Whenever we have anyone come to the house who want The Tour, the first thing they say is, "This is nice. I love the floors." They are usually a little surprised by how much we want to do to the place. They are also surprised with how big it is. She hides it well, but this little house isn't so little after all! It's a three bedroom split level (I've probably said that before) with one living room and a skinny little kitchen/dining area. But there is a downstairs, level three, with two biggish utility rooms. They make a big difference to the overall living area - or they will, once we have our wicked way with the place.
This is a rough plan of the top and middle levels of the house as is. It's not to scale. In fact it may be wildly inaccurate... I'm sure the kitchen is smaller than that, and there's six steps up to level 1 where the bedrooms are. But it's good enough for the moment.
Looks fairly straightforward, doesn't it? The rooms are comfortably medium sized - not big, but not small either. You can fit furniture in and get around it, but there's no wide empty spaces.
Unfortunately there's no real entry, you just walk straight into the living room. I've never been a fan, but hey ho, not much I can do here, it is what it is. There's a fireplace in the corner of the living room and an arch {{shudder}} into the kitchen, which is the original 80s pink laminate (yay) with barely any bench space and not enough cupboards, so we have a chest of drawers in the dining half of the room to help out there. And a teeny table. The steps lead you to the bedrooms and bathroom. Back to the kitchen and out the back door, down some rickety rusty steps and you can go into level 3, where there's a laundry, a loo and two rooms we aren't allowed to call real rooms because they're too short. They're livable though, and we plan to use them as rooms. They are under the bedrooms. Pity there's no internal access.
The plan is to knock out the back wall entirely and build an extension twice as deep as the porch. I will have a new kitchen right at the back and the old kitchen/dining area will become the new dining room. We will only be adding about 3.5 metres out, but it's a bit complicated because of the very low pitch to the original roof. At first I wanted to just continue the slope and make a skillion roof over the new kitchen, with clerestorey windows, but apparently that would add about $50,000 to the cost... and our budget for the whole extension including kitchen units, is way less than that! Oh well... Back to the drawing board. The plan for the new kitchen stands, we just need to rethink the roof. We want to add French doors and a little balcony off the dining room too, with steps leading down to our vegetable garden and opening up the whole space to the morning light, as it faces east.
The plan is to knock a hole in the wall between the dining room on level 2 and the bathroom on level 1 and make a stairwell leading to the lower level 3. There's a big cupboard in the bathroom just now so we won't actually lose much of the bathroom, just a tiny bit and of course, the cupboard. But we will gain internal access to the lower level, which will mean it will actually feel like part of the house.
The plan is to add lots of storage. At the moment it's pathetic, just the one cupboard. I want proper places for the esky, the Christmas tree and decorations, the suitcases, the tool box, etc, as well as the usual things like linen and brooms. So there will be a linen cupboard in the upstairs hall, floor to ceiling storage cupboards in the laundry area, a small walk in cupboard off the family room and more storage in the study. However, we are actually doing something weird and taking out the built ins in bedrooms 2 and 3. I know, controversial... more on that later.
The plan is to knock out the wall between bedrooms 1 and 3, and put in a new built in wardrobe for bedroom 1. At the moment the wardrobe is on the end wall, making the room short and hard to place furniture in. We have to have our bed half way across the window and I hate that. Moving the wardrobe makes a lot of sense, even if it's going to be tricky - the wall we have to remove is probably a load bearing wall.
The plan is to redo the bathroom completely and to add a bath. Bliss.
The plan is to remove all the asbestos sheeting from the downstairs outer walls and extend them slightly. We will put in new walls, and lots of windows for light.
The plan downstairs on the lower level is to make a walk through laundry/lobby area with French doors, a study and a family room, and extend the existing toilet to make a shower room. And add lots of storage cupboards.
The plan is to take out all the ugly corroded aluminium sliding windows and put in nice new timber sash (double hung) windows. And have French doors or similar leading to a balcony from the dining room, and from the laundry/lobby to the Pavilion (our outdoor dining area) and to replace the solid front door with a half or mostly glass one for some light - the house is so dark, I want light, light, light!
The plan is to remove the front porch roof and put up a nice new one, new railings too, and actually to extend the porch across the front to the carport, build new steps leading to it and make it somewhere we want to hang out.
The plan is to paint and refresh absolutely everything, inside and out, ditch the carpets in the bedrooms and refinish all the beautiful wooden floors, add lots of new power points and some nice lighting, a few sky tubes for some extra natural light, and take the whole place into a contemporary fresh modern cottage feel.
And that's just the house...
love Heather x
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