating would have to take a back burner for a while, but we didn't quite bank on how much of a time sucker Eliza would be.

Call me stupid, but I kinda figured that we could renovate when she sleeps. I didn't bank on her only sleeping for 40 minutes at a time during the day, nor did I put any logical thought into how making a tonne of noise and having a baby sleeping at the time time.

So we have become fans of 'hiring a man' to do things for us. First we hired a man to rekey our house. Then a man to paint the lattice for us. And now we have hired a man to concrete a slab for us. Jobs we could have done ourselves, and would have normally have done ourselves, but our time is better spent with Eliza now.

It is kinda adictive. I am considering hiring a man to mow our lawns this week, as the husband has been working away wand our pet sheep have gone back to the farm for sheering. And when I return to work we will hire a cleaner for a few hours a week. Now if only I could hire a chef, things would be grand!

Pin It

Keys

One of the things that always annoyed me about our house was the keys. There was a key for the front door, another for the back door, another for the dining room door, complete with a seperate key for the screen door. And then there was another two for the shed! So on my keyring I had 6 keys for our house, plus another 3 for my parents houses, and my car key.

So we decided to have the locks changed and keyed alike. The husband's best mate knew a bloke (gotta love how small towns work, everyone 'knows a bloke' to get things done) who was a locksmith and could do the job for us. All it took was a couple of hours and a couple of pineapples, and we were set.

It is so much easier to find the right key to get into our house now.
Pin It

Lattice Work

A feature of our house is the lattice work, despite all the shortcomings of our house's features, it still had the original lattice work.

We had to remove it to replace the posts, and made the decision to paint it before putting it back up. Unfortunately it was covered in 12 layers of paint in varying degrees of disrepair, and needed a bit of work with a wire brush before we could paint it. A friend of ours had access to a industrial sandblaster and a spraypainting booth, so we had him sandblast and paint it for us.

Now we just have to paint the posts and put all the lattice up again. I am not looking forward to it, as I think our mate lost some of the attachments.
Pin It

Jack of it

Toodle pip to the old concrete. I still maintain that my idea of resurfacing it would have been a lot easier though - there is three tandem trailer loads of cement there which all required being picked up by hand!
Pin It

Veranda Poles

A few weekends back we decided to start work on our veranda (I swear it was how the husband shut me up about moving house). We knew one pole was rotting, but we didn't realise just how much - it was being held up by the lattice work! And both poles were the same. No wonder our veranda was lopsided (something we never saw until we jacked up the roof to replace the pole!)

The husband busted up the concrete by hand to put the poles, which was no mean feat given the footings of the veranda were half a metre deep!

Now to break up the rest of the concrete, but luckily the husband is borrowing a jackhammer from work for that task!
Pin It