I just had to stop and do the maths because I seriously cannot believe I’ve been doing this crazy renovating thing for 5 weeks!
It explains a lot really…
This week has been hard if I’m honest. The hardest yet.
I’m tired and sick.
Then things started to go wrong, typically after we’d exhausted our budget…
At that point I think the stress caused my body to decide to stop fighting my cold and get properly sick for a change.
It’s been great fun I tell you!!

However, it hasn’t all been bad…
This week things that have been in the planning stages since Day 1 started to happen
And it’s all been rather exciting really!!!

Firstly we started painting the lounge…
We have painted the lounge 2 different colours; a light grey (which is the same as the darker colour downstairs) and a darker grey feature wall along the back.

The before…

The after…

I have to pinch myself to remind myself that it really is the same room!
The black mark at the top right of the photo, on the ceiling, is where my chandelier is going to hang.
That’s one of Mr Flutter’s many jobs for his “week off” this week, heheheh…

I haven’t been so good at taking photos this week in my sorry state of health, but I’ve decided to do a full “room reveal” post on each room at the end with all the details of what we used where, so there will be lots more photos and info on the rooms to come, rather than these sneak previews of the work we’ve been doing…

Then yesterday the carpet layer came downstairs to cover over the stylish 1970’s floor…

Loving the change!  It is so much cosier down there!
It is much less practical having carpet right in front of the kitchen sink part however… but maybe later down the track we can put a row of tiles in front of it or something when we’ve recovered a little.

The carpet layer also fixed the carpet in Abbie’s wardrobe where there was water damage and you’d never even know – he did such a fantastic job!

Oh, I also found new lights for the old ones downstairs… I totally didn’t think I’d be able to replace them yet, because there are 5 of them and that equates to quite an expense. I spent literally hours combing around online for a solution and could not find anything I could justify to spend.
Then I happened to be walking past the $1, $2, $3 store one day and saw a bunch of paper lanterns on display… Such a happy find –
$15 for 5 new lightshades = SOLD!!!

They look great down there!!

I know they might seem like they are the same to some people, but the lanterns are much bigger and more in scale with the size of the room.

At the same time as that was all happening downstairs, we had the builder and plumber working upstairs back to fix the little rotten floor situation…
Wednesday really was a busy day for tradespeople!!
The great news was that after they pulled the bath and laundry sink out to check, it turned out that only the toilet floor needed to be replaced, not the bathroom and laundry as well, so that was a major blessing…

New bathroom floor…

One silver lining of this whole water damage situation is that we get to replace two of the things that I really wanted to replace but couldn’t justify due to the funds involved in doing so.
But since they actually now required to be replaced that was a little win for me…

The first was the old seratone around the bath… The old stuff had definitely seen better days, and the seal of it was almost non existent.
Pulling out the bath has forced the need to replace it with nice pretty white stuff… Not just a pretty change but functional too because we also get to carry it up the wall to a much more sensible splash proof height… Otherwise when you have two splashy little girls, low seratone, and grooved walls, it’s not the greatest combination in the world for avoiding water damage!!!

The downside is that we have had to put the vinyl later off for a few weeks, and leave the bath unfinished, so that we can live in the house for a few weeks and monitor for any further leaks.
Worse things can happen I suppose, but that means we will be living with those bare floors and 1970’s vinyl for a bit longer.
At least the plumber put the toilet back in for us!!

The other good news was that I got to replace the leaky and yucky laundry tub with a new shiny white one. Well a new one which is currently sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor while we paint the laundry, but it will be in soon in any case…

The last major change this week took place today –
The first of our curtains got hung – lovely voile nets…

What a way to transform the rooms! They look so sensational in the flesh!

We weren’t going to bother with nets at first, because of the budget issue again and we have so many windows to curtain. But we quickly figured out how crazy sunny the house is and if we don’t then we will get sun damage on everything in no time flat, so I had to tweak the budget yet again. I’m really glad I did now because they will be a worthwhile investment.

A problem with the first shipment of fabric has delayed the rest of our curtains which was very unfortunate… But the rest of the fabric arrived today so hopefully they shouldn’t be too far away now.
Luckily we don’t really have any neighbours looking in on us…

This week we’ve also finished painting the dining room and just got the top coat to do on the laundry.
That’s 8 rooms completed and 1 room well under way in only 3 weeks since Mr Flutter left for Australia. Yikes!
I can’t wait until he is shocked with our progress tomorrow, he won’t recognise the place!!

With every room needing 3 coats on both ceiling and walls that is a LOT of painting we have done!
It’s no wonder my bones are weary and I’m sick.
Inez my friend and almost full time helper deserves a medal, she is such a hard worker and I couldn’t have done it without her!!
It is much more fun on the days when she is working with me and we spur each other on so we both end up being more productive than we would be otherwise.

Now it’s bedtime for me because tomorrow is MOVING DAY!!!
I’m so excited to get to see our things again and to sleep in my own bed.
It’s been 3 whole months since we waved them goodbye in Perth so I bet it will feel just like Christmas.
Can’t.wait!