Coming down the home straight

We're moving in at the weekend - I am SO excited! There has been loads of action up at the house this week: the floor finally dried enough for workmen to come in on Monday, and since then we've had people putting up the chandelier, touching up the internal painting, fitting shelves and hanging rails in the wardrobes and cleaning up. Officially the Council inspection happens tomorrow (Friday), after which we can move in as long as the Council's inspector gives us the all-clear. I've spoken to Warren about potential issues, but I hope there aren't any: Council has been checking the building process periodically anyway so one would think there won't be any surprises.





















This is the floor in darling daughter's bedroom. Everyone was so suspicious of an oiled finish (especially the flooring guy!), and yet when they see the final product they're amazed and impressed. Poor Phil may find himself having to become an expert in oiled finishes because Warren likes it so much he's decided to go for it himself!





















This is a view down from the bedroom end of the house all the way through to the TV room at the other end. Lovely! I really like the finish: it isn't really shiny, but it has brought out the natural grain of the wood. It is moppable, waterproof and reasonably stain resistant, and any scratches can be repaired with an oily rag.





















This is the island unit, complete with oven and gas cook top. And it's fabulous. The cupboard and drawer fronts are oiled Tasmanian Oak: a neutral veneer that will set off rather than compete with the completely MAD wood that will shortly be going on the big unit. See further down for more images!





















And THIS is our gorgeous chandelier. Weve talked about it for ages, and here it is, after almost 4 years swathed in bubblewrap in a crate! I hadn't realised the electricians were about to put it up or I would have made sure I cleaned and rewired the crystals beforehand... as it was, I spent a precarious hour up a very tall ladder, wiring in the crystals, washing and polishing them all individually, and changing the low-wattage CF bulbs. I want to move to LED bulbs but they're expensive at the moment and I actually had the replacement CF bulbs, so as and when they begin to give out I'll investigate the price of LED replacements again.

We owe thanks to our former friend Claire in Bristol, who gave us this chandelier when we bought our previous Victorian-era house in Redland, Bristol. She apparently found it at auction (?) or possibly an antique shop in the Cotswolds and for years hung it in her own place, but when she moved into a Georgian cottage with significantly lower ceilings she found it wasn't suitable and it spent a few years languishing in her attic before she gave it to us. Sadly our friendship hit the rocks a few years ago, despite the fact that she is darling daughter's one and only god(less) mother, and we haven't seen her for a while. But whenever we look at the chandelier we think kind thoughts of Claire, and miss her. Anyway, it was lovely to see the look on darling daughter's face this week when she saw it hung up: she was four years old when we moved back to Australia, and she's eight now. Even so, half her life away, she remembered the chandelier and is thrilled to see it again.
















The decorative brass chain is too short - goodness knows where the rest of it went! - but I've managed to find an exact reproduction from Antique Lamp Supplies in the USA and after a brief and effective email exchange (thank you Michael Barnes!) a 2 foot length is being shipped over by USP as we speak, and so the final position of the chandelier will be lower and it will become more of a visual feature in the room.

TALKING OF VISUAL FEATURES!!! THIS is the black-hearted Sassafrass veneer we're using on the big kitchen cupboards. Wow!
















Because I'm itching to have some idea of what the finished cupboards will be like I did a couple of mock-ups using some other photos I've taken of the kitchen as it progresses. They clearly won't give you a proper idea but I needed to imagine, so here they are, despite their numerous faults!




















The perspective is wrong, the colours probably aren't correct as the wood hasn't been oiled yet so we don't really know what it will look like but... the mock-ups do give me some idea, and we all love it!

Doing the groundwork

Life on the block has been a little frustrating recently because our builder is over-committed and consequently we haven't seen much in the way of building going on for the last couple of weeks. The problem started with the bad weather at the beginning of the month which meant it was difficult to get workers and trucks up here so none of the material for building the decks or plasterboarding the house has yet arrived, and the problem was compounded for a while because the plasterers couldn't start until the cool room went in.

As you know, the cool room (complete with commercial glass doors into the dining area) is close to dearest husband's heart... well here it is, in all its glory, albeit before the aforementioned doors have gone in.





















The 'box' effectively came in pre-assembled, just requiring seals and internal fittings. Part of the studwork in the wall between the pantry and the dining area had to be removed so that the cool room could just slide in!





















After a couple of days' work the unit was pushed into position





















The door into the cool room features a manually operated bell so that if someone got stuck on the inside they can ring for help - mind you, the door doesn't lock so all they'd need to do is pull hard!





















That is pretty much the only work that has gone on inside the house unless you count a bit of tidying up of joinery and putting down the bottom runners for the sliding wardrobe doors. Outside we did get a day of rendering (viz. the planter boxes, one of which is shown above) and a day with a bobcat and driver, who tidied up the (small) pile of builders' rubbish and levelled off at the back of the house.





















