NZ Baby Blog

Renovations have this tendency to start off kinda small, and escalate - well mine do anyway. By the time you’ve found that the wall needs rebuilding, and the floor joists replacing (on 2 levels) and thus reflooring must happen in 1/3rd of the house, redoing the whole house seems like a good idea.

Nearly 2 months later and we’re still squatting with relatives (thank you thank you for having us), and wondering why when the rest of us are having to work, tradesmen, or more to the point, tradesmen’s suppliers seem to be able to take the whole of January off.

So we wait for skirting boards to  be run - something about a machine breaking down, and cornice to get dry (plaster cornice takes a week apparently), so that the last week of real work can be done.

In the meantime we show people about from time to time, and imagine how nice it will be to be back in our own house - but I’m not booking the movers just yet!

The upside of the economic downturn is that my builders are free to begin the next phase of our renovation project. The downside of course is that if we need to borrow money it’ll be that much more expensive.

However we’re pushing ahead anyway, working our way through our building consent and we’re up to the last phase of that. We’re making a bigger bedroom for the boy out of the old study & old bathroom, tarting up our bedroom, making an upstairs deck, putting big doors on to the downstairs deck from the kitchen, and reworking the old downstairs bathroom & kitchen into a scullery & kitchen combo.

In the meantime the contents of 3 rooms (including the boy) are all in the front room (bye bye trampoline room you were fun for the winter), and the contents of the kitchen are variously in the lounge, and in the office (bye bye Dean).

Kitchen pack up isn’t quite done, it’s just got to the annoying stage. It’s a little unclear how long we won’t have any kitchen facilities for, maybe only a week or two, maybe a month or two, depends on the plumber among other things.  So we’re accepting invitations to dinner, we’re even happy to cook it