Now this is a bit of an emotional subject for me, since it's the house I grew up in. However there are several things that I would be happy to see the back of. Such as the 1970's carpet and wallpaper. I've been looking at these for 30 years now and I am SO OVER IT. I know patterned wallpaper is making a comeback at the moment, but I'm ready for a change.
So Peter and I have been talking about renovating the house for quite some time. We have come up with several different ideas and plans. The house is essentially 2.5 bedrooms (2 bedrooms plus study). And with baby number two on the way, we would ideally like to make it a 3 bedroom plus study house.
After much discussion and deliberation, we hired a Project Management company in July this year. Right from the beginning we said "baby number two is due in mid November, so we want everything done by end October at the latest". They said "Yes, we can do that".
The reason for hiring a project management company was
- so that they could take care of bringing together all the different contractors involved
- because they have contacts in the industry and know who's available in that time frame
- because they have good relationships with the contractors and get good rates from them
Peter and I came up with a design that we liked, that made minimal changes to the house. However as we talked with various people along the way we made a few changes to the plan.
Here is the original layout of the house as it was when I was growing up:
And here is the layout of the house as we have been living in it since Christmas last year.
What this floor plan doesn't show is the temporary nature of this layout. Because we always knew we were going to be doing renovations, we kinda just put things anywhere we could find the space when we first moved in. The house was already furnished when we moved in, so we had to cram both our furniture and my parents furniture into the house.
Thus ... The dining room was used more as a store room for bits and pieces, and not really used for anything else. In Kathleen's bedroom were stored a couple of unused beds, propped up against the walls. In our bedroom was the dining room hutch full of serving plates and glasses, and our big Plasma TV. It was always intended that the Plasma TV would be wall mounted in the living room. But knowing the walls were going to come down some time in the near future, we never bothered to wall mount it, and instead had it at the end of our bed - oh dear, how sad, never mind ;-)
So, here is the floor plan we proposed creating as part of the renovations.
Note that the walls come out between the kitchen and laundry, and kitchen and dining room, to make one large room. And half the wall comes out between the kitchen and living room, with a breakfast bar put in the gap. The idea is that anyone in the kitchen is not excluded from any socialising being done in the living room, and they can also see the plasma TV mounted on the wall.
You will also note an extra wall being built in the front bedroom. This would be a temporary wall, the kind they have in office buildings, that would provide separate bedrooms for the kids while they are little, but which would be taken out at a later date so they could share one big room. I was concerned about the new baby waking during the night and waking Kathleen up if they were sharing a room in the early days.
So, we dealt directly with the Project Managers, who arranged a valuation and an architect and builder and plasterer and Council building consent. Another reason for choosing a Project Manager was their expertise in this area and being able to get it all done quickly. Sadly this wasn't the case. The planning stage took much, much longer than we wanted it to. I understand that it is important to get everything right in the planning stage, but there were times when a week or two would go by simply because we were "waiting to hear from somebody".
Finally, on Sunday 23rd September, they got back to us with a final quote and project plan / timeline. Up until this point we really had no idea what it was going to look like in terms of cost or time involved (but we knew it wouldn't happen overnight). We knew we would have to move out of the house while the work was going on, and had planned on moving in with Peter's mum.
The timeframe had the builders starting work on Monday 1st October, basically one week from the date of the meeting. It had them finishing the work on Friday 9th November, i.e. the work would take six weeks. HOWEVER this is the day before baby is due!!!
So that would have given us ONE week to pack up EVERYTHING in our house and either store the stuff we don't need in the short term downstairs in the basement or take what we do need over to Peter's mum's house. Which, as it turned out, we would never have gotten it all done in one week.
The next problem was that we'd then have to move everything back again, with a toddler AND a newborn.
But the worst part of all was the quote itself. It was way, way, way over our budget. Of course that was including all the "nice to have's" that we'd asked them to quote for along the way, such as granite benchtops and rimu finishings. But still, Peter talked to a few people and everyone seemed to think that it was overpriced by about 20%.
So to summarise, we had been given one week to:
- pack up and move out
- decide what bits to cut out of the project to bring it into budget
- decide on all the extras such as which carpet and which paint and so on.
It was just NOT going to happen.
So, rather than be rushed into such an important and expensive decision, we've put the whole thing on hold until the new year. Right now we're going back to the drawing board trying to figure out what to do.
In the meantime I have still boxed up the things we don't use on a regular basis and stored them downstairs. Because whether we do it now or in February, it still had to be done. And it's easier to do it with only one baby in the house rather than two.
We have also rearranged the bedrooms as per our renovated plan:
- Partly because I'd done all this prep work and wanted to see some benefit from it.
- Partly in order to see if it really works or not before we spend the money.
- Partly to make room for Peter's mum who has now rented her house out and come to live with us for a few weeks until she moves back to Texas on a permanent basis.
- And partly to make room for Not Nooboo, who will probably end up sleeping in our room for a while.
So the floor plan of the house now currently looks like this:
The biggest change from how the house has been previously and from our renovated plan, is that Kathleen's room is now the room off the kitchen (i.e. what would have become the dining room). We were surprised to find that it is actually a pretty good size for her at the moment, although of course it probably won't work long term. I still envisage that long term Kat and the new baby will share a room once the baby is old enough.
Peter and I are still deciding on our options. One option is to simply redecorate and not make any structural changes at all. Right now though we are enjoying not having the stress of moving - although having said that we've spent the past couple of weeks getting the Salvation Army to take away all our excess stuff, and then moving Peter's mum and her stuff in with us.
But now that is all done and we are sitting back and waiting for baby to arrive. It won't be too long now, so watch this space.
-Megz
