Painting…(2)

The painter is here, and we’re in the midst of the painting work.

At least, there’s no dust, although we are living with the smell of paint.   Perhaps paint isn’t as smelly as it once was, but it’s still noticeable.  And of course, we can’t move back into the rooms that were affected first by the plasterers and now by the painter.

So far, we’ve been quite pleased with the way the painting has freshened things up.  It’s surprising that you don’t notice the gradual deterioration of the paintwork over time.

The next task will be the floor coverings.   We’ve had the carpenter here to look at the squeaky floorboards;   the good news is, there doesn’t seem to be a structural (that is, with the stumps) issue, but the less good news is that the work to fix the squeaks will have to occur after the carpets are taken up.   I had hoped that something might have been able to be done just by rolling the carpet back.   Looks like we’ll be in for a few very disrupted days while the floors are being fixed and new coverings brought in.

Painting…

Now that the plastering is finished, we’ve got the painter lined up, so we had to go to Bunnings to look at the colours.  A lot of the paintwork is going to be some sort of “white”.  Fairly straight-forward, I would have thought?  Not so – I had no idea how many different shades of “white” there are.   The colour card lists 8 in the “most loved” section, and 6 more in the “newly discovered” section.   That’s 14 to choose between before you move on to the “greys and neutrals” section.

Too much choice, and that’s just one brand!  After some time contemplating the range, the choice was with difficulty narrowed down to two “colour pots”, but with a few more colour chip cards just in case.   So we’re working with these and hopefully a decision is imminent!

Plastering (2)

Thank goodness that’s over – the plastering is finished.    We can highly recommend Joe and Dean;  they’ve done a great job, the cost was OK (at least, to our minds) and they’ve been a pleasure to get along with. Now for the painter – it seems never to end.

However, there were a lot of plaster scraps, and the guys weren’t happy putting them in the Council rubbish bin.   So I ordered a skip.    Apparently hard waste disposal isn’t cheap, but at least we did the “right thing”.   One catch:   even the smallest skip was more than was needed for the scraps.   S told me, never let an opportunity to do a clean out go by, so I had no alternative but to spend a couple of hours cleaning out the shed.

So, we’ve got value from the skip, but next on my “to do” list is to get the oddments that I’ve retained in the shed into some sort of order.    That’s for another day!

Plastering

Well, now that the underpinning is complete, we have had to turn our mind to re-plastering.  After all, the whole idea of doing the underpinning was to stabilise the walls so that we could re-plaster.    We knew that it was going to be disruptive;  we’ve been through the process before.  And so it has proven to be.

The plasterers are now with us, and we’ve realised that the passage of time dulls pain, and the mess is even worse than we remembered!

 

Refurbishing the garden

Parts of the garden were in a bit of a mess following the underpinning work.   The paving has been completed, so recently we set out on an expedition to Kuranga nursery so as to buy plants for the restored garden beds.

It’s always interesting to wander around at Kuranga, but the selection of plants is always hard.  It’s a balance between suitability for the location we have in mind as well as for our part of the world, the hardiness of the plant (we need them to be tough!), a desire to avoid the “same-olds” (dare I say, not another callistemon!) as well as the appearance and the eventual size.

Inevitably, we ended up with a couple of “stabs in the dark”, but our purchases have been planted now, so we’ll see.  In the meantime, we passed on a coffee at the nursery cafe, because it was just so busy.

 

Daylight Saving

Daylight saving has finally come to an end.    The newsreader on Saturday night reminded us to put our clocks back an hour – “if your devices don’t automatically adjust”.

Well, our phones and computers did adjust, but we’ve still got a number of other “devices” that had to be changed.    They’re called “clocks”.  Mostly, changing them is intuitive, but not so the time displays on the stove or in the car.   In particular, the stove calls for a particular combination of buttons to be pressed.  I have to look up the manual every time I need to change it!

And, yes, we enjoyed the extra hour’s sleep.  But now it seems to get dark earlier in the evening, which is a little depressing.

Restoring the House (2)

Well, work proceeded satisfactorily in the area to be repaved:  the remnants of the old path were removed, the new stormwater pipe was installed and the area was compacted.  But then?    Work halted.   And why?   I was informed that there were no 2nd hand bricks of reasonable quality to be had in Melbourne!

So, work ceased for a few days.   Then unannounced, a couple of pallets of bricks arrived, which in due course were manually moved into the yard.

 

 

 

We’re going to be away, so work remains suspended, but hopefully it won’t be long now and at least the first stage of our restoration will be complete.

Restoring the house…

There’s quite  bit of work to be done around the house after the underpinning, but our advice has been to let the concrete “cure” before starting on the plastering etc.  However, there’s no reason to delay moving ahead on the external paving.   But in addition to restoring the parts of the path that were dug up, we have to make good the stormwater pipes where parts had to be removed in order to dig the pits.

This work has now started.   The first task was to break up and remove the parts of the concrete path that remained – hard physical work.

Then the area was levelled and the pit for the new pipe was excavated.   That’s where it’s at at the time of composing this post, but work is still proceeding……

 

Archives

I don’t like hoarding papers, but I do it.  For example, I’ve been involved with the local Church for a number of years, and tend to generate quite a bit of “paper” in connection with that.   It’s often easier just to put old drafts of documents and other papers to one side than to cull them.   And after a while, that pile of documents gets filed away in a box or somewhere and forgotten about.

Eventually the time comes when the materials re-surface.  In our case, the trigger was the work we had going on.  Somewhat fortuitously, some material from the Church office is also to be sent to the Uniting Church archives.   So I’ve been busy going through some the materials that have accumulated here and adding some things to the material being sent.  It’s tedious and boring, but at times I come across something that brings back memories.   Most gets thrown out, but some is worthy of being archived.

Sticky lock

The lock on our door was giving me some trouble, in that the key was a bit sticky each time I withdrew it.   So, after some research (here) and here about what to do about it, there seemed to be a choice between WD-40 and graphite.   Everyone seems to agree that you don’t put oild on a lock, but I wasn’t too sure about WD-40, even though it’s not “oil” and some of the sites stated that it would be suitable.  However it’s not described on the can as being suitable for locks.

So  I opted to investigate the use of graphite.   I headed off to Bunnings, where after asking around, I found the graphite in the power tools section.  I ddn’t understand the logic of this location at first, but I suppose there’s some sort of reasoning behind it.  Be that as it may, it was what I was after.

When I squeezed the container, it was hard to see the graphite.  In fact, it seems that squeezing the container ejects an air/graphite mix, so it’s no use trying to coat the key with it.  Instead, the technique is to squeeze the mixture directly into the key hole.   Just a couple of squeezes and the lock was much improved.  Hopefully it stays that way.