Photos from August

A Photo Update...

Too Many Days to Count - August 22nd, 2015

Anne and I are home from our trip overseas and I said I would post some new photos when we returned.

We got home to find that a lot of the travertine tiles on the front balcony had cracked! Why? - we don't know for sure, but there is a strong indication that there is a problem with the substrate that the tiles were laid on. I look at them and all I see is $$$$ signs. Chris the builder came and looked at them and left in tears so this is going to be a large and expensive project to rectify the problem.

Currently I'm doing the myriad of jobs that need to be done to get the actual renovation completed - designing and building cupboards, fireplace surrounds, kitchen and laundry kickboards, and completing the stairs - the list isn't endless, but it doesn't seem to be getting any shorter.

In three weeks time, we will have been working on this reno for....one year! Phew. But any how, I promised some photos so here they are....

Looking towards the dining area across the formal lounge

The lounge area

Looking towards the kitchen

Across the dining area and out onto the balcony and Kiama golf course 

The lounge area - fireplace surround a work in progress

The front balcony

Ditto - front balcony

Dining room with its new table

The island bench in the kitchen

The eat-in section of the island bench

Looking back towards the main area

The TV lounge area

Ditto - TV lounge area

Looking out over the coffee table to the rear deck

The main bathroom with its stone bath

The vanity with its own under bench lighting

The shower

The Outside - the rear deck looking towards the extension

The new front balcony and lower deck

The front of the house....Before and After

After

Before

In Limbo

Another Update...

Day Too Many - June 17th, 2015

It's many, many days since my last post. At the moment, Anne and I are away from home so I will post the new photos at the end of July when we have sorted ourselves out after our return to Australia.

Stay tuned.....

The Quietness from the Golfers Pde Blog

A Long Awaited Update...

Day 210 - April 7th, 2015

It's ninety nine days since I posted the last update to this blog on the reno at 21 Golfers Pde. That's a terribly long time between posts, don't you think! At least I didn't let it reach a century before posting an update.....

I now realise why I have been so tardy in updating you of the progress (or otherwise) in this project. Put simply, I'm in denial. 

Nearly 3 months ago, I opened my last post by saying something like 'I have this natty little spreadsheet on my computer's desktop that allows me to know the number of days that we have been working on this project when you enter today's date. Chris the builder promised us that we would be finished by Christmas (I'm sure he meant 2014???) so my app only calculated days up until 31 December 2014. Hmm...dumb ass! I've just increased the app's range to go until the end of March 2015 - fingers crossed we won't be still working on  this project then!

Well folks - we are still working on the project and it's still a fair way from being finished. There are a lot of 'little' things that the builder still has to finish off and he's already started on another project - it's lucky we still owe him some (a lot) of money so we know it will get finished....eventually. Unfortunately, these delays and holdups have pushed both Anne and I into a state of anger, confusion, disappointment and frustration. Now I'm in denial and a state of depression that we aren't finished.

I still have nightmares about Dick the renderer who we paid off last week and asked him to leave the building site and never to return. We'll have to get someone else to fix up his mistakes - which are mainly in places where everyone immediately notices the stuff-ups (like around the front door or above the garage door).

There has been scaffolding across the front of the house since November and a lot of the front lawn is now dead from having building materials stacked on it for so long. We're still waiting for the flooring to go down as the builder hasn't levelled the floor yet so we still puddle through dust on the raw concrete floor as we trek out to the toot at night as the reno'd main bathroom still isn't finished.

Did I mention the dust? Or the fact that our garage has been a garbage tip full of dirt and crap and builder's tools for nearly 7 months! Or the fact that the travertine tiles on the front balcony had to be replaced because they cracked due to .... nobody knows why, but it was related to tiling and rendering.

But...we have made a lot of progress so I'm just going to throw in a heap of photos to show you where we are up to.....

Sanding the new gyprock in the loungeroom

















Below - the kitchen in advanced construction phase

Below - three pics of the new bathroom on the rear extension - in use already as the main bathroom has been demolished

Looking in through the door of the laundry - the feature wall of the new extension room is the dark grey colour suggested by our interior designers - I was a bit dubious when they recommended it but it actually looks great in the flesh.

Looking at the main laundry - now in full use despite my tools being everywhere

Below - the view of the new stairwell and new lower gradient steps. A solid wall replaces the old fashioned timber balustrade around the stairwell.

Below - the demolished main bathroom

The bathroom with wall sheeting and waterproofing and tiling partially complete

The main bathroom - without the bath and vanity installed but with the tiling largely done






Below - the kitchen nearly finished - note the concrete floors that will eventually have timber laid on top.

Excavation for the rear deck underway and the new water tank before installation

The bearers down for the rear deck.












The new rear deck with decking laid.

