Flooring and Kitchens

Having knocked a couple of small "activity" goals off already this year it is time to really get to work on the major renovation/repair activity that is planned for this year and that is replacing the kitchen and 1/3 of the floor in the house.

My lovely wife is a keen researcher when it comes to buying things and likes to know that the decision "we" are making is the right one. So before christmas last year we started to talk seriously about new floors and replacing the kitchen. Truth be told we have been talking about re-doing the kitchen for nearly 3 years but as with many things in our house it doesn't always move quickly. Sometimes we suffer analysis paralysis and other times we just lose focus. Since this year is, for me, about maintaining focus and not procrastinating I've been pushing a bit and we are getting very close to making decisions and outlaying money.

I completely ripped out old kitchen out about 12 -13 years ago and built a new one from scratch then laid cork tiles though a large part of the house a year or so later. The tiles are showing wear and damage in places and the preparation was not in truth all it should have been so there are some "off" patches in places where the substrate has molded to uneven sections of the underlying floor.

The plan is to pull the cork floor up from the living areas and leave it in the hallways. Fix the uneven bits of the underfloor (also a floor that I laid after pulling slate tiles up around 14 years ago) and rip the kitchen out. Then "we" will lay Blackbutt flooring (probably) and put a new kitchen with essentially the same layout as the existing one but with more drawers and factory finish doors/fronts with soft close and push to open hardware. The guy from Monaro Timbers came out and talked to us about flooring options and suggested that we don't need to pull up the existing underfloor, just make sure that the major inconsistencies caused by the house being extended and doors being where they weren't originally placed are fixed up. This was welcome news and will mean that getting a new floor down can be done a little slower than planned since it means we won't have gaping holes in the floor for days on end while the new floor goes down.

So today we re-measured the kitchen cabinets and confirmed the units that we wanted to get (flatpack of course) and will send away a request for quote tomorrow. The aim is to get the cabinets built well in advance of the old kitchen being pulled out and probably while the flooring is acclimatizing in the house (should be two or more weeks with 50 square meters of flooring cluttering up the family room). In the next couple of days we will get final quotes on flooring and then we are off!

Timeframe sees us getting the floor laid in the 2nd or 3rd week of May, hopefully before it gets too cold outside thus requiring us to run the heating all day and drying the wood out before it is laid.

Renovations and home repairs

Well Easter is over and done with, chocolate has been hidden and found after a quiz hunt that took the kids well over an hour this year thanks to some fairly cryptic clues hidden around the house including frozen in ice cubes!

Whenever we get a long weekend the TV fills up with ads for hardware stores telling us that now is the time to embark on those larger projects because with three, or in this case four, days you'll have all the time you need to get them done. So after spending a really enjoyable time on Friday with some friends I decided on Saturday that the pergola which has been in need of repairs for going on three years now was the perfect job to keep me busy and productive.

The pergola is 6m x 3.6m with a clear roofing material. Well it used to be clear. In recent years due to dust and heat parts of the roof had gone almost black and were seriously warped having drooped in the heat, almost like a slumped decorative glass bowl just not very decorative. It had also become increasingly brittle with quite a number of holes from the last significant hail storm we had. When it rained the deck under the pergola was a slightly drier place than the paving just beyond it but it was a near thing. When I built the pergola 10 or 12 years ago and we put the clear roofing on we quickly found that it was too bright and so for many years there has been shade cloth stapled to the underside beams. Not a particularly attractive look, especially when bits of it were starting to fall down having come adrift of the staples.

So, I pulled the old sheeting off, pulled the old battens off (they were always too thin) and worked out that only one of the bearers needed replacing. Then I measured up (8.1m x 3.7m). Worked up what I need and headed off to get the appropriate materials. $500 odd dollars later I'm home with 10 sheets of 850mm wide roofing giving a coverage of something like 800mm each. It's then that I measured again and realized that it is 6.1 not 8.1 and I'm two sheets over what I need plus I have more battens than I need! Oh well.

So to paint. I don't love painting. It's messy and boring but it's got to be done. Fortunately I still have the paint I used on the exterior last time I did the pergola and something else outside. If I'm putting newly painted bits in then I also need to paint the existing stuff. More time, more mess but it does look fresher at the end.

I put the battens up and am pleasantly surprised. What I thought were 5.4m battens are actually almost exactly 6.1m so they stretch the entire length of the roof without having to cut and overlap. A win, although now I have too many battens! Oh well I guess I can just space them a bit closer together and secure the roofing a bit better. The old roof would rattle in strong winds although it never came loose!

Now to put the actual sheeting up. Rather than moving a ladder five times for each sheet I put a loose board about 2.4m long and 600mm wide up on the roof and climb onto it and work from here, moving it around as required to give me a solid working platform. I only knocked the box of 250 roofing screws off the platform once!

Got three of the sheets up on Sunday and finished it up Monday morning. Since I had two full sheets of bronze translucent roofing material left over I decided to replace a couple of the corrugated iron sheets on the garage to let a bit more light through. That job only took an hour and has also made quite a difference to the inside of the garage.

I'm pretty pleased with the end result of the weekend repair work and think that the last two months at the gym definitely helped to make it easier to complete the job. I'm still a little sore from using different muscles and crawling around on the roof but all in all a good weekend.

Now I just have the floor in 1/3 of the house, the kitchen to replace, the driveway...(I'll stop there before I get discouraged!)