1 We are now having to make nitty gritty decisions about kitchen design and fixtures and fittings...
2 The house is still swarming with tradies (that's the Australian affectionate term for tradesmen); carpenters cutting wood, shaving doors, fixing architraves and skirting, gyprockers cutting and fixing cornice, tilers cutting travertine tiles to fit, and painters sanding back old wood for oiling as well as finalising edges around windows and doors. So it is still very gritty dirty dusty in there.
Sweeping up just creates clouds of dust, and it's all back in a trice anyway. On top of all of that, with all the tradies on site, every room is either a work room with benches and cutting tools, a preparation room or a store room!
At least the garages are slowly getting a little emptier!
At the weekend, one of the priorities was to finally decide what fireplace mantles were going where. As part of our package deal we had acquired 6 marble fireplaces, but we have 8 fireplaces so another two were required.We had already acquired a new (old style) one for the arch bedroom, but had not found an appropriate mantle for the dining room which we were trying to keep as authentic as possible.
We had come up with a couple of options, but not quite found the right thing. So we went round all the old wares/antique places in Newcastle and managed to find a genuine cedar one from exactly the right period. Just needs a sand and some oil!
On the Monday a small working party went to the house to try and finalise the main kitchen design, working with the actual kitchen cabinets which had been put together the previous week. Think we got there!!The adjacent family area was the cornice cutting area, and then the kitchen and family area also became the area where the travertine tiles were precoated!!
The cornice at least should be finished next week!
We were hoping that upstairs would be pretty clear by now so we could completely clear out some rooms and start getting floors done - there's a lot of floor sanding to do (and a couple of rooms to carpet too)...but we aren't quite ready for that yet. One of the upstairs rooms has all the downstairs light fittings ready to go up when the downstairs ceilings have been painted, others have bits of panelling and doors that will be made up into the built in bookcase or the wardrobes, and the rear verandah currently has a bath on it.
The bathrooms are looking pretty good - though not yet finished...there's a couple of ensuite bedrooms (the master suite and the downstairs guest room), and upstairs there is also a bath house and a shower room (each with loo and handwash basin too)...and they all have underfloor heating!
This one is the master en suite, complete with door out onto the non existent balcony!
We will be up there again over Christmas and are looking forward to the work in progress being a little more progressed!