The view from the front balcony with the travertine tiles laid and the glass balustrading installed. Top photo looking north west towards the escarpment and Minnamurra River.

Bottom photo looking north east towards the ocean, Mystics Beach and Bass Point.

Below - the new rear extension with our old leather lounges and TV in place. The feature wall is pretty obvious. No flooring yet but we put the furniture in place as we had friends down for Easter.

I'll try and give you an update soon on the nearly finished (hopefully) project.

Photos Galore to fill the void of the the past month or so...

Day 115 - January 2nd, 2015

I have this natty little spreadsheet on my computer's desktop that allows me to know the number of days that we have been working on this project when you enter today's date. Chris the builder promised us that we would be finished by Christmas (I'm sure he meant 2014???) so my app only calculated days up until 31 December 2014.

Hmm...dumb ass! I've just increased the app's range to go until the end of March 2015 - fingers crossed we won't be still working on  this project then!

Anyway, since my last update referred to work that happened eons ago, I'm just going to dump loads of photos in this major post so you can see where we're up to.

It would be remiss of me not to tell you what the hold up has been in the project. It's really come down to one trade - the cement renderer! When Chris rang his renderer whom he had lined up to do the job, he was aghast to find out that his main man had fallen off some scaffolding and broken both his ankles and couldn't walk (obviously). He wasn't prepared to send his team around to do the job unsupervised, as none of them spoke any English.

So...there was a mad rush to find a renderer who could do the job. Enter a new player who had done a job for a friend of ours. I'm not going to use his real name - let's just call him Dick. "Sure I can do the job" says Dick in Turkish English. "It will take me and my team 5 days to do the render and another 3 days to put on the acrylic colour coat, clean up and get off site".

Ten days later, the scaffolding goes up all round the house and Dick starts work. There is no 'team' - just Dick and a labourer on some occasions. Another renderer did turn up for 2 half days but mostly it's just Dick. Dick rarely turns up 2 days running and when he does show up he nicks off after a couple of hours to go to another job he's working on (we know he was working on at least another 2 jobs but his labourer reckons it's 8!) to try to appease another irate builder and owner.

Well...Dick started the job on the 3rd of November and he still hasn't finished. The scaffolding is still up all around the outside of the house and there's still tons of render work to do. This has held up the roofers, the gyprocker, the plumber and most of all Chris the builder, who can't get on with what he needs to be doing.

Added to this, when Dick rendered the inside brick walls of the entry foyer (needless to say he made a huge, huge mess inside), he got his labourer to clean off the floor tiles after he had finished. I was upstairs when I heard Chris going off downstairs at someone and as I got downstairs, I saw that the labourer was hosing off the tiles with the high pressure water hose and all the water was running under the door of the flat and across the timber flooring.

The floor flooded and although we applied the hot air blowers for a week, the floor buckled and split and when the timber floor company inspected it, it was declared a write-off. A $6000 floor that needed to be replaced!

Another labourer of Dicks was instructed by Dick to clean the render that had been carelessly splattered onto our new picture window. The worker then proceeded to get a blade and inscribe a dozen or so vertical scratches right down a $3000 piece of glass. The window company told Chris that it is virtually impossible to fix the pane and fitting a new window will require undoing and re-doing a lot of the work already completed. DUMB!

Anyway, enough of Dick - he's in my nightmares now and we all want him to finish up (no other renderer will come in to finish another tradesman's work) and to get out of our lives.

To the photos.........

The kitchen components stacked up in the flat - these also got water damaged when the flat was flooded.

The renderer's team - this fellow showed up for 2 half days during the job.

This was 10 days into the 5 day render schedule!

The back of the house with the first cement render coat. Note the plastic on the windows - this is to keep the render off the glass and the frame. Somehow Dick managed to get render on every glass pane and every frame.




The front of the house during the rendering.

Chris putting blue-board on the front of the lower deck to allow for the Rockcote (a synthetic render - not the old mortar kind) to be applied.

Upstairs with the new stacker door doors just installed.












Macalister about to remove one of the walls in the kitchen. Before....

....and after !












Chris contemplating his hat, the hole through to the laundry...and what to do about Dick! 

What's left of the old kitchen.

Where did all our furniture go as we gut the inside of the house - why into our bedroom of course! Cozy!!!






Two photos of our ruined timber floor in the flat downstairs.

Putting up some of the ceiling sheets - it's a 4 man operation as the sheets are 6 metres long.

I've been building our new kitchen down stairs in the garage. It's been a bit of a problem as hopping around with my left leg in a moon boot is not conducive to good carpentry skills. Here is the first of the new kitchen in situ upstairs.

The photos below show the new Caesarstone benchtops being lifted by crane onto the front verandah for the new kitchen.

Two shots of the new kitchen as the benchtops are being installed. It's December 23rd and we've just made it before Christmas!