Several days into May and we moved out of our house, back to our long suffering friend's country house. That week we stayed away as Dad singlehandedly removed all the asbestos cladding from the house. The local regulations were about to change so that only 'proper' asbestos removers would be permitted to handle asbestos. We had to deal with ours before that happened. At the end of the week we convinced Dad to take the camera and record the effect. Some photos actually turned out!

Looking toward the kitchen door:



The eastern wall:


The front of the house:

The silvery lump in the verandah area was secondhand insulation we'd salvaged from the Reviva Centre. The guy at the Reviva had asked some exorbitant amount for all the insulation; Dad offered almost nothing, well trained in Mexican haggling. They wouldn't accept it, so he walked away. However as it was about to rain, they found him before he left and told him that, for the price he'd offered, he could have as much as he could carry away. We just about got all of it.
It ended up enough to insulate most of the house, but boy, were we glad when it ran out! Dirty (and often damp) secondhand fibreglass insulation is No Joke.


The far side of the laundry:
The green iron on the side of the building represents the first cladding to be put up - and the last for a while. Although the blue plastic to be seen between the buildings was covering a stack of new plywood, bought specifically for cladding. The window seen behind the little shed was the first window taken out. It came from the bathroom, above the sink.

It was ANZAC Day 2006, and we were doing our bit.


At the front line the wire was expertly barbed...




(With blackberries from a seemingly inexhaustible source)




And behind which the trenches were dug.


The back garden was seriously blitzed. (The trench was destined to bear the footings of a rock wall, and the blackberries were destined to die.)

Not having a television, we entertained ourselves with the aerial...



It wasn't useful for much else!

Ok, so I've learned to leave lots of space around photos, and that it's not worth the trouble of trying to stagger them down the page! My apologies to those people who've been bearing with me so far. I hope I'll improve rapidly for the sake of your sanity as much as mine.

So the photos begin to reveal the challenges that lay ahead of us in April 2006. Some things, such as the brown lino, were unbearable, and were amongst the first things to be changed. On the day we moved we began. The small bedroom's linoleom surface was already torn and horrible, so it was decided to take it up before stacking all our boxes in there. Taking up that lino was rather like picking a scab - once embarked upon, it led on and on till there was no more. The next day we finished picking...with the help of one or two crow-bars.



And then we had to deal with all the nails. That was really fun (for the first ten minutes)...





Boy was it a relief when we'd done. The floors were unfinished cypress pine and the lino had only been nailed, not glued. The blue and pink bedroom already had finished floors, and the bathroom areas and verandah were tiled.

This was the house as we bought it and for some of us it was the last time we saw it thus. The next time we arrived at the house - latter end of moving-in day - the lino had been ripped up and the kitchen gutted - what there was of it.






The front of the house from the western corner.

The western corner of the house (kitchen corner)
and laundry end of the garage.

The back of the house, looking toward side door. Side door goes into kitchen (see last pic).











Looking straight down the hill to the garage and crappy little aluminum tool shed. I think there was a dog kennel between.














The eastern wall.

The separate toilet cubicle, (door to bathroom on the left, door into pink bedroom on right, door to blue bedroom behind).

The bathroom, looking to the right from the door.

The bathroom, looking to the left from the doorway.

Fairly self explanatory I hope. Pink bedroom to right; bathroom to left.

The lounge, with entryway partition down right side of pic.

The blue bedroom.

The lounge. Wall seen in small bedroom on other side of room is end wall of house.

Looking across lounge to kitchen. Small bedroom to left, inset verandah to right.

Small bedroom.

The kitchen.

The side door into kitchen.

This is a record of our renovation to date - with rather a lot of catch-up to begin.

On the 24th February, 2006, we turned up to inspect a house whose existence we'd only just discovered. It was an unprepossesing box with very few windows (13 in total, I believe) and on a block of land that boasted almost no landscaping whatsoever. It had a little garage with a laundry out the back, a hills hoist and a few mature trees. It faced both the main road and the railway track. However it also had good zoning, had a view out over the town sports oval and park (therefore a pretty view that would not be built out) and had back lane access. It was to be auctioned the next day.

As we had a very limited budget and were searching for a house that we could renovate to sell, thereby digging ourselves a little further out of debt, we decided it was worth attending the auction.

At 11:30 0r so the next day, we arrived and registered ourselves as bidders, information in hand. (To be seen at right>>)

The bidding began at an amazingly low number for the area, and proceeded fast and furious - at increments as low as $5oo. There was a total of about 87 bids! For the last $30,000 or so the bidding was between the neighbours and ourselves. We had set ourselves a definite limit - and there the bidding stopped. We held our breaths, the hammer fell, and we found we owned a house. (Well, it took some negotiation, as we hadn't reached the reserve, but for an extra 10 grand it was ours.) Then the hard work began...