This is argilite, the shale rock on this side of the hill on which the house is built. It's very beautiful: all sorts of shades of red, yellow and brown with the occasional streak of quartz or blue-grey stain.

The largest contribution to 'progress' has been our own engaging of John Lacey's earth moving company to do more ground works around the place. A couple of trucks' worth of road base has been laid in front of the house and down the slope to the studio where we're living which should make a hell of a difference to the site in the rain. I was surprised at how coarse the rocks were in the road base, but after a couple of passes with the trucks and a bobcat it has smoothed out considerably: the larger rocks have pressed into the clay sub-surface, providing a very effective anchor for the finer grit, crushed rocks and dust that make up the rest of the material. We should get a couple of years out of the new surface at least...













Pete the digger driver






Pete's almost balletic with that digger! He's currently digging terraces on the slope in front of the main house: that's going to be the site of our garden and we decided to go for broad terraces running in sweeps across and down the slope so that we have a series of flat areas to work with rather than a single slope. We want to plant some bits and have a flat lawn on some areas; digging it out ourselves would take AGES and frankly we'd like to be sitting on the grass drinking our Pimms before we're too old and decrepit to enjoy it... so we've invested (heavily!) in Pete's expertise and he's spending this weekend with us, digging out the terraces and putting HUGE granite boulders against the batters to keep the whole thing upright as it were.

You can see the back of the first terrace being carved out earlier this morning....





You get some idea of the size of the rocks with darling daughter sitting on them!









The other arrival yesterday - apart from the digger - was our brand spanking new firebox, which to me at least is an object of great excitement. We saw this firebox in a magazine and decided it was what we wanted because it is double-sided and so it sits in the middle of a wall and can heat both rooms. As our house is decoratively simple inside, this is going to be a real feature when it is eventually installed in a new wall in between the TV room and the dining area.





















Sam and Shannon drove all the way from Sydney to put it together, and will provide Warren with any telephone support he requires to install it fully.





















The great thing I love about it is that the fire glass can be either lifted (on a weighted pulley) or opened on each side of the firebox. The chimney that will be built around the firebox allows for the fire glass to slide up behind the opening, making it a very sleek construction. We haven't yet decided on an external finish around the firebox because we haven't yet got a proper idea of what it's going to look like in situ, so you could argue that it's a very expensive leap of faith! But I maintain it's going to look stunning when it's all put together.





















The flue and all the other bits and pieces for the fire are sitting inside the pantry waiting for something to happen...

Progress Report #1: the house

OK, OK, I know... I haven't been very good at posting things recently! It's been a combination of being too busy elsewhere, poor internet connection and general laziness and I do apologize. To make up for it, here is a digest of recent photographs of the house, shortly to be followed by another post about what's been happening in the 'grounds'.

















I thought you'd like to see a different view of the house, taken from the new earthworks above the studio. See the following post for details about all the excavation work. Soon (we hope!) the bare soil will be covered with grass and then shrubs (once we've worked out how to prevent the wallabies from eating any mass plantings). The tree ferns are beautiful and they are staying right where they are!
















I do love this view of the house, nestled into the landscape. Some elements of that landscape look a bit raw at the moment, but that will change...





















Inside the house the floor has been laid. This has had its frustrations, not least because the contractor deliberately bought the wrong grade of timber which, as it is milled specifically for each job, meant we couldn't return it.





















We requested 'Feature Grade' which is the lowest quality, because it comes with all the knots and marks and colouration that we feel gives the wood some character. It was hard enough getting the guy to buy stringy bark for us (which we wanted because we like the look of it and it's locally grown) so we were furious when we found out he'd gone for 'Standard Grade'. His view was that we didn't really know what we wanted and that he didn't want to work with Feature Grade wood because he didn't want to fill all the holes! He simply couldn't comprehend that we didn't want him to fill the damned things, we wanted a floor with lumps and bumps in it!






















This is the resulting flooring (complete with pencil marks), and it's OK. It is less bland than Premium Grade timber would have been, but also less lovely than Feature Grade... Our next battle is set to be about what treatment to put on it! The contractor likes polyurethane and we have specified a natural oil. His response was "I'll use OIL-BASED polyurethane", so as you can see, we have a problem - but I have told Warren that if the wrong product is used it will be sanded off at his own cost and the correct treatment will be applied!





















This is a view towards the front door (which will also be oil-finished, just so you know!), with the planter in the foreground, having just been core-filled prior to being rendered.





















A bath with a view!

ding dong merrily on high

We're getting there!
















We went up to the block yesterday to get a run-through of the solar electricity system, which is now connected and fully functional! AND... Michael signed off on the Biolytix sewage system as well. Apparently we have to "innoculate" the system for a couple of weeks before the installers come back with the worms and microbes, which is a posh way of saying that we need to use the toilet properly for a while to give them some food! Darling daughter had the honour of being the first innoculator (although I don't suppose in years to come she'll thank me for announcing that!). I had a moment of panic when there didn't seem to be any water in the toilet, but of course it was the first time it had been used and water had to travel along the pipes from the tank. Phew.

