Portrait of a Boarded Man

Short on a plank, I contacted Ross the man we purchased the bulk wood from. Sending him an email to explain our dilemma, he searched his warehouse attic to discover, yup, you guessed it, one board left!!! This board is definitely from our batch too, I'd recognise it anywhere. Its got a tounge and groove too so its mint.

The email was sent just in time too. He was moving all his belongings to a new warehouse and I had to pick it up today, (when I got there the warehouse was almost empty). He would have chucked it out if I hadn't contacted him.

Best of all, he gave it to us for free.

Delicate Kickboards

On Sunday, Pete worked on and finished the kickboards in the kitchen. We opted for a stainless steel finish. Like our other kitchen components, they were from IKEA.

We purchased two packs. From that, Pete managed to fit an extra offcut on the side gap where the fridge is (not shown in pictures).

They are pretty basic bits of MDF covered in aluminium look contact. Not even a thin sheet of real metal!) They attach to the legs with the clips that were supplied in the pack. Pete finished it with a clear waterproof filler on the edges.

Here's the before and after. Everything in the photo below is now DONE! Like a snippet into the near future..

Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With String

Thought I'd post some details. Throughout renovating, we were always decorating. Guess that's the whole nesting thing coming through. Picking and prodding at twigs till it's just right. Then picking and prodding again. This is the fun stuff. There is no dust, no mess, no heavy lifting, no sore muscles the next day and nothing done here has to be permanent.

We attached this bird to our pulley switch for the light near the bookcase. Found him in a toy shop in Annandale for a couple of bucks. He already had a loop attached to his back that we could attach to the string. Such a cute blue wren.



Einstein lives on top of our intercom. I love the way the cables have been painted white but only half way, then the original yellowed cables connect to the receiver. We thought about painting the intercom receiver red, but I really like it in its original state. Einstein is holding a piece of chalk. Almost like hes gone and whitened everything around him with it.



We received this beautiful driftwood candelabra as a gift from Petes brother at Christmas. The candles have a vanilla/caramel fragrance. This sits above our bed on the Besta Burs. Nest to this I have two cigar boxes that hold my special shiny things. The top box I scabbed from work.
I also was lucky enough to get these empty Penfolds Grange boxes from work. They hold all the delicious wines and spirits that we have collected over time (of course always evolving). I am trying to gain access to a third box from work for all the overflow that I can no longer fit.



This spice rack from IKEA hold our tea instead. The white cafeteria was a Christmas present from my cousin from Italy (so it is italiano authentica), and has a matt white finish on it. Bellissimo. The loveley green teapot was from my brother and his partner. They know I have a bit of an obsession with tea. I could happlily fill another rack with the rest of our collection!



Meet Paul Palmer. He doesn't like the sun. We inherited him from our friends A&D who moved to Perth recently. Toto the Bunny had a good gnaw at him when we looked away for one second and now he is on the road to recovery. Thanks to the new floor we just installed, Toto treats it like acid and refuses to walk on it. Us-1. Bunny-Nil.



Easy access Olis and Salt n Pepper next to our cooktop. Anyone that has a minimalist kitchen with mirrored splash-backs (OK so I have a thing against mirrored splash-backs) mustn't cook much..



Jen bought us back this beautiful hand stitched lobster from her travels abroad. I teamed it with some autumn leaf corduroy and made a pillow out of it. It used to have an orange tassel, but again, destructor ahoy. How awesome are lobsters? They're waaay cooler than deer and bears and pandas and owls and kittens.



Our gallery above our bed is a work in progress. Not happy quite yet with this layout. We use these stick on velcro like adhesive pads to hold up the frames so no holes in the wall!
We have here a lab partners goco print, a heart screenprint on canvas and a Twiggy print that was a lovley gift from a lovely friend.



A table runner from Jens travels. Love this salmon colour. A hand made fox mug from the market in Brooklyn. Some pretty lillies. The piece de resistance, the Denon. Looks like a bit of a Denon Shrine with all this stuff going on around it. A couple of weeks ago this picture fell of the wall. Yes we used the sticky stuff to attach it instead of nails or screws, but I blame it on the fresh painted walls and the insane amount of humidity of late. It broke the power-point. The worst things to fix are those that have just been fixed, arrrh!

Rabbit in Residance

Introducing, Mr S.F.Bunny. Chewer extraordinaire. Destructor of all things new and of value.
Here he is in lunge position and again with him in action on the Bisazza tile box. Some gnawing.

A Big Bad Wolf at the Edge of the Woods.

Heres a small thing worth noting. So far, we have found that if you can get the item from anywhere other than Bunnings, you will get better service and a better product for the same amount of money.

We purchased this entrance strip from Harvey Norman Flooring. It came as a kit with three diffrent components that pieced together to fit between the carpet and the edge of the floorboards. Pete cut it down to size and hammered it in with the mallet that we have from our floor installation kit. Its a laminate strip, all the edging they had available was either laminate wood look or metal. We thought the laminate looked a little better even though it is fake. We picked a "stringy bark" laminate strip. It cost $19.95 and had everything we needed in the pack.
So neat.

