The Home Stretch!

There is finally a light at the end of the tunnel! We spent almost a week over the Christmas break working on the house. Last year, the house was very uncomfortable to work in due to the heat. It couldn’t be more different this year. The house was lovely and cool, thanks to the thick stone blocks and fully insulated walls and ceilings. The bathrooms have most of their tiling done now:

I grouted the wall tiles so the bathroom is ready for the toilet to be installed.

The plumber dropped around before the public holidays started and installed the toilet near the laundry.

The main shower just needs the screen to be installed and it is completed.

The vanity is installed. A few little things need touching up but it is almost there!

The Exterior Walls – Preparation Work

I spent several hours pressure cleaning the outside stone block walls. I needed to clean off any loose crazed, flaky paint before I could repaint. In doing so, I made two discoveries. Number one – the house had at one stage been light green. And secondly – high pressure water very quickly eats into sandstone. Without its covering of paint, it was very easy to end up with holes in the stone.

The paint was in particularly bad shape in this spot. You can also make out the previous pale green.

I happened to find a couple weak spots in the paint…

….which meant I had a bit of plastering to do before I could paint. Luckily I learnt my lesson after cleaning this front wall and didn’t have too much trouble with others.

After pressure cleaning, the walls looked a lot better. However, the now exposed stone would deteriorate if we didn’t repaint it.

Cleaner but worse for wear after the pressure cleaning.

The Exterior Walls – Painting!

I spent most of two solid days painting. I did two coats on parts of the exterior – the last of the cladding, touched up a few other places, the front stone wall and what I could reach of one side wall. The uneven surface of the stone blocks required quite a bit of pressure to ensure complete coverage with the paint and beyond a certain height, the roller became too long for me to exert the needed pressure. I also painted some of the trim in Basalt, architraves in the same and both sides of the back door. The interior of the door is white:

Don’t worry, there is plastic on the glass – it hasn’t been painted!

The front wall looks much better all in one colour:

But it looks even better with its dark Basalt trim:

All that is left as far as the wall is concerned is the cutting in, which I was unable to do as someone had borrowed the tall ladder for the week.

My husband plans to paint the remainder once the ladder was returned. We ran out of the Basalt to be able to finish the trim on this wall but the base and also the tiny window ledge will be grey once we get more paint.

I painted the last of the cladding as well:

Someone will have a fiddly job of painting the wall behind the pipework with a brush.

The last wall I worked on was the other side wall but sun glare meant I could barely work out where I had painted. Instead, I did the windowsills and my husband painted the wall later.

Around the Back

On the first day, we took a crow bar to the remnant of the old concrete left along the back of the house.

For having large chunks missing already, there was a deceptively large amount still left.

We found there was more left than it looked. We broke it up (there was no reinforcing) and ended up taking 2 tonnes away to the concrete waste dump.

My husband and father-in-law framed up and concreted the area in sections while I painted. They have also left space for a drain along the edge. The entire backyard is concrete and we don’t want rain runoff to pool along the house. They sloped the newly laid concrete to run water away – the drain provides an extra back up in case of a large amount of rain in a short time.

The gap has been left for the in-ground drains. There was actually been an old concrete drain there previously that had been filled in – we found it when we broke up the old concrete.

Sharp eyes would have noticed a couple other differences in the above photo. I painted the exterior of the back door in Basalt, along with the architraves for the kitchen window.

Don’t worry – there is plastic film on the this side of the glass as well! I had painted the architraves but the concrete was not set before I took the photo. You can see them in the previous photo of the completed concreting though.

A Little Before and After

We finally feel like there is an end to the must-be-done jobs! It is easy to forget how much has changed compared to what we have left to do. But in case you have, I have the before photo of just the front of the house: