Showing posts with label cottage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cottage. Show all posts

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Crazy Aussies and WIIW

Well we had three guesses for this week’s WIIW. Two were not really close but the third was soooo close…

Linda G guessed: “I think it's some sort of recessed lighting for your house.”

It is kind of recessed at the moment, and it is for our house, but it isn’t any kind of light fitting. 40%

Marcy guessed: “I was thinking the same thing although I thought it was somewhere else, maybe a public building.”

Unfortunately the public building part of your guess reduces your score 20%

Now to Susan who said: “To me, it looks like light coming up through a hole. Maybe the picture is taken in the attic?”

It is absolutely light coming up through a hole, but a floor below where an attic would be (if we had one). So you earn 80%.

It is a hole in our bathroom floor!

I have graded and tiled the bathroom floor, the two holes are what will be the floor waste in the shower and the drain in the middle of the floor.

The light is coming through because there is not yet any plumbing connected beneath the floor.

The vivid green is not our idea of a wall colour, it is in fact the waterproof membrane that protects the walls from water penetration and will soon be covered.

Now to the Crazy Aussies part of my title.

Why crazy?

Deb and I have moved in to the cottage. 

It is still winter and we have moved in to a house with -
No bathroom
No kitchen
And  perhaps more importantly given the frosty nights…
No ceilings and
No wall linings!

Oh add to that no electricity and no running water.


Why did we move in?

Well as you may be aware we have been boarding at my mum’s house which is a good half hour drive from our cottage on the “back” of the property.
As much as we love my Mum and Stan her husband, Deb and I kind of needed our own space again.
Plus with only working at the day job I will gain at least an hour each day I work on the cottage by not having to go back and forth.

So a quick tour of the house as it is now…
The head of our bed and the back wall of our bedroom. Note the torch and battery lights on the bed head (no electricity remember). We have some pretty good LED battery lights so we don’t sit in the dark when the sun goes down.

Turning the other way we look through our bedroom wall into the living room and through into the front room. I wasn’t kidding when I said we have no wall linings!

As for the kitchen, we have a temporary sink (the original one that I have reconnected to the drain, but the water can is our water supply (refilled from the rainwater tank outside).
The slow combustion stove will provide heat and hot water, but because the plumbing is not connected we can’t light it at the so we don’t damage the water jacket.

The other corner of the kitchen has a table and the gas burner we are using for cooking at the moment.

Human washing is currently done in a basin, and we go to Mum’s for a shower every couple of days.



Stop press: today I got the ceiling in the bathroom and tiled one wall (the wires dangling through the ceiling will ultimately be for light fittings)

Monday, March 25, 2013

Up, down and then up again

Well as I said last night I have had a hectic three day weekend working on our cottage.
So first up I did some framing work on one of the bathroom walls.

Then I shoehorned in the first of the windows I ordered.
 We have a bathroom window!


And from the outside.
 
Woo hoo!

But then a real downer, on Saturday I began on the diagonally opposite corner of the house, at what will be our bedroom.
As I began tearing the old weatherboards off I found the bottom wall plate was completely rotted through, here…

And here...
 (the blue piece of timber is a temporary prop to hold up the corner of the house)

The old boards have been leaking, possibly for decades and a lot of the frame is rotted.
This means more expense and more time. Sigh.
But by Saturday evening I had shot an hour’s drive down the mountain to collect some replacement timber and managed to salvage some of the original timber to reuse.

Sunday morning saw me working on reframing the bedroom wall.

Then as it began threatening rain I started covering the wall in insulation foil.

This will be the view out our bedroom window. I have to say I love the mountains and the way it feels as if you are in the weather.

So just before dark I had the foil over the wall finished. It will keep the weather out for the coming week.

Next weekend is Easter which means four days in a row working on the cottage!