house renos

[mic-d]

For the first half of the year I had a break from other people's work to renovate our house. Mostly the inside is complete and still to paint the outside. Firstly it involved a lot of time sitting and thinking about room layout and efficient use of space. Then it involved shrinking a non-load bearing wall and lengthening others, a full replacement of all timber trims and floor coverings, a full repaint, change of light fittings and fans, complete change of window coverings. I did everything except the electrical and setting the plaster. First thing was to build a covered pergola to give me an undercover for painting trims and storing materials. The bonus is it reduces the temperature in my workshop considerably.


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These are before photos looking from what was our TV/lounge area into the dining room

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And the after photo. This room isn't furnished as we'd finally like it, but it is a lovely spot for the winter sun. We have two sets of doors like this and all the windows are similar, I thought it would be a nightmare, but I found the one trick that made painting them to a high standard a breeze - masking paint. We went with the one paint scheme throughout, quarter lexicon on the ceiling and double alabaster for the walls.

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These are before photos looking right across our large room, across no-mans-land into the TV area, and facing the other way with the front door being on the other side of my secretaire
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These are the after photos. We moved the dining room to where the TV area was and no-mans-land becomes the TV area. Eventually I will add a hybrid display storage area on the wall behind the table. We went with DC fans for their efficiency and quietness. Towards the front door I extended the wall to create a more private entry. This area will eventually have a bench seat built in. The wall behind the TV was the one shortened at both ends.

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The house is divided into living areas above and bedrooms off the hall shown below. I knocked out the wall on the right and offset it to create a pocket and added a header to carry zoning doors. I made my Soji doors (still have to install the paper).

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One of the first things I did was a laundry reno, where the tin cabinet under the sinks were replaced with a plywood cabinet for the kitty litter, but was designed to have doors retro fitted. I kept the nice tubs and added the timber bench and overhead storage
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I had to use a bit of levelling compound here and there, but one room required four bags of compound to bring it back to flat. This was screeded rather than trowelled for reasons. The floor is a hybrid tile by Karndean.

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We went with Veneta honeycomb blinds throughout

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Thanks for looking

[mic-d]

I'm nearly finished the last of the internal renovations at home with the final major thing being the makeover of our big storage closet that you can see in this photo.

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First the doors were tossed!

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Then the closet was gutted but all the shelves were salvaged and cleaned up because they were nice hoop pine. Also the head for the doors was too low making access to the top area difficult, so I moved the beam higher up and made the opening bigger. Drawers are replacing the shelves so I built 3 carcases from melamine. The top shelf is camphor laurel plywood to assist with deterring moths.

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The top of the drawer unit has a top made from red pine

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I built 12 drawers from premium birch plywood using lock mitre joinery. Some of the hoop pine shelves went to uprights to transfer the top shelf load.

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The majority of the remaining old hoop pine went to make the drawer fronts

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[mic-d]

I bought 0.2 cube of Silver Ash from a bloke in Gympie for the doors of the closet

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This rough timber was converted into a forest of parts for four Shoji doors

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I also had a few small crotch slabs and boards left from salvaging a neighbours red cedar from the chipper which I used to make transom panels for the doors. These are 8mm thick and consist of between four and six boards per panel

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I made 4 Kumiko panels out of the smaller dimension silver ash. Actually there are three different widths for these components

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There are 128 mortises for the four doors for the Kumiko panels alone.

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I glued up the four doors. This is one of them

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And this is all four now installed into the front of the closet. They run in traditional tracks made of silver ash.

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The shoji paper is on the way and once that is installed and jambs added and a few internal trims the job will be done