With my mum arriving for a visit on Saturday and my youngest sister staying for an indefinite time, we were under pressure to get the back bathroom renovated. It's been out of commission for quite a few months due to water damage.

We're working with a fantastic tiler named Washington who's helping us through this particular renovations.

The tear out started just prior to Christmas 2009.

Here's a few photos of the journey so far.

The original bathroom:


The tear out begins!


New mirror cabinet, partially recessed:


The existing bathtub with new surrounds:


New tiles going up:

We've been having a busy weekend tiling the kitchen. We've completed putting the tiles on the walls. Things left to do include grouting, cornices and painting.

Here's a quick photo of our progress.

With the start of the new year comes firm resolutions to achieve a lot more with renovations this year. One of our first targets is the garden. We've spent the weekend buying a nice range of veggies and herbs for our portable herb garden, planting them and also working on the front garden (which is a huge mess!).

As much as we would like to have a more permanent veggie garden, there's the possibility that we'll be moving this year. I don't like the idea of having to spend hundreds of dollars buying herbs and veggies and not seeing the benefits of it.

Here's a bit of a photo journey of the past weekend.

Empty pots and some of the herbs, ready to be planted.

Some flowers and native plants for the front yard

Repotted plants and herbs

Planter boxes that used to live in the greenhouse - we're out of space so they've been moved outside and the chillies have been moved into the greenhouse

Our portable herb and veggie garden!

Hard to believe that Christmas is nearly upon us. Where has the year gone? Most importantly, why haven't we progressed much with our renovations?!

The good news is that we finally have kitchen handles! The kitchen installer sent his two apprentices over on Monday afternoon to install our long awaited (and boy do I mean LONG) handles. Queanbeyan Auctions took a number of months to give us our kitchen handles. To add insult to the injury, we had the wrong number of handles, the wrong sizes (they were all the same size) and no screws.

We had some hot footing between Bunnings and home, but the handles are now all installed thanks to hubby.

Pictures to come!

In other news, we now have a rough deadline of when we need to complete the renovations on our current house. Having a deadline is good as it gives us something to work towards which means things get done.

It's been a whirlwind of a week (or two). The past week has seen the replacement of part of the kitchen wall, installation of the new kitchen cupboards, new granite benchtop, most of the appliances and a new fence! The installation of the kitchen involved a number of tradies, including a plumber, electrician and the kitchen installer. All other work (ripping out kitchen, replacing walls etc) is done by us.

Photos of the kitchen are available at our kitchen renovations photo set at flickr.

Here's a few photos from the flickr set.

The new fence!

Part of the old kitchen.

Ripping out the old wall.

That's me plastering the joins, looking way too happy for the time of the night.

New kitchen partially installed.

More progress in the kitchen! Benches installed, granite tops installed, sink installed, most appliances installed....

After the whole kitchen debacle, we got in touch with Queanbeyan Auctions on Monday to find out about the damaged oven. Unfortunately they didn't want to deal with it, palming us off to the company who imports the ovens into Australia.

Hubby got in contact with the importers who are kindly replacing the oven for us at no price. Good on you Italnova for helping us to solve our problem! They will be delivering a new oven to Queanbeyan Auctions for us to pick up soon.

In other notes, hubby has booked the plumber, a electrician and the kitchen installer who will be coming to install the kitchen early next week.

During that time, we will also be replacing the back fence (at the Government's request as we share a fence with public housing accommodation). The cost will be split evenly between the Government and us, but we're paying a bit extra to have a higher fence!

I feel like we're hemorrhaging money at the moment...

The new kitchen has become an absolute debacle. It was finally delivered on Wednesday (21 May) afternoon (keeping in mind that we ordered this kitchen in early February). Fine and good...until we discovered that no appliances were delivered with the kitchen and the wrong handles were delivered (despite Alastair and I telling them on TWO separate occasions which handles we wanted).

We paid a visit to Queanbeyan Auctions yesterday to follow up the issues with the kitchen. Here are the issues and the responses:

• The wrong handles were delivered - the right handles will be available in three weeks. They promised to call us when it arrives so we can come pick up the right handles. They refuse to hold the right handles for us when it arrives so we just have to try our luck and hope for the best.
• Appliances were not delivered - the appliances include stove, cook top, sink and range hood. We also discovered that despite taking our credit card details over the phone for the range hood, it wasn't ordered. Fortunately they had one in stock.
• The oven is badly damaged - when they brought the oven out to us, the box was badly damaged. They assured me that the oven was ok. Well, it wasn't. Pictures below of the damaged oven.

To make matters worse, we can't get hold of the recommended kitchen installer despite calling and leaving multiple messages.

So instead of having a nice new kitchen installed, we have bits and pieces lying around. Very very unhappy. This, on top of all the other issues going on (having my car broken into, losing my expensive Tablet PC etc), is just terrible.

