Fence, Part One

Since we moved in, one of the only really negative aspects of living in our home has been one of our next door neighbours. It's a share house and we're not sure how many people live there but there's a lot and they're all loud. There have been massive parties, police have been called, and there are often suspicious activities in the backyard, and smells from under their house. So part one of this post is some photos of the fence when we moved in, and the view from our place. Enjoy. 

One of the issues is that our houses are so close together, but you can see that the fence was terrible, their yard is terrible, and it looked like half their garden was about to fall through the fence onto our yard. We never spent any time outside an it's been annoying us more and more since we moved in. Which was a whole year ago now!!

Continued in part 2...

The Study

Finally! The front sunroom has been converted into a proper, liveable space!!

This is really exciting for us, the front sunroom used to be a front verandah and somewhere in the past 90 years, one of the previous genius owners closed it in. In theory this is fine, so many Queenslander style houses have been changed in this way to quickly and easily add a room but it really heats up the house by preventing air flow, and the big clear panes of glass really make it feel like a hot house.

Before. I don't even have words.

Here's the beautiful room before we started. The roof and three of the walls are asbestos, and the floor boards are set with large gaps that had been previously filled with caulk that was actually starting to fall out into the carport below. So although we had hoped this room would just be some quick painting to make it nice, we started with the floors.

I never knew this, but you can actually get coloured caulk for jobs like this one. Yep, brown caulk. I'd like to say that filling in the gaps between the boards was quick and easy, but that would be a big fat lie.

Hopefully this gives you an idea of what the floors were like, if they were just 'ok' we would have left them, but it was just awful. Also, since we've put in the air conditioning we're trying to eliminate the natural air con - and in this house there's a lot!

Anyway, I started by trying to just neatly pipe the caulk into the gaps and then flattening it out with a damp cloth. I was confident that it would be quick but I spent about 3 hours on a 20cm section and decided something had to change. Enter the engineer husband, and this little trick…

Isn't it (he) BRILLIANT!! So it still took us quite a few hours to tape up the floor, pipe in the caulk, scrape off the excess with a  wet scraper and then quickly rip off the tape before it dried and stuck the whole lot together (not that I would know that's what happens or anything).  When it was finished it was worth all the effort, the floors look amazing now, at least compared to what they were.

Floors after! The caulk isn't exactly the right shade but it's close enough for us. If you look closely it has a few little flaws in the caulk but most of it is covered now anyway. So the floors were done, then we moved on to the rest of the room. The first task was to sand, although with most of the surfaces being asbestos we couldn't sand those. We used a special sealant paint to cover the asbestos without sanding it which acts by sealing the asbestos fibro in place and also acting as a primer. It was stinky and very thick to work with but took a lot of effort out of the sanding process.

In this room we decided to have a go at filling in the gaps between the vertical joins in the walls (or wall in this case since the others are fibro). We didn't bother in the other rooms we've finished due to the time pressures we were under but after nearly living in the house for a year we're starting to notice cracks in the rooms we painted when we first moved in. 

Husband also had a lot of work to do on the windows. The wooden frames were quite worn and the many layers of paint were chipped, leaving a very messy and uneven surface. He used putty to make a smooth surface and the result was beautiful. Here's the end result, I'm in love with the makeover here so I've added some before and afters.

All painted and nice, with the chief painter peeking around the door. He's a bit shy.

An example of a peeling fibro asbestos wall that looks almost perfect now.

Floors done, paint done. Sorry it's dark, it shows what time we finished up!

I'm not even sure that these photos show how dramatic the difference is, but believe me, it's big.

Next we had to add some curtains. I'm using the room as a temporary home office so we didn't what the windows as….errr… see through as they are. It sounds weird but seriously, you can see from the street into the sunroom and even into our bedroom behind it when the door is open. We decided to use some nice green curtains (ahem, the cheapest ones at Spotlight) and it makes it feel nice and relaxing in the room. I wanted a cool colour that wouldn't contribute to the heat.

After we hung about 5km of green curtains.

This was how the room looked with the curtains…and it's a lot of curtain. We've also added a sheer layer underneath to cut out some of the brightness of the morning sun. It's not bad in the winter, but in the summer without a buffer I might actually melt in here. Then we added the furniture and the room really took shape.

Reading chair next to the bookcase. 

Home office set up. Can never have too many screens.

With the addition of the sheer curtains it's all done. Even partially blocks out the house next door (double win).

The Spare Room

The second bedroom has been one of those things that have been really slow going. To save some cash we decided to fix up the existing wall once the asbestos came down rather than covering it up with new vj sheeting like we did in the kitchen.



Before. We had started steaming of the wallpaper when we found fibro. Asbestos-y fibro.

And under the fibro... a total mess!

Jason has spent days and days agonising over filling and sanding the wall over and over until it resembled something good enough to slap some paint on. Along the way I may have been accused of being a 'backseat sander' for constant questions (mostly about how long the whole process would take) and honestly I think Jason could have spent months working on it and trying to make it perfect but basically the wall is AMAZING compared to what we started with.

 



Master painter at work











Painting nearly complete
 

This is how the room looked when our first visitors arrived:

 

 



Such an improvement! We were in a mad rush to get it finished so it's not perfect but it's a huge change from what we started with! It's quite a small bedroom so it's hard to get decent photos but overall the room looks really good. The next step (and there's always a next step) is to get a new ceiling fan with a light so we can remove the old fluro.

Trees? What Trees?

It's 2015 already! I think we expected that our house would be looking vastly more impressive by now, alas... not so much. We've kicked changes off for the year with the removal of the two big trees from our front yard. They provided a lot of shade in the front sunroom but they really had to go. They were far too big and close to the house, were ugly from being cut back so much, and made a mess on the gutters and front steps. When I came home yesterday to see the new yard I was so happy! Here's the before and after:

I'm not sure that this photo does justice to how bad the front garden looked with the trees there, but this was taken just as the removal was starting and a few branches had been cut down.

 

After:

The garden just looks so neat and tidy now. It's obviously not perfect, but at least we have a space to work with. The palms were always there, just overshadowed

We still need to put up a front fence and decide whether we'll even keep the garden or remove it to change the stairs and entrance but for now this is a great improvement!

Loving our daggy little colour coordinated letterbox!