2-36 Marau Crescent. Week 5!

That's Mission Bay where we're going to auction tomorrow night!!

Our New House!! Week 5.

...OK, I've only just sorted out Week 0 (click here for original images of how the house looked!) and we've been too busy madly DIYing to write web pages, so hopefully Week 5 will be added shortly!

Our New House - Week 10

Marau Crescent update

Where to begin…….lots has happened since we bought 2/36 Marau Crescent two and half months ago! Phil has been reborn as a DIY Daredevil and I’ve…..well, let’s just say I don’t have a promising future ahead on Changing Rooms.

It’s been exciting….and it’s been really really tough. People say that you make an estimate on how long DIY will take and you plan a budget and then you should double both………and they are right! Phil now has the best stocked tool cupboard and we have a big hole in our bank balance!!!

We’ve put ourselves under tremendous pressure to try to get it finished by Christmas (and our flight to the UK) so we could come back and enjoy it in January. We also have hopes of completing it to rent it out over the Christmas break…know anyone who’d like to rent a ‘nearly finished’ place in Mission Bay??? We’re slowly realising that we’ll still be going in January…and February…and maybe March!! (Sorry Mum, Dad, Frostie…..you might be coming to a building site!!)

But enough of the nightmares….what have we achieved?? Well, we now have a fantastic nearly completed kitchen. It’s got alabaster cupboards (white-ish) and a groovy shiny black worktop, we have a pantry (apparently a kiwi-must-have), brand spanking new Bosch oven and hob, some more Trade me bargains in the form of fridge and washing machine AND very excitingly we have a small breakfast bar, so we can eat breakfast in there! Yeah!! The kitchen has been a slog……firstly it was crammed from floor to ceiling with the most solidly built rimu wood cabinets, full of wood worm and dry rot……Phil had quite a demolition job on his hands. It needed lots of holes filled, a re-plaster and paint. It also needed a total electrical rewire – and so Phil spent pretty much a whole weekend under the floor sorting that out. It also needed some plumbing – there was none! We think the elderly lady before had washed all her clothes by hands. It still needs a floor to be built for the fridge to stand on…but Phil is onto that this weekend.

The bedrooms and lounge were all wallpapered, so we began back in September with the removal of all of that. Tedious job, but nothing strenuous when compared to the rest of the jobs we’ve done We pulled out the Art Deco fireplace and picture rails (sorry to all you Art Deco lovers out there…we just did not like them!) Phil masterminded the most incredible ring-main around the skirting boards of these rooms – and then had to chase in the electrics into the walls (what a long, hard, dusty job). He managed (unbeknownst to me – as I would have tried to stop him!) also to wire in the speakers and TV aerial into the walls…..very impressive, very modern! . We had those replastered and I’ve spent many long evenings painting and repainting those rooms.

We’ve got one hideous ongoing job that we think we’ll probably be doing until 2008….which is removing paint from all the woodwork in the house. The wood is a gorgeous rimu, really stunning. Previous owners have just applied so much horrible leaded paint to these gorgeous pieces. We’re painstakingly restoring them – but the system we are using is horrible. We have to wear hot sweaty masks and gloves – and use heat guns and paint stripper chemicals….and it is just a grim job. What a silly idea to do it! We have managed to finish our bedroom though which is great :)

This last weekend we finished sanding the floors in all the rooms – big job using industrial sanders. They certainly build up your muscles! And now we are putting down the polyurethane and filing all the small holes in the wood. I’ve just the Dulux rep coming round tonight – as on the tin it said 24 hours dry time, and our floors are still not dry 5 days later! Ooops… nothing is ever simple with DIY!

We’ve still got one important room to tackle – which is the bathroom. We are bathless as we’ve already ripped that out. So we’re staying with our lovely old neighbour Viv until we put that back in. We may not be able to wash ourselves in the house in the next few weeks, but we’re only 50 metres from a beach (even if it is still a little chilly!)

So there you go, quite a project, but we hope it will be really worth it. We’ve certainly learnt stacks…made a number of mistakes….and developed either a passion for DIY or a real hatred of it!