Hey guys things are going well on our side of the world!  We’ve just finished some renovations in the house, have been working hard on my recovery, and are making plans for the future.  Hope you enjoy my winter update (yes, it’s winter here!).

The house has been crazy, we decided when we moved in to convert a long unused hallway space near our master bedroom into a walk in closet, change the entry to our bedroom and expand our bathroom into a master ensuite.  We’re almost done now, but so far we’ve made our way to the painting, and soon -to-be carpeting stage of our bedroom/walk-in closet.  When we were on our trip to Asia earlier in the year we picked up some really nice artwork for the bath and bedroom walls.  We can’t wait to finish painting and get everything into place.

The Walk-In Closet: Our first job

Once a long and boring hallway, dreams of closet space came to mind.  Rod’s mind.  He’s so good.  Close off the end of the hallway and create a perfect space for our mounds of clothes, shoes, handbags… well those are all mine, and some of Rod’s clothes too. As nice as the hallway was it just didn’t suit us and this house has a major lack of storage and closet space.  This is our remedy! Rod put this together by hand, and we purchased the drawers, 3-each from Ikea.  SO HAPPY with the results. 

To see from beginning to end click on the pics below:

Next we are on to the other areas of the house that are small but of the most use to us.  Ultimately we want to move our current kitchen to a different place in the house and that is going to be the biggest job, but if all the little job are out of the way first, we can move on to the “biggie”.

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The Laundry Room: From outside to inside

The laundry room used to be outside the back door, in a little room that was hooked up for water and had a basin sink.  But going inside and outside all the time, especially in the very cold winter here, is really a pain in my ass (arse).  So… We decided to convert one of our four bathrooms into a laundry slash shower/toilet.  It’s in the middle of the house and eventually will be attached to the new kitchen.  We have a pantry that feeds into this dual laundry/bath room. 

First things first, we had some really nasty vinal floor blue and white checkerboard.  Horrible.  Tile is the answer, we picked a white/opal tile for the laundry to match the white shelving and appliances.  Overall I love this room, we do our ironing here, Birdie can use this shower to clean up after working outdoors cutting wood or the grass, everything goes straight into the front loader!  The above cabinets, basin sink, lower cabinet and benchtop we purchased at Bunnings (Home Depot) and Birdie hung them himself. 

 I did all the tiling and grouting myself!  Yay me!

Master Ensuite (Master Bath): New everything

The bathroom that ajoins our master bedroom had a toilet and a very small sink with one single under sink cabinet.  The bathroom itself is enourmous and it looked quite silly really.  No shower or bath tub, so we had to use the shower in the now laundry room.  We wanted to do a bit of work so we started by ripping out a small hallway wall that led into the bathroom itself to make it larger.  Then we had to rip up that old vinal flooring that was in all the bathrooms and replace with tiles.  We picked a chocolate floor tile with small pebble accents and a tan shower tile with the same pebble accents.  Rod did most of this tiling, including the shower.  We had a plumber come out and redo all the pipes in the bathroom including running new pipes for the double vanity and the new tub and shower.  Click on any picture below to enlarge.

This bathroom was a lot of work as you can see but man it is beautiful.  We live on an acre property so I had the drapes (which looked old and heavy) taken down and replaced with a one way dark tint so we can see out and nobody can see in.  The house is surrounded by bush and all the neighbours are so far away anyway, I didn’t want to lose the view. 

Closet, check.  Laundry, check.  Master Ensuite, check check check.

Next is carpeting in our bedroom and maybe some new window treatments.  Then back to saving up for our ultimate kitchen and main renovations which includes ripping out walls.