jayneandmarty.com

Jayne tried to run a bath tonight. This was the result.

Rusty bath water

No, that isn’t an autumn-inspired bath bomb turning the water a lovely shade of orange. It’s rust. Our hot water system has carked it. The water’s hot, but it’s brown.

So we need a new system. Trying to be environmentally friendly, I researched solar hot water systems. Yes, they seem to be more efficient than gas or electric systems. And yes, they’re more environmentally friendly. But they cost around $5,000 after rebate (not including installation costs). A quality gas-only system is around $1,200 and I’d estimate it’d be 50% cheaper to install.

So, ignoring the environment factor, to be convinced to buy solar we’d need to save at least $3,800 over the life of the system.

Will that happen? I doubt it.

Convince me otherwise…….

These photos show that I’m starting to make progress in the front yard. Finding the time is the hard thing.

Before

Not quite so before

Today

Before

Not quite so before

Today

Jayne’s painting everything cream to match the window frames. It makes a big difference to the house (front and back). Looks quieter, calmer, more set back. No idea why.

I’ve been removing fenceposts at the rate of one a weekend. Slow going. With three to go I’ll be done later this month. Anyway, here are some more photos of the front garden with the fence removed.

Ages since we’ve written anything. Did you miss us?

We’ve been working, sleeping, working, sleeping during the week, and gardening most weekends. I’ve started on the front garden, while Jayne has been concentrating on planting out the side part of the back garden now that the balcony’s done.

The plan with the front garden is to preserve all our beautiful shrubs, trees, bulbs and groundcover whilst completely remodelling the whole thing to create a more welcoming streetscape and an obvious entry. As you can imagine, those two goals are at odds with one another, so some of the plants have gone to the big skip in the sky, and we’ve moved others to the back garden.

I’ve almost finished removing the weird half-fence but I still have 4 fenceposts to pull out and they’re like icebergs: 2/3rds of them are underground. It takes about an hour to get each one out with the sledgehammer and the shovel. Last weekend I seriously considered hiring a mini digger to ram them instead. Anyway, when that’s done I’ll move some earth and put in some simple retaining walls to create some levels, put up a new fence that follows our boundary, and probably remove some lawn and replace it with shrubs and paths. Haven’t decided for sure on that last bit though.

It looks much better without the half-fence, and it’s easier to picture it finished. Glad I decided to take that out first before putting in the new one. It means we can’t let Maxy out there to do his business but he goes in the backyard instead. That’s not ideal because he tends to go find a bone and forgets all about going to the toilet. But never mind.

More pics when we’ve made more progress ….. but here are a few to be going on with.

This weekend marked the official completion of the balcony. Peter, Christine and Jayne have put a huge amount of effort in over the last five months and they are justifiably very proud of the result. They’ve lifted, painted, nailed, sawed, measured, balanced, hammered, oiled and puttied their way to a sensational 2.5m wide x 18m long merbau-deck balcony with a retro late 80s balustrade that will still be solid in 2030. (And me? I was chief designer so can take some credit for the final outcome but not as much as the real workers.)

It’s hard to believe that I first ripped up the boards in August 2006 and we’ve only just finished it now, but there you go.

Here are a few more photos … the entire set from start to finish is on our Picasa page.

Me removing the filthy green mesh – (a) to annoy the possum and (b) so we could paint the beams to tidy things up a bit

Halfway through painting the beams. We’re completely removing the red from the house and going with a single colour. It looks much calmer one colour, strangely enough

I fixed up the garden lights around the bricked area this weekend

Looking out from the kitchen window. It’ll be sensational when we have some pots, plants and furniture out there

Peter cut two angles on each end of each slat for the steps – one at 45 and again at 25 to match the pitch of the steps. He mucked it up a few times, he reckons!

Already it looks like it’s been there forever – It blends in with the house perfectly. We were close to installing a stainless steel wire / timber posts balustrade but I’m very pleased we decided to be faithful to the house’s 80s heritage and go retro.

Last night we celebrated with a superb homecooked beef and mushroom pot pie and Peter even cracked one of his good bottles of wine to mark the occasion – a 1992 Penfolds bin 407 Cab Sav.

So that’s it. Project finished. Hooray.

Since the last post about this on Feb 11 Peter and Christine have done a HEAP of work. All the beams were replaced, the supporting beam straightened, and the fascia board and decking boards all done. Just the railing and stairs to go.

I’ve added photos to this project’s Picasa page (and don’t forget all the other ones from part 1) but here are a few to be going on with.

Getting the old beams out from under the doorway was a real bugger.

The merbau is a significantly different colour to the first batch (because it’s much drier, we think) but a coat of merbau stain should take care of that. Of more concern at the moment is our friendly possum Alan, and probably his mates too. They’ve decided that the new boards make a great toilet so this afternoon I have to devise a friendly way to scare them off to somebody else’s house.

** Update. I went to Bunnings and bought some Poss Off (named by a Kiwi, no doubt), hopped up on the roof and sprayed it all over the place where we reckon he sits, then got down again and sprayed it all over the shrubs and trees we think he uses to get on the roof in the first place. We’ll see what happens tonight.

On Sunday work started on the second part of the balcony – the bit next to the kitchen. Jayne and Christine started by hacking our beautiful camelias, roses and ferns right back to nothingness … but they’ll grow back in a year or so … and then work started on the decking boards and supporting beams. As we suspected, some parts of the beams were cactus. To be honest it’s surprising that something hasn’t broken yet.

There’s still plenty of work to do but these photos (and more on the jayneandmarty Picasa page) make for a good progress report.

Last weekend Jayne bought a decking oil putter-onnerer, some oil, and went to work. Five minutes later she was done. Sure beats doing it with a paintbrush like we did at our old house.

A solid days’ work by Jayne, Peter and Christine yesterday saw all the slats go up. Hooray! They even worked through the rain!

There was some debate over how to space the slats, i.e. perfectly spaced across the entire 10m width, or just 90mm apart. In the end we figured that using the 90mm method would be much faster, would enable us to use one of the decking boards as a spacer (you can see it in the first photo), and if one or two slats didn’t match up perfectly to the vertical posts it wouldn’t matter. We were right, it looks perfect anyway so it would have been a big waste of time if we’d tried to mark out slat position by dividing 10m by however many slats we wanted.

The slats themselves are 42 x 42 and the top and bottom rails are 120 x 42. We chose the dressed & primed pine over lasered pine despite the extra 25% cost. Zero knots in the wood and no need to hand-prime was worth the extra money, in our opinion. We still have to paint it but because it’s all pre-primed we don’t have to get to that for a few weeks.

We’re very pleased with the result, and also with our decision to stay faithful to the 80s style. You sometimes see houses with this style that don’t quite look right – we reckon it’s because the owners tried to cut costs by using bigger spacing or smaller timber, so we tried hard to ensure that it looks solid (but not too chunky) when you’re next to it and equally solid from a distance. I reckon we got it right!

I’ve updated the Picasa album but here are a few shots for the blog. I’ll take more when it’s nice and sunny.

The top and bottom rails are in and it’s all ready for the slats tomorrow and Thursday.

I’ve added a few photos to the Picasa album.

P.S. The last photo is #2193 since we bought the camera in late May. 2,193 photos in 7 months!!!!! If we were still using standard film that’s about 82 rolls of film, which is definitely more than $1,000 including printing. Love those digital cameras.