I'm not sure what is going on. The owner, Simon, was just fabulous. He was really helpful and provided lots of advice. His staff on the other hand, were not as interested in the business. They did try to help, but it wasn't as professionally run as expected.

Fingers cross that everything will work out!!! I still have (some) faith in Queanbeyan Auctions. We've been big supporters of them ever since we discovered them years ago. We've spent thousands of our hard earned money at Queanbeyan Auctions over the years.

Anyhow, on to the pictures.

New cupboards in our formal lounge area



New pantry and cupboards



Damaged oven box



Another view of the damaged box



Damaged front of the new oven



The very damaged front of the oven

Many thanks to our friends Caronne and Nigel who helped us out of a tight spot - Nigel drove out to Queabeyan Auctions to help us take the oven and other appliances home. Thank you to Caronne and Nigel for being such fantastic friends!!

We've spent the last weekend moving the majority of the contents of the kitchen into boxes of varying size. We're now mostly living out of the dining room.

This long weekend (three day weekend thanks to the ANZAC holiday), we've started demolishing the kitchen. We firstly removed all doors which involved unscrewing the hinges. The doors were moved outside where we removed the handles and hinges for easy transportation to the recycling depot.

The following picture shows some of the doors that have been removed. I'm a bit worried about the water staining that you can see in the photo. Our plan is to waterproof the area after we take the old kitchen out.

After the removals of the doors, we tackled the wall cabinets.

Removing the wall cabinets were a bit of a challenge. We forgot to remove the power point first, so we struggled with the removal (lots of pulling and shoving), then realised that we had to shut off the power to that area so we could plug the powerpoint for now.

It took a while to remove the wall cabinets. Fortunately the cornice came off fairly easily.

When we finished for the day (around dinner time), this is what it looked like.

Things left to do:

• Finish packing the rest of the kitchen
• Remove pantry cabinet
• Remove drawers
• Remove main kitchen cabinet framework
• Remove all tiles
• Patch holes and sand walls
• Silicon any gaps to the outside (to stop those annoying ants!)
• Waterproof wet areas
• New kitchen to arrive!
• Organise for kitchen installation guy to install new kitchen

It's been quiet on this journal but hubby and I have been busy sorting out our stuff, decluttering and holding a massive garage sale on the 15th and 16th of March.

Our next big project is tackling the kitchen. Hubby and Glen removed the oven this afternoon, which wasn't as painful as I expected. The oven is now sitting in the car port. Know anyone that wants a free gas oven? It's still working but needs a good clean and possibly a new door seal.

Next on the agenda is to pack up the rest of the kitchen into boxes. I've started the process by packing away my baking tins and trays. I just need to find more clean boxes to pack the rest of the stuff away.

Here's a photo of our very ugly kitchen and even uglier floor in the current state. Please excuse the various tools and bits and pieces in the kitchen. I'm aiming to post more photos of the kitchen progress!

After months and months (well...years, really) of hard work and procrastination, our ensuite is finally finished! We officially commissioned the new ensuite yesterday evening, 10 February 2008. It looks great and I'm really pleased with all of it.

On to the pictures...

The original ensuite

Here are some photos of the original ensuite. Note how dark and dirty it looked.

The following picture is of the old shower recess. Notice how dirty the shower recess looked, despite repeat attempts at cleaning.

The following picture is of the old vanity unit - note the water damage.

One of the banes of my existence - the filthy tiny tiles that made up the floor of the old ensuite. They looked constantly dirty despite lots of cleaning.

The renovated ensuite

Here's the finished product! The first picture was taken looking into the new ensuite.

The following picture is of the new shower recess and feature tiles! I love our feature tiles

The next picture is of the sink area, including our new designer tap mixer we got from ebay.

What a difference! I love how much larger the bathroom looks and feel. I'm definitely loving how clean everything feels too :)

Some interesting information:

• We started the renovations on 23rd April 2006!
• It has taken nearly two years to complete the ensuite.
• Everything you see in the renovated ensuite is brand new, including the walls.
• Other new things include new shower rail, shower screen, shower head, cabinet mirror, downlight, tap handles, stainless steel power fittings, toilet, vanity unit.
• The cabinet mirror is partially recessed into the wall, creating a much bigger storage space.
• Check out the renovation photos on flickr.
• Read all posts associated with the renovation of this ensuite, including photos in some of the posts.

We're very pleased and happy with the ensuite. It was a pretty tough challenge as we've never done this kind of stuff before. There was lots of tears and frustration on my behalf although Alastair took to it like a duck to water. We learned a lot during the process, which will be handy for our next project - renovations of the main bathroom (yes, we're crazy enough to do this all again)!