Drawers Draw to a Close.

O.K-O.K so this is pretty boring, but theres soooo many things that need finishing off. Like I said the smallest things take the longest to get around to and are surprisingly fiddly. Pete cut a bit of IKEA Perfekt in Abstrakt white to cover the end of the drawer so it sits flush with the wall.

It just finishes off the cabinets nicely, don't you think? Perfekt.

Timmmmmberrrrrr!.....floor.

On the weekend, Pete and I tackled the floor. We purchased this timber a LONG time ago. Not long after moving in we had it delivered to our apartment. 13 boxes in total with a few off scraps.

We fell in love with this timber as soon as we set our eyes on the one sample plank. It was a brash decision to purchse. $400 cash on the spot and outta the warehouse that day if Ross, the owner had it his way. There was only enough to cover 22sqm. Just barley enough to cover our living and kitchen space. Perfect. (Well not as everyone says. You are meant to allow an extra 15% extra for errors and unusable offcuts so we were cutting it tight. Literally) Who could pass up $20 a square meter for imported, German made, Southern Chestnut. You can see from the picture below that we have lived with these planks behind our sofa for many months now. That's right. Taking up space. Precious, precious space. Remember our living and kitchen is 22 meters worth of floor space!
I know this other image of a bare concrete floor looks like nothing much, but believe me, Pete spent many long, back braking hours chiseling out the bumps to prepare a smooth surface for the underlay.




So finally I have included myself in my fancy-shmants renovation outfit. We had just ripped up the floor. Under the carpet, we found the original underlay. Looked like hessian. Ripping it up, it made the finest of dust. Horrid stuff. We rolled it all up ready for council cleanup. After a bit of scrapping and vacuuming, we started on the underlay. We purchased a product called "Silent Shield" from Harvey Norman. It's priced at $10 a square meter and its pretty thin compared to some more expensive and better quality products, but they have the ratings and tests to prove it works which is the main reason to purchase it. An acoustic underlay was essential in an apartment block (if not on the ground floor), else we could have gotten away with underlay for around $5 or less per square meter.



It is recommended that you open a few boxes of the timber at a time to balance out the colour tones as being a natural product, we had to pick our planks wisely for colour variation. We purchased a kit that contains wedges, a mallet and a block to hammer the wood in. There was as "s" shaped metal tool in the kit to assist in hammering a plank when they are close to the wall. We bought this from Bunnings and installed the floor ourselves. I would definitely install a floor again in the future. The tongue and groove in the timber makes it really easy to hammer together. We glued together each piece with waterproof woodworking glue. It took us all Saturday and Sunday to finish it but this included ripping up the old carpet, and a trip out to Bunnings and Harvey Norman for some extra supplies like more glue and 1 meter extra of the underlay.




Here are some before and after shots of the finished work. We are yet to put on skirting board, but for now, we have finished the main part of the floor. Out of all the projects we have tackled so far, I would have to say the floor was the easiest and most dramatic update. It's aesthetically so different and beautiful to what was there before, and only for a few hundred dollars. Compared to the kitchen and ceiling, even painting, the floor was a pleasant surprise.

Tadah!



No wait...There one more thing and its an important bit, even though its just a bit...We are short just 50liniar centimeters. We used every board that we purchased. There was even a random timber board that wasn't part of the same batch that we used as an extra (looked close to the same though you wouldn't even pick it). The photo shows all that we had left. Mathematically it was impossible to match all tounge and grooves without having any offcuts. Ironically when pieced all together, they would fill the gap we have left in the corner. Now for my next ebay purchase: "One Offcut Southern Chestnut Wood Timber Floorboard German Made Pick-Up Sydney BNWT".
This is still not a lesson learned. It was still worth it.

90% - 5 minutes. 10% - 5 days

I've worked out some sort of ratio to renovation projects. Some days you reach this point where you're working on a project and in a matter of hours, the whole unit can seem transformed. A day where you really feel like you've accomplished something. The before and after of this, at times overwhelming, transformation is a lot of preparation, moving things, cleaning up and finishing off. While a project is underway, there are days spent working, days with friends and family and days researching.

Finally, today, after 2 weeks of mess in the kitchen, we have finished the wall. Days of touch ups and I am finally satisfied enough to put back the racks and dishes.

Rock Oyster

I have finally gotten round to painting the wall in the kitchen. Continuing on with Wattyl paint, I have used 1 litre of Wattyl ID with a colour called Rock Oyster in a low sheen. The wall is 2 meters wide and 2.6 high so 2 coats was fine for the 1 litre can though I wouldn't want to paint much more than that as there was only really just enough left in the tin to finish the job. We are waiting for the paint to dry so have not yet put back our racks but I will update this post soon so you can check the final look.

For a while I was tossing up between two other greys (Snowdonia and Colourbond Windspray) but settled for this shade of "Greeny, natural grey" called Rock Oyster as it was more fitting with the natural shades of the floor (yet to be installed) and the wood finish benchtops in the kitchen.