We bought 8 steel posts, 46 lengths of thin pine, 2 lengths of thick pine and 2 steel hinges, then we pressure washed the brickwork, we dyna-bolted the steel posts to the brickwork, we painted the posts, we painted the brickwork, we cut the pine to size, we painted the pine and then we screwed the pine to the steel posts. Then we made a timber door frame, then we cut more bits of pine to size, then we painted the pine and then we screwed the pine to the door frame. Ya ya, anyway …

The privacy provided by the screen is enough to shut out the neighbours’ view of us and our view of the neighbours’ when our trees lose their leaves in winter, but there is also enough space between the wooden slats that the screen allows us to see out into our garden. Having that gap between the wooden slats allows the sun to shine through into the garden bed on the other side and also allows for air flow so hopefully when the wind is blowing a gale there is not much chance of it blowing over.

At the start of this project, we had to do a little remedial work because, well, when we pulled down the last remaining greenhouse window (after the first window was knocked over by a huge gust of wind one afternoon), half the brick wall that the window was built into came down with it. Tim was quickly forced into learning a new skill (bricklaying) that afternoon. Look at the concentration …

Then when the new cement had set on the bricks, the steel posts were dyna-bolted into the brick wall. Then one-by-one the timber slats were screwed into the steel posts. As you can see, we had three steel posts behind each section of screen, just to make sure that the timber was adequately supported. The timber slats only had the first coat of paint before they were screwed onto the steel posts. We did a second (final) coat when it was all complete and in place.

If you look carefully in the photo directly below, whose head can you see popping up from behind the brick wall?

Oh yeah, it’s me behind there. Look at me, all trigger happy:

Starting to take shape:

Almost there:

Now we just have to cut off the tops of the posts and put nice little caps on the ends:

See the dirty possum prints?

Pretty much done, just building the door:

And putting the second coat of paint on:

And done, complete with painted timber benches laid across the brickwork (and in less than 12 hours one of those nice shiny painted benches had been pooped on by a very large bird, it didn’t stand a chance, poor bench):

Finally, looking from the garden towards the courtyard area:

Built in only two days, here is what it looked like after they left on the first day:

The outside looks a little bit like a temporary builder’s cabin and desperately needs softening up with a stack of plants, but that will happen over time (there are plans to re-do that horrible covered patio area and put in some beds around the shed, but for now we both need a bit of a rest after this shed project).

It’s been up for 3 weeks and since then Tim has been busy putting up 3 rows of shelving and I’ve been busy hauling box after box after box (probably 300 boxes in all) from storage and moving them into the shed and up onto the shelves.

The packing area is all set up and, although it’s a little rudimentary, it’s a nice area to work in.

What’s been happening the last 4 weeks? Well, after we knocked the shed down, we had to clean up a bit, we cut up some of the pieces of wood that was left in piles. We made a lovely wood shelter from the old tin sheets that we removed from the roof of the shed. Like our handiwork?

We also had to hire a jackhammer and concrete saw to cut off 30cm from the long edge of the old concrete slab because it was completely hollow underneath due to excess water running along the edge over 30 years. That took some work. We filled two skip bins with concrete boulders.

The dogs were very confused about where the shed had gone:

After knocking off the side of the old cracked slab, we had to hire a mini digger to remove the dirt from underneath where the pavers were pulled up. We were going to do this by hand but quickly realised we would kill ourselves, so in came the Toro Dingo to the rescue:

Then once the area was all flat and the mounds of dirt had been removed, in came the concretor guy to box the area up, place metal mesh (reinforcing) over the old concrete slab and then pour in three truck loads of new concrete. Here’s the finished product:

As you can see, we have had a lovely new fence installed along the back.

I can feel that we’re almost there. After all this, we’re due for a break so we’re shortly heading off to the central coast of New South Wales for 3 days where I’m booked in for a nice back and shoulder massage. Then when we come back it’ll be work work work again moving my boxes of business stock from the storage unit into the new shed. Woohoo!

With a lot of help from our neighbour (he owns a very powerful chainsaw), we spent 3 big days over the Easter long weekend working on demolishing the shed and it’s now in pieces in a big pile waiting to be cut into firewood for burning in our heater this winter. Here’s some of the fun we’ve had over the past few days:

First step was to remove the sheets of zincalume from the roof of the shed.

