And done!

We finished renovating the house! Just in time to sell it… as usual there were a host of things that we (and by ‘we’ I mean mostly ‘me’ being slack) never got around to finishing, until the impetus was really there. And what better push than getting the house ready for sale. Sure, it’d be nice to have lived with some of the final changes for longer, but still, it’s nice to see that it did work out very nicely in the end.

Sure, it never got the extra bedrooms we’d planned, and we spent more than we thought we would, but in the end, it’s a much better house and garden than when we moved in 5 years ago, and we didn’t lose money on the whole venture, which is always a bonus.

So, I give to you, the finished house!

Now we just need to find another one, and do it all again 🙂

Renovating a Caravan!

You know, sometimes renovating a house is just too big of a job. Sometimes you think you’d like a mini version of that challenge so you can actually finish it in a reasonable time-frame. Sometimes you think that buying an old caravan and renovating it for use in family holidays is the way to go about that.

Sometimes you actually go through with this idea…

The Caravan (more…)

Veggie Patch!

So, yeah we still haven’t done much more inside the house (there are some more skirting boards, honest), but we have been getting our garden into quite a nice state 😀

One of the major things we really wanted to get in place was our veggie patch, and so… (more…)

Yard partly done!

So, we’ve been very busy with our backyard. We may not have finished, but it sure is a lot better than it was when we moved in. It has gone from a hard to navigate jungle, to quite a nice little place to get away from it all.

For instance, the view from next to the shed, out to the yard.
(Click on any image to see it larger)
Old
Old Yard 5
New
Yard from next to shed

Yard from next to shed

Outside the house

It’s been a while between updates, sorry about that. Life has moved back in, and so renovation has slowed and I don’t want to show you the inside of the house until it looks complete. 🙂

However we have been doing some work outside. Outside the house needs a whole lot of work just like inside, it’s just that outside we can do largely ourselves and at a more relaxed pace.

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Episode 5 of web series… now in HD!

A little different to past episodes 🙂

Timelines, budgets… and missing them

So, in the real Grand Designs show, we’re constantly shown families who present a timeframe and a budget at the start of the show that Kevin McCloud scoffs at and and says they’ll never be able to meet. We, nod sagely and agree that there is no way that these people are ever going to meet those completely unrealistic goals, and then congratulate our wisdom when it turns out to be true.

But of course, we’d never do that ourselves would we?

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Episode 4 of the web series

Look Floorboards and plasterwork and paint, oh my!

All quiet on the Western front? Hardly!

Sorry for the lack of posts, it has got to that stage of the project where I’m working until stupidly late every night trying to get things ready for the tradies, or for the most part, painting… so getting stuff up onto the site has had to fall off a bit.

Not to fear though, there are videos and photos galore to share, they just need to be put up here with adequate explanations 🙂

What has happened since the last post? Glad you asked…

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Episode 3 of the Web Series

In which we see just how much builders can do in one day!