Living in the living room.

It's been a long while since the living room was completed and the last pictures I posted looked like I lived the "less is more" philosophy well.  As much as I wish I lived this way, I don't.  One minute I'm in blissful minimalism and the next I'm throwing down a shag rug for the girls, extra seating for guests, side tables for beverages, a home for Mila's artwork and an armchair for Anton.  The room quickly becomes function over form.....oh well.

Construction complete.

I can smell the fresh paint.

Now, function over form......

We also thought it practical to have a dining table, oddly enough, it proves to be useful.

The table has a steel top, which I love, only it really heats up in the morning when the sun comes through the bi-folds.  On a bright note, it keeps my coffee warm.

Anton's arm chair, super comfy.

I'm trying to get the girls to learn a little Dean Martin.....

It wouldn't be right if we didn't have a George Nelson clock in the room.

The girls both have their little orange armchairs that they can move around the room for playing, movies or sunning on the deck

The one toy I am happy to leave out in the living room

I love Boontje.

Intended for extra seating or side tables when needed, these have become a great framework for an awesome tunnel.

Dear HGTV

Dear HGTV,

I have a sad, sad, sad back yard with huge potential.  My husband and I have spent the last few years putting all our blood, sweat and creative juices into fixing up our house and we have just run out of steam, energy and inspiration when it comes to stepping out of the back door and finishing the job.

Finished house, finished pool and not so finished poolside.....

We have made some progress by refinishing the pool itself, however it is unpleasant to be anywhere near the pool as the 40 year old concrete surround is old and unkind, especially for my two little girls. I always arm myself with towels, suncreen, hats and bandaids when we go poolside because it is inevitable that a toe will scrape or someone will topple and blood will be drawn.

How many shades of grey can you count in the concrete patches?

The sunny side of the deck is too narrow for the chaise lounges, so we have to sit in chairs with the lovely chicken wire as our backdrop.

More lovely concrete.

We have a planter bed next to the pool that seems be a nice haven for a few plum trees and a lot of determined blackberry bushes.  If you wouldn't mind making this pretty, that would be nice.  There is a fabulous fireplace in the corner that we make s'mores in that I would love to make more of a focal point too instead of it being overshadowed by a triffid-like blackberry bush.

Lush un-lushness.

The fireplace.  We even have the sandstone to reface it, but at this stage it would be like polishing a turd.

We have a small lawn below the pool which has made some attempts to sprout grass here and there but it's not faring well. Not that it matters much because our girls aren't currently allowed in the yard because the decaying, not to mention ugly fence is loose and unsafe and there is a 15' drop from the fence line.

Sad sprouts of grass.  This is no putting green, even though Mila tries.

Bits and pieces....

The fence that hinders the girls from playing on the lawn.

The drop behind that old fence.....no thanks.

We have a corner of the yard that is completely overgrown.  It is partly in this state because my husband and are at a stale mate.  He wants the corner to house a hot tub and I want it to be a play-house for the girls with a nice old tire swing.  So rather than agreeing on something, we neglect it. Bless my Mila's little heart, she thinks it's a magical fairy garden....let's hope she doesn't go fairy hunting, she might find a grumpy possum.

The view from the garden stairs.

The fairy garden, hot tub or play house?

The rickety gate that leads down to the "magic garden"

The rickety stairs that lead from the gate to the lower yard. This we will leave 'as-is' until we are ready to install the art studio under the deck.

It is easy to neglect the corner of the garden because it is shielded from vision by the garden stairs. Let's talk about our garden stairs shall we? Built out of recycled interior stairs, they are quickly rotting and have very little life left in them, I am quite excited to have a swipe at them with a sledge hammer because I think I could take them down with one foul swoop.  The railings are also made out of weathered old pine faced with some old rusty chicken wire just sitting in wait to give someone a nice dose of tetanus.  And the cherry on this pretty cake is a cheap children's gate serving as our "safety gate" to the pool.  Naturally, the children's gate is rusting because it was intended for indoor use and the powder coating gives new meaning to the term "powder coating" as I am always coated in a powder-like substance upon any contact.

Looks secure doesn't it?

Classy.

Did someone say shabby-chic?  Not me.

I will finish on a bright note, the deck is fabulous if I may say so myself.  We enjoy it a lot, in fact we spend almost our entire Spring, Summer and Fall out there.  That being said, there is no cover or shelter out there, which can be harsh in the summer and unusable if it rains. We did create a fancy lean-to roof over the sink which was supposed to be a temporary measure that just never went away. With every windy day I hope it blows away, but it is far more solid than it looks and the only thing  that gets messed up is the builders paper that's floating on top, (and now down the sides).
But with a fabulous view and our fabulous home that we've built out of love behind us, the deck gives us far less woe than the rest of our yard.

The deck.

The lean-to

The front side of the lean-to

Aaaaaah, this view never gets old.

Anyway, we are tired and at a loss, so if you wouldn't mind we'd really appreciate if you could step in and send some of your big guns to help us out.

Desperately Seeking Landscaping.
(AKA Lucy Dawson)

PS A hot tub would be nice too.

Dun, dun, dun, not dun.....

I know it's been two years since I've updated this blog.  It seems that the absence of old Boges has just taken the fun out of it all and the absence of Ben Franklin's has taken the progress out.  But now that I've got two little helpers at hand, I'm going to try and crank out some little projects.  This will now be the DIY phase until I can convince Dad to come back.  After all the abuse he suffered, I don't blame him if he doesn't, but we didn't kill him, so that has to count for something right?