We disturbed three possums whose house was in the roof of the shed. This last one didn’t want to leave, poor little thing (now he’s living underneath our house   )

Next was to call in the neighbour with the big chainsaw and start cutting some of those timber beams connecting the roof to the vertical posts:

Then we get the angle grinder and cut these heavy-as steel railway lines which connects the patio to the shed (yes, the previous home owner used old railway lines as supports for their patio):

Then eventually it looks like this:

We had to leave that back wallwith the funky wallpaper standing so as to keep the doggies in (that temporary steel fencing you can see on the left has now been moved over to the right, so if that funky wall came down, there’d be a big gap between our property and the paddock next door and Smokey and Cloe would be off).  Speaking of doggies, here’s one now, laying in the sun watching us do all the work  :)  :

Now we wait for the weekend when we go to the hire shop, pay our $80 and get the use of a concrete cutter for 24 hours, during which time we hope to shave 30 cm of concrete off each side of the existing concrete slab (why? because the edges of the concrete are crumbling and it needs a nice new edge on the side of the slab). Then next week we will have a concretor come with a truck full of concrete and he’ll make us a nice new concrete slab over the top of the old cracked one. Then we wait about 7 days for the concrete to dry (if there is no rain) and then we can have the shed company come and drop off the shed bits and pieces and then about a week after that we’ll have a new shed all ready to be used.

Then I can tidy up the back yard after stuff was just dumped everywhere and anywhere and perhaps build a little wood shelter for all this new firewood we’ve got!

I’m so proud of the effort that we put into this room.  It’s the first complete room that we have done so far in this renovation project.

We hired a builder to put in a few new walls for us and to put in new skirting boards.  Unfortunately, he came and went as he pleased throughout the job and then once he was paid in full he didn’t bother coming back the next day to put the finishing touches on the job and to take away the rubbish that he dumped in our front yard.  So technically our study is not technically *complete*, but we will forget about the nasty builder and enjoy the work that we put into this room ourselves.

We used ‘Green Moss’ on the walls and also painted the ceiling the same colour. We weren’t sure about painting the ceiling but we’re glad we did.

I went around the timber window frame and the skirting boards with All-in-One stain and gloss and they came up reasonably well.

At first we were going to put timber floating floors in this room, so that it would match the timber floorboards in the kitchen and laundry, but we found out that you have to pull up the skirting boards to install the floating floors, and I didn’t feel like doing that after we just had them installed.  So we decided to paint the concrete floor instead. We hired a concrete grinder to grind the top layer of concrete off so that we had a nice smooth surface to paint. Unfortunately this meant that we had to put a third coat of paint on the walls and the ceiling, because the dust that came off the floor got stock to the walls and wouldn’t wipe off. Of course, had we known in the first place that we were going to paint the floor, we would have done the concrete grinding first

Because we were so confident that the painted concrete floor would work(!), we decided to continue the painted floor from the study out into the front entrance, so we had to pull up the old tiles that were there and we grinded that section too. 

Then when the floor was all nice and smooth and clean, we painted the floor.

We just need to go and buy some blinds and install our whiteboards on the walls.

These are the lights that I have bought to go into the study:

Left to go is: get skirting boards made, put a frame around the windows, fit lights and light switch, sand walls and plaster, selastic the corners and gaps near windows, remove carpet.

Then I have to decide what colour to paint it, what type of window furnishings to put in there and also whether to paint the concrete floor or put click-clack flooring in.

Then we’re going to have new walls because there are gaps between the window and the walls (they did a really dodgy job when they built this little sunroom). Then we’re going to have two new port-hole type ceiling lights put in to replace the long fluro tube currently there. Then last but not least, a new door fitted (one that matches the front door).

This is what the room currently looks like:

Crossing our fingers that nothing goes wrong while they’re knocking the walls down!

To make the hearth, we purchased a piece of cement sheeting, 14mm thick, 1 metre long and 1.2 metres wide.  This cost about $27. We set the cement sheeting down on the floor where the heater was to be installed (according to what the sales people in the heater shops told us, the hearth can be placed directly on top of the carpet, so that’s what we did). Then we placed the heater on top of the cement sheet (no mean feat when you consider that the heater weights 150kg). We positioned the heater on the cement sheeting right where we wanted it to be installed and traced around the base of the heater onto the cement sheeting. 

