The House Renovation Saga

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!

mood: busy

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.

mood: accomplished

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....

mood: tired

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...