A HOLIDAY SPENT RENOVATING......

Our mission these holidays were to get down to the coast, and clean our house, paint and re carpet it ready for some tennants to move in within the next couple of weeks..

We knew  we would need to put in a mammoth effort to get it all done, but I think our mind is often a lot younger than what our body feels....
With many late nights and quite a bit of help from our girls, my sisters in cleaning out Dad's shed, more help from my niece's husband with his paint brush, and help from my good friend Barb who hemmed all my curtains and her husband John who also came and used a roller and paint brush for us, we managed to get it almost done in the knick of time....

We arrived down on the coast around lunchtime on the first Saturday of the holidays, and as it was wet and raining spent most of the day  and all day Sunday in the shed going through packed boxes of Dad's that had been stored there for 30 odd years...

The girls had a field day, and decided they want to hold a garage sale to get rid of quite a bit of the stuff... We are happy enough to let them do it...

massive amount of work to clean this all out...

Old patterns... boxes of them..

 We found all my Mum's old patterns, wool, crochet cotton.  In some ways it was very sad to throw them all away....

Monday was spent out buying all the paint, brushes, rollers and then off to finalize payment on the carpet we had ordered for the house..

 There was at least another day spent cleaning out the rest of the furniture in the house before we could even think of starting the painting...

 We wanted to keep the palette of colour in the house pretty neutral so that regardless of whoever was living in there would have colour or furniture that wouldn't clash, so we decided to go with whites and greys as the colour for the house and we chose a charcoal grey carpet to go throughout..

I wasn't going to change the curtains, but after washing the curtains out of Dad's office and having them fall apart on me, I figured that new curtains were also needed for the house as well.

Our first job was to tackle painting the ceiling.. Sarah did most of the cutting in, and Steve rolled the ceiling.  It took them a couple of days and poor Steve's neck and shoulders were so sore... He needed a massage each evening to release the muscle tension.

Painting the ceiling...

 It seemed to take ages before we were able to get some colour on the walls... the cutting in seemed to take forever...

 Meanwhile whilst they were painting, I was searching the Facebook Market page for furniture for the house...
We needed to find a new dining room table and seats... and I found this great table and six chairs for only $120... great bargain, as the table alone was worth that... It was in pretty good knick, but a couple of the chairs were a little rickety, but Steve being the handyman that he is, didn't see any real problem in fixing them.  The upholstery was also grey and white which totally fitted in with our colour palette for the house...

Our bargain table and chairs

 The other thing I really wanted to get was a trundle bed for Dad's old office which we were conveting back into a bedroom.  The room was pretty small, so two beds in their would really crowd the room.  Having a trundle which would slide out for night sleep and then slide back under the bed during the day seemed the best way to go...

New bed ends.... all solid wood

almost new mattress

I found this solid wood bed and trundle with almost new inter-spring mattress in really good condition advertised for $100.  I offered them $80 and they accepted my offer so felt we got another bargain,  The plan down the track is to paint it white, but we have run out of time to do it this trip...

It was pretty exciting for us when we finally got some of the grey colour on the walls... The trouble was we only had a couple of days to go to get the final two coats of paint on and we wondered how on earth we were ever going to get it done... There were some very late nights for Steve or should I say every early mornings, as more than one occasion he worked through to 1 and 2am to get it al done...

My friend Barb''s husband John came over on the Tuesday of our last week and started rolling the first coat of colour on the walls whilst Steve started the next lot of cutting in.  Steve then managed to finish the walls that evening and also do the second cut in before going to bed....

John came back the following morning and both he and I started working on all the doors in the house...

John helping to paint the doors..

Putting on the final coat..

 Once the walls were painted, the toilet seat looked quite yellow, so Steve measured it for me and I added it to the list of other things I needed to buy at Bunnings.... whilst the boys painting,  I did a few runs to Bunnings to pick up handles, tools, new light bulbs, storeage containers etc... 

needed new toilet seats

Often at night, I surfed on line to do some inspiration boards searching for curtains, cushions, plants, etc to dress the house..
Aldi catalogue contained household items that I wanted to grab for the house....