Then we laid out our tiles onto the cement sheeting to see how they would fit best and made a plan of where each sheet of tiles would sit. We didn’t actually start putting the tile adhesive on just yet because we wanted the heater installer to approve the position of the heater when he came the following day, in case we had to move the heater for some reason (the last thing we wanted was to tile the hearth and then have to smash it up and start again).  [Photo taken at night, sorry ]

About the tiles we used: We bought the tiles from Bunnings. They’re about $4.50 a sheet and you get 12 tiles on there, a 3 x 3 sheet.  You can find them in the outdoors section, they’re called crazy tiles.  While you’re at Bunnings looking for your crazy tiles, you also need to purchase a small tub of tile adhesive and a couple of bags of grout (we used coloured grout to match the tiles).

[Photo taken at night, sorry ]

So we laid the tiles out to see how they would fit in and then when we were happy with the positioning of the tiles and the spacing etcetera, we traced around the outline of the tiles. We then made a note of where the tiles had been placed and removed the tiles off the cement sheeting and put them to the side. Next, we removed the cement sheeting off the floor, took the sheet outside and using a tree branch saw, we cut along the line that we just traced to cut off the excess cement sheeting.  We ended up with a piece of cement sheeting measuring approximately 1.1 metres x 1.1 metres.  Then we took it back insde, placed it on the floor in the correct position and lifted the 150kg heater back onto the cement sheeting.

The following morning, the wood heater installer came and said that it was find to be installed where we had positined it, then he connected all the bits of the flue to the heater through the ceiling and out to the roof (see the flue is now connected to the top of the heater in the below photo?).

So now that the heater was propery connected up, we could go ahead and stick our tiles to the cement sheeting. We laid the tiles back onto the sheeting in the set up that we had planned out the night before then we got our tub of adhesive and a paint scraper (used in the wallpaper removal project) and buttered the tiles with the adhesive.  We then waited 24 hours for the adhesive to cure.

The photo below shows a close up of the tiles with the adhesive clearly visible on the back of them.

Here’s a closer photo of the tiles around the side of the heater.  (And this photo really shows the colour of the heater well – the colour is “champagne brown”.)

After waiting the specified 24 hours for the adhesive to set, we then started on the grouting. Here’s the grout that we used (we used two of these bags):

Then we mixed the grout with water in this bucket (the grout turns almost black when you add water):

Then I realised that if we were going to just whack grout onto the tiles, it wasn’t going to be very neat.  So I realised that we needed some kind of piping bag to spoon the grout into so that the grout can be put into the crevices neatly and easily.  So I went down to the local supermarket and bought this $3 squeezie sauce bottle. It worked a treat. 

So we spooned the slodgy grout into the squeezie sauce bottle and squeezed the grout out into the crevices.

Then we went along and smoothed down the grout with our fingers.

Sometimes grout got onto the actual tiles, so we went around with a wet rag and made sure that we wiped off all the grout off the tiles before it started to go hard. I thn it’s important to do this on these kind of tiles – because they’re not shiny glazd tiles it would be super hard trying to remove the grout from these tiles when the grout had set. That’s me wiping off the grout from the top of the tiles with a wet rag.

When we finished, the hearth looked like this (all wet and damp):

Because the grout is so thick, it takes about 3 days for it to dry completely.

Although we are now using the fire, the hearth is still not completely finished as I think it needs some wooden beading runnin around the 3 edges to make it look ‘finished’. Stay tuned for how to make a frame for a diy hearth

We now have a log pile in our backyard.

Oh and here’s the fire in actin [Sorry, photo taken at night ]

I also bought this painting, not sure if it’s going to go in the house or in the shed:

It has served us well and provides instant heat, but I will be glad to see the back end of this gas heater (apparently so is Tim ) [Photo taken at night so a bit blurry]

These are all the parts of the flue that need to go from the wood heater up through the ceiling and out of the roof. All wood heaters need to be installed by a wood heater installer. Now we have to wait another week before he can come and install it for us.