Until I get cracking with my girl team, I will just filter through old progress pictures when I have a few seconds in the day and post them up, then as we get current, I can keep you up to date.  

The pictures underneath are of the old floor coming up, (in the green room mentioned below). I took a break from abusing Dad and hit my Mum up for free labour this time around.  She shovelled, scraped, stripped and hauled the 30 year old Berber out of the second floor.  The padding was so old it crumbled just from looking at it, there was a layer of paper glued to the floor, I'm assuming from some sort of linoleum that had previously been there and the carpet was so full of dust not only from 30 years of neglect, but from serving as a drop cloth for the last year and a half.  We should of had Mum's lungs X-Rayed after this, they probably would have looked worse than Dad's smoker lungs.

The floor with the layer of paper glued to it and a smidge of the old padding

The padding was so old it just crumbled when you touched it.

The padding looks like crackers in this picture.

Goodbye carpet, you will NOT be missed.

We then recruited Estuardo to install the flooring.  We chose a black walnut with an antiqued finish.  In other words, we paid extra to have someone abuse it before we did.  And it was a smart idea, every time I notice a scratch I just romanticise it as adding character.  The baseboards and trim are still absent in these photo's, but you can see the dramatic difference between the before and after.

Anyone for a waltz?

New floor calls for a new rug.

I still had to stick my elliptical in here which is a designer bummer, but I need it somewhere pleasant or I won't use it.

Mila was pretty happy to have somewhere to roll around. Her bedroom floor also got done.

Pre trim /baseboard and pre toy room.

I will have to update these pics because with two girls, this room now looks way more lived in than this, but I'll pause here and pretend that this is how I live.

The Green Room.

This was probably the most livable space in the house when we first bought it. We thought we would have a little patching and some painting, tear out the carpet and refinish the hardwood underneath and we'd be done.......when will we learn?

This was the living room the day of the sale. Looks harmless doesn't it?

As we started investigating, we found that the floor was not only sloping 6 inches, but underneath that 25 year old stain over stain Berber carpet there was a festy batch of nastiness brewing. We had rotten joists and rotten floor boards where the two exterior doors were.

Of course it would be easy to replace, but what we also had to do was find the source of the water. Was it a bad seal around the door? Was it a door that had been left open? Was it just water from too much wet traffic? No, those would be easy solutions. We came to discover that the Juliet balcony was attached at a downward slope with aluminium pipes instead of joists. These pipes worked as a tunnel that brought water straight into the house when it rained.......I couldn't even think this s**t up. Needless to say, we had to tear out the entire balcony which we never intended on touching and rebuild it from scratch. The second problem was that the thresholds had been installed backwards so they were feeding water toward the house instead of away....Morons, I tell you, morons!

Next issue please! We came to learn as we started to tear out the carpet, that we had different thicknesses of flooring and underneath the now crumbly carpet padding there was very little remnants of hardwood floor. On top of that, there was glue and cardboard stuck to all of it....I decided to re-lay the carpet and save it for a rainy day, it obviously hasn't rained enough because I haven't touched the floor since.

The Juliet Balcony and old windows.

One of our torments was this godforsaken mural of clouds set in an archway. It was backing the wall of the stairs that lead up to the Master Suite. We couldn't tear out this wall until we could tear out the stairs. We couldn't tear out the stairs until we extended the stairwell. We couldn't extend the stairwell until we had all of our permits signed off on because the stair extension was one of those notorious under the radar jobs Dad was going to do "Valka-style". I didn't want to waste my time painting it, so it just tormented me every day. What a great day it was to tear out the stairs and this mural.

The stairs were a pain in my ass. Literally. I fell on my ass walking down those things several times. They were short runs and short risers to begin with, but to make it even worse, there were a few broken treads that had split all the way across and the only thing that held them in place was the carpet. It was a very wobbly trip up and down, especially being VERY pregnant.

Here is a before shot before the balcony was reopened and the stairwell was added.

Rebuilding the balcony and keeping the stairs as "exterior" stairs as per building plans.....

Second flight of stairs added and changed to interior.

We replaced the windows on the side that was exposed to the elements with the hope that we would replace the others shortly thereafter.....or in our case one day. As we started installing the windows we realised that the interior wall was a layer of lathe and plaster in some areas, sheetrock on sheetrock in others and a combination of it all in other places. This made for a very uneven wall and it took Estuardo a week of mudding layer upon layer to get a nice even level wall.

After the stairs were gone we blocked off the 2 doors to the bedrooms and created a central vestibule that leads to the bedrooms and bathroom. Giving us a nice big clean wall. You can see the old openings to the bedrooms and stairs where the new sheetrock is.

We noticed that the ceiling was sagging in places, as we started to throw a few extra sheetrock screws in for good measure, we realised we were throwing in the ONLY sheetrock screws. Mr Moron thought that glue would work just as well as screws and that he didn't need to align the panels with the joists.....aaaaaaah!!!!!

We rewired everything and added these temporary overhead lights until I can select what I want. The festy carpet worked nicely as a drop cloth.

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Here it is after leveling, rewiring, desconstruction and painting. We still need to do the floors and the baseboards and then we will have the best play-room/reading room ever!!

Aaaaah just breathe in that fresh paint smell.

We did the long wall in a light Lemongrass colour to freshen it up and break from my obsession with white.

Mila approves.

Here is a before shot of the balcony that sits off the reading room. We tore the whole thing off, literally and rebuilt it as an exterior living space. It is now one of my favourite places in the whole house.

Not done yet, but Mila sure likes it.

This has nothing to do with anything, but check out all of the deer in our yard.