Some of the items from Aldi on my shopping list.....

 When the curtains started falling to bits, I then had to start looking for some new ones... The trouble is you can find all the things you want on line but actually being able to get them is a totally different thing... Most of these items come out of China and with Covid around, stocks are low...
I did find these curtains and rods that I liked and they were from Spotlight....
The trouble being that they didn't have any on the coast, so my sister Jude and I had to drive to Morayfield to get them....

Curtains and rods picked for the house..

 I looked at the rods at Spotlight but they were a lot more expensive than the ones at Big W, so in the end I went with the cheaper ones and we were able to find them also at Big W in Morayfield....
Presently we have Dad's old brown lounge in the house, which doesn't really go with the colour scheme so Sarah hopped on line and ordered a couple of grey covers to go over the couches, and then we started shopping for some cushions to match,,

I'm looking at this blue and white to compliment the grey cushions...

 As we don't have a lot of furniture in the house, we decided to add a little more colour by buying some artifical plants to brighten up the rooms... We would have preferred real plants but as there is not always going to be someone there we didn't want to spend a  lot of money on real plants just to have them die on us...

We found quite a few accessories from K Mart which would brighten the house, so off I went shopping again for plants, throws, lamps, quilt covers and had a lot more success obtaining these..

Online shopping at KMart

Plants from K-Mart.

 Whilst we bought quite a few of the smaller plants from K-Mart, we ended up getting some of the bigger plants from Bunnings....

Ideas for the bedrooms...

 I also went shopping for some wall prints and came across three that I really looked.  I wanted to keep a bit of a Hampton's feel in the main living area so settled for these two paintings which I managed to pick up very cheaply from Fantasic Furniture.   These prints were larger than the ones I found on line at "Wall Art Prints"and for less than half the price that they were advertised here...

I loved this painting but they had sold out in Maroochydore so it meant another drive to Morayfield to pick it up...

Loved this print

 It now has pride of place up on a wall in the lounge area....  I love that it draws you in and you just want to head down that path onto the beach...
Fantasic Furniture also had this print at a great price also, so decided to pick it up in Rocky here and will take it down net time we go down and it will be hung in the house on the wall overlooking the dining room table...

I now have purchased this print for our Dining Room wall

I really fell in love with this bird print also, and ininitally thought I would hang it in my dining room, but have now decided to keep the beach scenes for the living area  and these beautiful birds will go in our bedroom...

For our bedroom..

 The carpet was booked to be laid on Friday morning, and we finished the painting just in the knick of time... Steve put his final strokes on the wall just after 7.30pm on the Thursday evening...
To say he was excited was an understatement....

Doing a happy dance.... the painting is complete

 Thursday evening I spent unpicking the hems of the curtains I had just bought as they were too long and were bunched up on the floor.  Barb had kindly offered to machine the hems for me if I could pin them up to the desired length I wanted...

Once the painting was finished then it was a made rush to get all the furniture out of the rooms that needed to be carpeted.  That was a lot of hard work....

Furniture got crammed into the dining area

 We still needed to sleep on our beds, so we needed to rise early to have them dismantled and taken outside before the carpet boys arrived....

The carpet boys arrived at 7.30am Friday morning to lay the new carpet...
At first I was a little nervous about our carpet colour choice, as when the blue underlay was laid on the walls, it made the walls like quite blue and the carpet almost brown... I thought it was going to clash, but once the grey carpet was completely down, the walls went back to their grey colour....
Obviously, the blue underlay was being reflected up onto the walls making them appear blue...

The Underlay goes down

Starting to roll out the carpet

Starting to look good...

carpet is down in the lounge...

