Trouble In Paradise

Yesterday and today we just continued on our fun scraping of the main bedroom and Summer's bedroom, removing the glue layer and then so far now stripping the paint from the main bedroom. The gloves we bought to soften the load on our hands have helped heaps, we have started getting bruised palms so these are great!

Yesterday we had some more lovely visitors, Scott's Dad and Uncle who were kind enough to also bring us dinner and then supplies and food for breakfast today, this is so much appreciated while we are so busy and our two houses look like bombsites! It is nice having people through so they can see how it looks now compared to how it will look after all our hard work!

We also stayed the night for the first time lastnight, which was good because we could get up early to start working again and today I went shopping with the kids for more supplies, and to give them a break and for me to go to our other home to get some of my own work done. Had my little sister and her family visit today and they too had some lovely gifts for us, more wine and some beautiful additions for our home once we move in, thanks so much guys.

We discovered today after my purchase of a lead testing kit that we have lead paint on our floors and walls in some rooms. This was a huge disappointment for us, but also one we expected buying such an old house. It means the kids and I packed up all our bedding, toys and clothes and had to leave Scott there to stay by himself to continue the bulk of the work doing the floors and wall painting. We are all pretty bummed but obviously we can't stay there, it just means a lot longer of a job because I can't help and it all has to be done by himself. He is sleeping there in his swag so we can get it done as quick as we can because he goes back to 12 hour work days in 1 week time. Once the rain clears up I will go in and help with our safety gear on so the kids can just play outside, but until then I am back at the old house packing and getting my big list of work done that needs to be finished, and taking stuff out to Scott and visiting him during the day. Lots of pinteresting happening between Scott and I and messages of things we want to do and goals for the house, not as good as having him here but better than nothing!

On a brighter note, now that the paint stripper is done our main bedroom floor is looking so much better, you can actually see the transformation taking place and that is pretty exciting! Tonight Scott said he removed about 500 staples from the floor boards, and he has pulled up the carpets in the lounge and hallway so sounds like he is keeping busy!

Safety first. How on earth does Scott wear this stuff everyday at work?

Applying the glue remover

Main bedrooms progress of the paint remover

Finished scraping the foam off Summers floor, yay!

Jack is enjoying taking photos!

Before we realised this floor was lead..minor lack of safety gear!

Pulling up the Carpets..and endless floor scraping

The day we got the keys to our house (Christmas Eve) we started eagerly pulling up the carpets and lino floors straightaway, to then expose us to some wonderful foam carpet underlay to hand scrape off, then thick layers of glue adhesive and under all that scraping was thick coats of paint that we used paint stripper and metal scrapers and many hours to remove. That was just two bedrooms too, there's still the rest of the house to go but only 1 other room with painted floors by the look of it. The lounge room, kitchen, hallway and dining we have left the floor coverings on for now and have just started on the four bedrooms to get us started.

So the method to remove it has so far been:

- Pull up carpet/lino
- Scrape all the yellow foam underlay up
- Use Glue remover and a scraper to remove
- Use paint stripper to remove a lot of the paint

Next we think it will be time to hire a drum sander after we have punched down all the nails and removed the skirting in the four rooms.

This job has been long but it is so fun seeing each layer of the gorgeous wooden floors underneath, then looking back on how it looked only 3 days ago, we have already come a long way!

We've done some shops to Bunnings and Masters to buy lots of essentials, heaps of paint stripper, sandpaper, gloves since we worked out just how hard the scraping is on our hands, and lots of other fun renovating things! The kids are really enjoying it but while we are using the chemicals they go out to keep occupied with their toys which is working pretty well.

Have had a fair few visitors come through who all seem quite positive for us but we know we have a huge job ahead of us and I think maybe people might think we are a bit crazy doing this much, but the end result will be worth it (plus we are a bit crazy anyway)! We have received a lovely bottle of champagne from one of Scott's sisters, so that will be great to sit down to enjoy as soon as we get some glasses to the house!

Will put some photos up of the progress of the floors so far!

Amanda x

Main Bedroom - Before

Scraping off the foam

This stuff is really tough...then the glue under it is tougher!

Jack finishing scraping the last bit of the main bedroom!

Our first dinner in our new home, in style!

We Bought Our First Home!

Our first blog post! Our family bought our very first home and on Christmas Eve 2014 we were handed the keys after what seemed like a really long few weeks of paper work, phone calls and a bit of anxiety thrown in while waiting to see if it was going to be ours. It's been such a big dream of ours for a long time so it still doesn't feel real to us and we kept waiting for something to go wrong, but nope, it's ours and the kids are so excited!

Our plan for buying a house has always been that we want to renovate, to make a house ours and how we like. We rent a brand new house at the moment which we really don't like but we have loved previous old houses we have lived in, the character of them, the bigger yards and just how much hardier they are with children! We have two very awesome kids who we knew would help out and not hinder our work while we are renovating so I think that will help a lot. We also wanted to move to the town 20 minutes from where we are, because that's where hubby works so we changed our sons school which he starts at in 2015 and our daughter is enrolled in kindy across the road from school. Oh, and the house is 400m or a 40 second drive from them so Jack is very happy to be able to ride to school finally! As well as a nice big backyard, just over 1000m2, it gives us plenty of space for more sheds, a big play fort and lots of room for our dog, Sarge.

We also wanted to make sure we bought a house cheap enough that we weren't scraping the bottom of the barrel every week just to live, to still have fun and enjoy ourselves-not move in and have no money to renovate, holiday and all that awesome stuff. So it turns out that with mortgage repayments, rates and water we will still be paying less then the house we are currently renting (for the next 5 weeks). That's a massive win for us and we are so glad to finally have done it!

We will be updating this blog often with all the fun and not so fun times we have renovating-we have never done this before, but are very lucky Scott is a trade qualified house painter so he will have a great time sanding and painting the 11 foot tongue and groove walls over the next few weeks while sleeping in his swag there to get it done to move in!

So welcome to our little families blog, we hope you enjoy reading it and staying up to date on this adventure of ours, it's sure to be a great time and any input or ideas would be greatly appreciated if you would like to comment on anything, this is all a big learning game for us and half the time we are just googling to find out how to do stuff! Merry Christmas!

Amanda x

Our huge backyard!

The day we got our keys, I think Scott's been waiting a long time to do this :)