Disaster Area? No….It’s Just Our Renovations, Honest!

Many of you already know that the past couple of years have seen BIG changes to my family’s way of life….First having my elderly parents come to live with us and then building a granny flat onto our house for them. We had to demolish a part of our house and rebuild/extend our house as well, to make it all work! (Otherwise we would have ended up with the main bedroom not having a window! LONG story! LOL)….

Our local council wouldn’t let us have a seperate building…it had to be joined to keep them happy! What rediculous rules they have…BUT that is a whole other story!!

Anyway……it all meant BIG changes, especially for ME! I had planned on going back to work once my youngest daughter, Amy, had started high school…I even got my qualification in Real Estate so I could get a job where I could earn some serious $$$$…. BUT….as often as not, things happen, times change and your plans fly out the window!

Life and our home is definitely NOT the same BUT….do you know what? I wouldn’t change it for the world! Well…..maybe that is a teeny bit of an exaggeration….because NOW my bedroom looks like this:

Going back in time I used to have a nice bedroom ….pity I didn’t take some photos of it….BUT then maybe I would cry if I saw them……because look at it NOW…..it WAS in here:

BUT of course that hole on the far side wasn’t there and the window on the left was actually still a window! LOL Once upon a time there was a verandah outside of that window….now there is a TV room….hence it is no longer a window….get the picture? LOL!

Since the room has no window….we are going to open it up into the far room (Yes…the hole you see straight ahead), which is actually a closed in verandah itself. That hole is actually only the start of the hole….we are going to open it up as much as possible and the room without the window is actually going to become a walk in robe/dressing room. YAY…finally a decent cupboard….really? It feels like a DREAM….just wish it would hurry up and come TRUE!! At the moment I don’t even have a cupboard and my clothes hang in the open!

Looking back into the old bedroom from the closed in verandah:

You can see the current door on the far side, which will removed and closed over! Pivoting on the spot you can see this:

The doorway in the middle leads off to the living area. The door on the left which you can only just see, leads into what used to be the main bathroom….since we have a new bathroom in the extension, this will become our ensuite! YAY! No more fighting with the girls to use the bathroom! YIPPEEE! LOL

It’s amazing what you find when you start demolishing a house…..once we removed the old wall sheeting, it revealed really DIRTY old boards:

There was even a mummified old RAT carcass in the wall cavity! YUUUUUKKKKK! (Sorry…I totally forgot to photograph that….bet you are disapointed, right? Hehehe!) PLUS we found old white ant (Termite) damage:

Thankfully we didn’t find any live ants BUT we will have to see how much repair work will need to be done once we cut the hole bigger and more of the old boards are removed!

See how there is a wall frame cutting accross the room:

Well….that wall was originally closer towards the camera, with a door in it and my daughter Emma’s bedroom was beyond that door/wall. She now has a nice new bedroom with walk in robe in the new extension! LUCKY her! LOL

We demolished the wall and rebuilt it further back to make more space in our new bedroom, so we can make a bigger opening in the wall into the new walk in robe/dressing room. (Note when I say ‘we’ throughout this post, I actually mean my hubby! LOLLLL) Emma’s old bedroom will become a sewing nook for her. For those of you who don’t know, she is studying Fashion Design…..YAY…another sewer in the famly! 🙂

Note to myself: While peering through camera, don’t forget to look at the floor occasionally or I might tred on something:

OUCH! Now I know what it feels like to tred with bare foot on a wire brush and lets just say it is reminiscent of treading on a whole bunch of pins at once! LOL

Alas….it is going to take a long while to finish this renovation….we are replacing all the windows you see as well….with new ones that actually work properly! LOL…..so that is MORE work for hubby! I guess I will just have to keep him motivated with plenty of refreshments:

OK….so now you are probably wondering WHERE we are sleeping, since there isn’t any bed in sight (And WHO in their right mind would have one in there anyway? LOL)

Well…..our bedroom is now sharing what is now my Studio, since my parents have moved into their granny flat! We had built the studio so my parents had somewhere to stay when they moved here and the extension/granny flat was being built. Our house was tooo small the way it was and so was my old work area…. so a new studio solved the problem! <BIG GRIN!>

Ok…so inside is not so glamorous and I suppose you could say it is rather messy (Suppose, I say? LOL):

You can see the bedroom section in the background….That’s not our normal bed cover…..Hubby left the window open during a storm when I wasn’t home a few days ago…. and of course our bed got SOAKED! Typical of the male of the species….if it were some of his power tools there, I bet he would have remembered to close the window!

Hubby’s clothes are in shelves and most of mine are hanging on those portable hanger thingies which are behind the wooden pine bookcase, so you can’t see them….well…if I am honest, MOST of my clothes are in that basket on the floor, waiting to be ironed! LOLLL Just another thing on my ‘to do’ list…..

Ok….so admittedly I am a messy worker….

On my cutting table and scattered on the benches, is the current pattern I am working on. It’s been on the back burner for a while now BUT….it won’t be too far away now!

Oh and no….before you ask…I am NOT a clock fanatic, watching every second pass me by! The two clocks are just sitting there waiting until hubby puts hooks in the walls so I can hang them up…one in the studio and one in the TV room in the house!

Well…I hope you have enjoyed this little tour into my disaster zones! I will show you some progress photos as it all comes together and how my studio looks once I have it all organised and setup properly!

Oh I can hardly wait!….Just to have somewhere to store my clothes properly will be ACE! What more can I say BUT…..Bring it on! 🙂