The above photo is of what will be my studio, complete with dearest husband standing in front of the new sink unit (very nice). My printing bench will be next to it shortly, serving as a temporary storage/food prep area until we move into the main house.






















Now that we have a working solar system we also have ceiling fans and lights! The recessed lights are 21W LED lights that look a lot like halogen down lights but aren't... much more energy efficient and 'green', and 3 times the price, but never mind. Because of the relatively high ceilings we're not expecting them to light up the place in a dazzling sort of way, and in any case we prefer task-oriented lighting so I have 2 vertical fluorescent tubes above my printing bench and plenty of plugs for lamps, which I will have to convert to using LED bulbs.





















This shows the small bathroom in its glory. We've chosen amazingly cheap dark grey floor tiles and flat white matte wall tiles. The vanity unit was cheap(ish) but smart (drawer unit is on the floor in the front of the first photo), and the fittings were on sale, as were all the ceiling fans! The ceiling fans are all reversible so that we can draw down warm air from the ceilings in the winter, and they were reduced in price by over $100 so we bought all 10 that we need for the house, thereby saving ourselves over a $1,000 dollars!

The savings in the ceiling fans and the floor tiles will - hopefully - accommodate the extra we're going to be spending in some other areas such as wine storage. We went up the other day to meet someone about the cool room, and he turned out to be a brilliant source of pragmatic advice and creative ideas. Now we don't need a huge cool room and were planning to place it diagonally in a square space so that we could fill the rest with wine storage, but our friendly refrigeration specialist (I'll call him Martin but I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember his name. Oops!) suggested making the cool room square, to fill the space, because it will reduce costs and maximise materials by avoiding cutting into the standard-sized sheets of wall/insulation that they use. However, he's shown us a way of using one side of the cool room as a partitioned wine cellar and - here's the fun part! - cutting access into the front of it i.e. from the dining room side of the wall, with snazzy glass doors so that it looks like a swanky commercial wine storage display. Wow! What a great idea, and I could see darling husband's eyes light up at the thought. Additionally, darling husband came up with the equally jazzy idea of using a coiled copper pipe running vertically through the cool room from the exterior water tanks to cool the water on the way through and dispensing it via a dedicated 'drinking water tap' on the pantry side of the wall, above the sink, and thus making great use of the available refrigeration to get cool drinking water and obviating the need for a fancy zip tap.

The only downer is that the kitchen people who gingerly made their way up the muddy track (we'd had a LOT of rain again) to the house still can't see what I'm getting at about the central kitchen storage/island units and so I still don't have anyone lined up to build them, and that could be a bit of a problem.

Advent Calendar

It's been a little while since I posted any pictures, but there's been a lot going on! I had hoped to be able to put some more photos up of the interior of the office/studio building that we're moving into in a few weeks' time, but the painters were up there today and everything had been shrouded in protective plastic so it didn't look very photogenic... the upside to that is when we're next up there the shrouds will have come down and the paint will be dry! Meanwhile, we've been busy chosing LED light fittings and thinking about the kitchen in the main house.

Tomorrow we'll be up at the block all morning: Michael will be supervising the sewerage people as they dig the trenches (and the big hole) for our Biolytix system which is being connected, and after I've dropped darling daughter off at school I'll be joining him to meet a local kitchens company to talk about interiors and measure-up.

















This view is slightly out-of-date as the support timbers for the front verandah have now gone up, as you'll see in subsequent photographs. But it gives you an idea of what the completed house will look like from the office/studio!
















This photograph is taken from the top of the slope in front of the front door (which you can just see on the very left hand edge of the shot, draped in plastic to protect it). The verandah shades the huge stacking glass doors of the main living area. The large 'planter box' made of besa bricks on the left side of the verandah as you look at it here will be lined and turned into a pond. The smaller one you can see on the right side of the verandah, just in the shot, will be planted up with culinary herbs.





















The 'pond' will be over 3m long! We'll be putting native fish in it to eat the mosquito larvae.

















Under the special render on what will be darling daughter's bedroom is a special foam block insulation: easy to construct, very well insulated, and coated with a solar-proofed paint... once we decide on colours!

















Remember our comments about the outline foundations in a previous post making the place feel small...? Not any more! This is a view down on the roof of the main house with 74,000 litres of water tank at the back of the house. It's huge.






















I took this photo half way up one of the drainage benches at the rear of the property because I wanted to see the effect of the 'pop-up' roof. The clerestory windows are louvred to allow a free flow of air through the house as we won't have air-conditioning.





















The solar panels are going up on the arrays, as well as on the shed roof.











































This is what the house looks like from the bottom of the block, next to the arrays. Although the benches in the hillside appear quite stark against the green I don't think the house intrudes too much into the landscape.
















And this is what both buildings look like from the bottom of the driveway. In a couple of years' time, when we've planted around the house, they will almost disappear...