The story so far...

My patient, forgiving, amazing husband and I have been renovating our house for about 9 months so far.

I figured I might start a blog to track our progress, a little late, but there is still PLENTY to do and lots of decorating (which is my favourite part!!!)

This is what we started with... (keep in mind these are real estate agent photos, so the house has NEVER actually look as good as these photos would have you believe. Scary, isn't it?) Trust me, the house was not as light and airy and spacious as these photos imply. The kitchen was full when one person stood in there.

Our main aims are to open the house up a bit to give it a more spacious feel and also drag the house into the 21st century.

First we knocked out the walls that were boxing the kitchen in and stopping the nautral light getting into the dining area.

We also knocked out the top half of the wall that separated the front lounge from the entry.

We actually changed our minds and ended up filling in half of the top part in the above photo, because we decided to move the pantries onto this wall. So we went with a full length wall, half way between there the full wall ends and the half wall ends.

There was lots of fixing up plaster and cornice. I'm becoming quite the expect at cutting cornice!

We gutted the kitchen and had all the plumbing moved and the gas plumbed in for the new cooker. Then we plastered it all back up!

Then many hard hours later, we had a kitchen with a temporary benchtop! I really wanted lots of pot drawers, which we got. My husband wasn't really convinced about the port drawers.

We also got rid of the ugly big brown glass sliding door that was in the middle of the house. It will be replaced with silver aluminium bifold zone doors.

Then there was painting. We even had helpers!!!

Then some pantries! We went with 3 60cm pantries with pull out drawers, which I am still in love with!

We then laid our cherry bamboo flooring in the kitchen/dining area, as we wanted a waterfall end bench top, so the floor had to be in first. It took us about a day and a half to get the flooring laid in the entry, kitchen and dining area.

Then the other week, we got our bench top!!

Sparkle, sparkle!!

Today, I painted the hideous mission brown powder coated aluminium window frames gloss black! I primed using an etch primer and then painted using black gloss kill rust.

Then we are caught up to now really! It doesn't seem like much when I write it down, but given we are only doing work 1 day of the weekend, and we are juggling that with children here in school holidays and also other family / friend commitments, I think we've done alright for novice renovators!

The only things we've not done ourselves are the plumbing/electrical and the stone benchtop. Other than that, it's ALL us :)