Latest update on the renovations

The renovation project for the new house is absolutely cranking along! Thanks to Mario and his family, things are moving pretty quickly, and it’s starting to look a lot better.

Completed since the last update:

• The floor tiles were removed by some tradies (screw doing that ourselves)
• Patched all of the walls ready for painting
• Removed all the old lighting
• Patched the old ceiling holes and cut out new ones
• Inserted the new lights
• Painted the ceiling
• Begun painting the rest of the house
• Got quotes for new carpet
• Trees from the outside were cut down
• Removed all the rubbish from the lawn work
• Built a new extension to the wall in the main living area

Room preparation

I actually know zero about painting and pre work. When I was younger, my ex and I tried to paint a room and the work we did was beyond terrible. It was back in the day where a feature wall was all the rage, especially in the blue colour we’d selected. My “favourite” feature (note the sarcasm) was the particularly crooked wall where the blue met the cream. It looked terrible.

Hence I was a bit anxious about how useful I would be with this stage of the reno. Thankfully it appears as I’ve aged I’ve become a lot better at this! Mario’s dad ran me through the basics and away I went.

Surprisingly, I found a new love of prepping walls! My OCD kicked in, and every single dint or damage was quickly covered with putty. As the house used to be a rental, it’s fair to say that not much care was taken where the walls were concerned. Once I’d finished, there were putty dots everywhere. In the room to become my study area, I spent probably nearly half an hour alone working my way around. I don’t know if that’s a typical amount of time per room or not, but for this rookie, it felt like quite a long time.

How beautiful is the carpet where the cupboard used to be?

I also learned how to tape the power points, switches and the windows in preparation for painting. Given my painting history, I spent a lot of time making sure this was perfect. Even though we’re not doing any feature walls, and so it wouldn’t be as obvious, I still didn’t want to mess up.

Back into a routine

We’re back at work this week so Mario’s dad is working through doing the painting during the day. It means that at night that he comes back to our old house, and we all have dinner and go to bed. I much prefer it that way, as it actually feels like we’re getting back into a routine again. I’ve had time to do the house work, catch up on the washing and ironing, and make food for lunch at work. I must prefer that to going back to the new house, sitting in a camp chair breathing in dust and reviewing what’s been done.

At the moment I’m still doing some early shifts at work so I’m still yet to get back into a routine with a blog. Hopefully having some nights at home again will help to catch up on that. From next week there’ll be a few days that I’ll be starting a bit later, which will make things a bit easier.

In the meantime, I’ve created a gallery so that you can see the latest updates. Click through to the Flickr gallery to see more.

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