You know I love DIY work. Well, this started as a bit of DIY handyman work but soon blew out to a full-on home renovation.

Our friend Sue-Ellen wanted to move back to her place after having renters for the past few years, but before moving in, a freshen up was on the cards.

Days 1757 to 1850 – December 28th 2018 – March 31st 2019

As a professional chef, the kitchen area was of particular interest to me, and this kitchen was very average. Entrance from two sides and little amount of cupboards with poor workflow, those designers need to find a new job.

The first $900 dollars went on a few basics and some paint…

Thousands of dollars later we have gone from a paint job to knocking out walls, building walls, ripping out the kitchen, installing a second-hand kitchen, ripping up carpets, installing floating floors.

Here I start cutting into the master bedroom wall to allow the installation of a wardrobe in the bedroom behind. Even though this intrudes into the master space, a built-in robe will fit perfectly along the wall and butt up neatly to this.

Removing the original floating floor and replacing that with a much better quality one in the main lounge, dining & kitchen areas. Removed all the old brown wood cornice and replaced it with modern curved cornice.

Removed the old toilet and installed a new one, painted over bathroom tiles, and probably more that I can’t remember.

A new floating floor going down in both bedrooms. The master bedroom had the floating floor which I took up from the lounge area and relayed it.

Painted ceilings, walls, skirting and everything else. Tilled the kitchen splashback all around. Moni painted every door in the house!

Probably the biggest part was deciding to remove the pointed kitchen wall and open the area up. Once we’d established that it was not a load-bearing wall we were into it.

Thankfully I had some help from Mr Don (SE dad) who is a machine, I call him demolition Don because nothing gets in his way. Always handy for some serious earth moving…

Without that ugly useless architecturally designed pointed kitchen piece gone, look at how it really opens up the entire space.

Wow, I’m tired from just remembering. It was lots of hours and hard work, however, I had so much fun and seeing it all come together was very rewarding.

I installed a wall between the lounge with fireplace to the kitchen which made the lounge a real room, not just a walk through area. And it gave the kitchen a wall for cupboards and its own identity.

Crazy temperatures during our reno time and some days we just had to cool off.

Dining room floor going down. We got a second-hand floor and had more than enough to cover the dining, kitchen, entrance & the lounge area all the same throughout.

Mr Don moved to the outside work, building a wall around the new pool filter system and then some landscaping before putting up a fence to screen it off.

An electrician came in and installed new light fittings and cabling to power points, wifey doesn’t let me play with electrics and rightly so 🙂

The entire reno cost more than Sue-Ellen had planned and thanks to Don it all came together. Something to consider when doing a renovation is that whatever you plan, it will nearly always cost more than budgeted especially when things don’t go as expected.

Also worth considering is that one job started often leads to something else to repair that wasn’t planned as a result of the other job 🙂

The final part was the laundry room.

After over two months of hard yakka and plenty of $$$, we were pretty much done.

Considering that Moni & I were going to be living in the spare bedroom & office for a couple of months after the original paint job… a few nights sleep there was all we had before heading over to Brisbane and our next house sitting engagement.