I was expecting that the electricity bill would be higher given all the power tools being used in the construction but it wasn’t. It was lower by a tiny 0.3 kWh from the same time last year; it must be all the energy saving light bulbs and turning the microwave oven off at the wall that is doing it.

The water bill, on the other hand, was substantially higher than any previous bill – 621 litres per day in June, July and August. It is the biggest water bill I have ever had and this is at a time when Melbourne is facing a water shortage. I didn’t realize that construction consumed so much water: the concrete saw must have used a lot. Hopefully with our new water saving toilet our next water bill will be considerably lower.

Until now Catherine has been doing most of the work on the blog and I have been moving furniture and cleaning up after the builders.

Until recently I didn’t think of myself as a handyman, it wasn’t part of my self-image. I did have some skills, as an artist I had learnt to make picture frames and paint the walls of white cube galleries.

I hadn’t intended to start renovating my house until I was in a long-term relationship. I knew that who ever she was that she would want the kitchen redecorated and probably other parts of the house. So aside from minor repairs and repainting I did nothing to the house for many years.

Before meeting Catherine I was renting out the two front rooms to various tenants and my band rehearsed in various rooms in the house. So the house certainly needed some attention and redecorating was long overdue.

Bedroom

We started with the bedroom where a carpenter knocked out the wall and installed a built in wardrobe, along with a smaller one in the front bedroom. I currently use this front bedroom as my studio and the wardrobe serves a very useful function storing paintings and materials. We then repainted the bedroom ourselves and I did a decalcomania monoprints on the wardrobe doors. Decalcomania is a surrealist technique, used by Max Ernst among others. This was my first time using it on such a large scale. I still enjoy the results, they are wonderful to look at when half asleep.

The repainting of the studio has been left at the primer stage.

The only problem is the gap between the old lino floor and the new wardrobe that has yet to be filled. It is a major dust trap that is still on my too do list.

Kitchen

The old kitchen before renovations

I did much of the kitchen renovation myself using a kit, flat packed, kitchen system from Kitset Kitchens.

Renovating the kitchen meant stripping everything out down to the floorboards and starting from scratch. This turned out to have its own difficulties because there was asbestos behind the some of the splashback. We hadn’t disturbed the asbestos and had it removed by professionals, but it was frightening to think of the health of the people who had put it in and sawn a hole in it.

After stripping the kitchen and installing new lino on the floor the ceiling collapsed due to a leak in the roof. After many years of drought I was unaware of how many leaks there were in the old roof. Fortunately it happened at the best possible time, the insurance paid for the new kitchen ceiling and we paid for a new corrugated iron roof for the house.

Then I assembled and installed the kit kitchen with help from Catherine, my parents and my friend Terry Cooper, who had just been laid off by Qantas. It was a big job and it was months before we had a fully functional kitchen again. I am still very pleased with the results and the way that design works.

The new kitchen

The Emotional Toll

Renovations bring with them stress and emotional turmoil. Everything will not go to plan. There is a lot of waiting around for tradesmen or deliveries.

And then…

Late last week both Catherine had colds and both the telephone and broadband cable were out. Catherine’s hacking cough was keeping both of us awake. It was a miserable experience that we could not have prepared for.

Things were a bit difficult that week as both Mark and Catherine were unwell with a bad cold (we are both still recovering!). What made matters even more difficult was the fact that we were without the telephone or internet on the Thursday and Friday (the internet was restored yesterday). There is a lot of building work being done around this area, and around this particular block. Some other builders had cut a cable which resulted in many houses being cut off. This made things a bit iffy as we had made appointments with the TV arial person (the arial was attached to the side of the house that had been demolished) and the re-blockers who were going to ring to confirm dates and times. Luckily, Mark has friends living in the same street as us who were still connected so we were able to send some emails (me to work saying I wouldn’t be in on Friday) and ph calls. When Telstra did appear, it seemed like a telecommunications convention was being held in the street – there were so many Telstra vans parked in the street!

By the end of the 4th week, we had a useable bathroom!

The wet area fittings:

The knights on horseback tiles are in a classic 60′s illustrative style. The colours are aqua, light karki, red-brown and black, on a slight cream background. It works surprisingly well with the charcoal floor and white wall tiles. 

Look at our new wet area taking shape!

Then the tilers did their job:

    The  sliding door goes in 

     The bath goes in  

     The view to the kitchen                         

    The new toilet window   

   The spare room window goes

  The new bathroom window  The insulation and wiring goes in

Here are two pictures of it:          Rheem Coppermatic!

When you open the door to the spare room now, all you see is a frame of a room … and there were bones underneath the floor! Sheep bones though – not human (thank goodness) – someone had obviously had a spit BBQ there before it was floored over.

We showed our cat Cujo (who is old and grumpy) the room and she was very interested! The previous two days, she scrammed as soon as the builders arrived. But Wednesday, she arrived for munchies all covered with dust, old insulation and sawdust!! Looking very happy and contented too!

Thursday she sat inside while the plumbers were jackhammering the concrete outside …

Things came to a halt late Thursday as the floor of the bathroom wasn’t level. So, the builders leveled it and the back door to the laundry etc now not longer closes properly, and there are plaster cracks in the walls of the kitchen. Not bad cracks though …