Carpet down in the main bedroom

Bedroom 3

Bedroom 2

 Whilst the boys were laying the carpet, I took off to Maroochydore to drop off the curtains for Barb to hem up for me, and also to go and get a hair cut....
Sarah arrived whilst I was away and the carpet was being laid.  Colin was spending the weekend in Mackay with his folks fare-welling their family home so Sarah was keen to see the changes in the house from the week before when she was up with us...
 The kids enjoyed playing in the trailer whilst they waited for the carpet to be laid inside...

 The boys had finished laying the new carpet by lunch time....
Then we had to put all the furniture back in the house...
We also had to go pick up the new matresses that we had bought during the week.
We had got a good deal from the Bed Shed at Kawana on a couple of single mattresses earlier in the week, so it didn't taken much convincing for us to go and buy a new Queen size mattress for our bed.  Dad's mattress was completely had it, and we had already dumped it and were using Pete's old mattress but it was very hard and we were waking up each morning with a very sore back, so we decided to invest in a more comfortable mattress for us also...

We had bought it on sale, but by the time we went to pick it up, the price had come down a further $70.  We were so blessed because in the end, the Bed Shed refunded us that $70 as we hadn't picked it up before the price went down... Winner.....

Our new mattresses for the spare room but in a single mattress...

We ended up with the plush Eden mattress for us.

Sadly we only got to sleep on this mattress for two nights, but it was amazing...
No sore back at all in the morning...
In fact it is a lot cheaper than our bed at home but I seem to get a better night sleep....
Maybe we need to get a new bed at home....

Most of Friday night was spent moving furniture back into the house and whilst we did this, the children enjoyed a movie night...
We had packed our Apple TV in but couldn't find it when we needed it....
Steve had also packed his mini projector in at the last moment so in the end he hooked it up to his phone and the kids got to watch a Netflix movie on the big screen (projected up on the wall)...
They thought this was great... much better than watching a TV screen, and it left us adults with a little peace to get the furniture sorted....

Home movie night...

Engrossed in their Friday night movie..

Steve needed a haircut before going back to work, so he and Sarah set off to Maroochydore  early Saturday morning to visit the barber, and then they ended up shopping for all the little bits and pieces to make the house feel like a home again...  Off to K-Mart and Bunnings to buy some artificial plants, and knick knacks..

They also stopped in at a few bedding stores and furniture stores looking for some plastic caps for the slates on one of the single beds.  These were a lot harder to source then they could have imagined.  However, they did come across one of the paintings that I wanted for the lounge and it was on sale and a third of the price of getting it online...  The only problem being they had none left in stock and they wouldn't sell us the display print... 

They did ring their store at Morayfield to see if I could source one there and there were still 4 available there so once again I had to make a quick trip to Morayfield to pick up the print I wanted... Still well worth the drive as this print was larger than I was going to buy and a third of the price, and the bigger print did look really good on the wall there....

Saturday night, Barb and John joined us for our first meal in our refurbished new home...
Usually John and Barb have us over to their place but this time, they knew how busy we were, and we wanted to repay them for all their help and hospitality so invited them to our place for take away pizza.  It was a lovely relaxing evening with them and they were happy to see the house finished..

 Sunday morning we were up early, as I wanted to wash the linen and remake the beds and we needed to pack up ready to leave that afternoon to drive home as Steve had work the following day...
Just before we left, I took photos of the house complete... Only one room to still be done and that is the laundry.  It will have to wait until we have a chance to come back down and stay...

Renovated Lounge

From hallway looking into lounge..

Dining Room

Looking into Kitchen from Dining area

Dining Room table

Looking towards dining area from front door...

Main Bedroom

2nd Bedroom

3rd Bedroom

Toilet

Bathroom

 And finally the laundry... this room still has to be done.... 

 One the whole we are very happy with the way it has turned out and we will enjoy staying down here.    Not a lot more to finish it now...  new laundry, few new cushions, a couple of more wall prints and it will be done...