Paint Colours

A few hundred shades of off-white later...


Centre: Clotted Cream (living areas and above the picture rail in most rooms)

Clockwise from top: Cuddlepot (study); Diorite (bathroom and toilet); Mint Circle (laundry); Harbour Blue (boys' bedroom); Mallard Green (pergola); Spring Green (main bedroom); Sundaze (boys' playroom).

Ceiling and cornices in Ceiling White, as usual, and the architraves, picture rails and skirting boards will be in China White gloss. The woodwork was initially stained and varnished, and all the walls would have been painted cream, going by photos of similar houses on Picture Australia. The picture rails and skirting boards, however, are a bit narrow to be so dark. The previous owners painted them with the wall colour, but that looked odd. We're hoping white looks a bit less peculiar.

Outside, the windows, fascia and soffits will be painted in the original pale primrose colour, which for some reason was known as Ivory.

All colours from Dulux.

Mostly Indoors

Our rest on the Queen's Birthday long weekend consisted of packing our remaining goods and chattels (mainly books and some toys) so that our former library could be made good and skim-rendered. We had major cracking in that room, but a lot was hidden behind the bookshelves. Here it is after being repaired.


We're getting a new ceiling, as you can see. When John got up to scrape it, his trowel went through the plasterboard. Three cracked tiles on the roof had been directing water on to it for years!

The renderers also came to do the family room walls. I am intrigued at how you can "see" the masonry as the render dries; I suppose the brick absorbs water at a different rate to the mortar.


I had a lovely chat with Jason the electrician, who advised me on a better placement of external lights, how many downlights I'd need, and so on. I'll have to do a separate whinge post on lighting. I was intrigued by the little panels he used to organise the wiring. The renderers plastered right over some of them, but that's no problem -- as they are steel, you just need a magnet to find them again.


We're also putting a skylight in the darkest part of our house: the linen press. It is so annoying to be unable to see whether you have grabbed a blue or a green tablecloth! And as the cupboard runs to the ceiling, there is no room for even an oyster light in front of it. Skylights have some disadvantages -- they allow convective heat transfer, for example -- so we chose a small tube-style light.

Because there was a batten running down the middle of the hall, Louie asked me which side of it I wanted the skylight on (naturally I said the side away from the cupboard, which would allow more light into it). The next day John just cut the batten, saying it would look far better if placed in the middle...


Lastly, here is a shot of my herb bed. It has been lined with a bituminous waterproofing membrane and I asked the brickies and tilers to chuck in any broken bits. Over this layer, I plan to have a layer of 10-20mm recycled concrete 'gravel', then planter box mix. I did wonder if I ought to have a layer of geotech fabric under the planter box mix to prevent the fines clogging the weep holes, but Stan, the gardener from work, assured me it wasn't necessary.



The lack of opportunity to work in the garden is getting to me. I found myself in a nursery today and restrained myself... if you don't count the three plants from the bargain table...

All About Bricks

Our house is built of bricks called Eastwood Reds.

The Eastwood Brickworks closed some years ago, after being in operation about 80 years. My Dad lives near it and I remember occasionally hearing blasting in the quarry when I was a child, then seeing the dust rising. But why is our 1946 house built of Eastwood Reds, Sydneysiders will ask, when the closest brickworks was in fact at Homebush? It turns out that the Homebush Brickworks was closed during the war. I imagine the manpower that was left was simply moved to a smaller number of brickworks -- after all, there was very little building going on.

There is, of course, a problem when you try to match bricks: the clays are always different colours in different places, and even at different times. And as you can see below, it's difficult to match bricks from pictures. These samples are from the Austral website, and are of their Hereford Bronze and Shorthorn Mix respectively. The actual bricks are significantly darker.



We initially selected Hereford Bronze, finding the Shorthorn too dark when we received the samples. Our original bricks are rather gingery in colour, with a darker range of shades used below the floor line. Then we hit a snag. After a couple of weeks of being told they were on back order, Austral confessed that the clays for the Hereford shades had run out. They had to break into the Shorthorn pallets to find lighter bricks to make up our order, so the result was rather darker than we had anticipated. As most of the bricks we see at the back are new, it doesn't really matter. I think they tone quite well with the old pinkish-grey commons to the right:


And even where one sees both old and new together, the new looks rather like our darker subfloor bricks:


But scroll up to the top again. They don't look like the photos from Austral, do they?

The New Roof

One of the unexpected and significant expenses of this extension is the complete replacement of our roof. When John and Robert demolished the kitchen, they discovered they were being rained on. Inspection revealed that the tiles were at the end of their lives, after 65 years. The builders tell me that the hot sun gets them in the end. I also wonder if wartime production restrictions might have produced lower-quality terracotta.

Last Monday, the tilers started work. They started tossing the old tiles off before breakfast...


...and were finished by the time we were ready to leave for school.


Then they had to remove the old battens for the sarking. Most older houses in Australia do not have sarking, but it improves insulation slightly (R=0.5) protects the house from leaks if a tile shifts, and improves the wind resistance of the roof. For those who aren't familiar with the term, it's another Scottish word that has made its way into Antipodean English. In Scotland, "sarking boards" sit on the rafters, and slates are fixed to them. In Australia and New Zealand, we put a moisture-resistant layer of fabric on the rafters, and hold it down with the tile battens. This is what it looks like from underneath:


Sarking and tiles are both visible below. The reason is a bit embarrassing. Apparently you don't ask Wunderlish for X amount of tiles: you tell them the area you need to cover and they send you the tiles. Except that they were short by two pallets, so the tilers had to wait a few days for delivery. I am sure they would have been finished in two or three days otherwise.


When I came home after shopping on Friday morning, the tilers weren't there. I wondered if they'd gone off for lunch, but no -- as I was unloading, the truck pulled up with another pallet of tiles! Either someone's measurements were out or Wunderlich's formula isn't that good! By the end of the day they were all finished and gone, and I was admiring the result:


Then the rain started, just in time to test the new roof!

After Rain, the Surprise

On Thursday morning, as the clouds rolled away to the north, my husband told me there was something next door I needed to see. Now. So I climbed the ladder and looked over the fence.


All I could say was "Wooooooooow!" Robert was up on a ladder, putting the finishing touches to their work. He turned round with a huge grin -- hadn't realised I'd spoken so loudly!
During all the rain this last week, he and John had been cutting the treated timber pieces to size and shaping the ends, so they were able to put the whole pergola up on Wednesday. Suddenly, the whole area has become graceful.


I could look at this picture all day!

Where do Builders Go When it Rains?

The start of this week saw some of Sydney's worst weather in a long time. When it stopped raining, it started pouring! People had to be rescued from their cars in several suburbs because of flash-flooding, and open ground turned to mud all over Sydney. I didn't expect our builders to turn up, as they plainly couldn't work on the roof in such poor conditions.

But they found a few other things to do. One I didn't realise would come so soon, but the bad weather made it a good time to cut timber under cover. More on that in another post.

It was a surprise to see they'd managed to put in our steps, as this area isn't covered. I suppose they did it between drenchings! They have also covered the beam over our old back wall with the bulkhead (the blue bit).


They also laid the footings for our two rainwater tanks. Hooray!

Starting on the roof

After the brickwork comes the roof framework. These trusses turned up late last week, and John and Robert put them up with great speed.


Our extension is really taking shape now!



I love the pattern of shadows here and looking up at the blue sky through the woodwork. You might notice a bulkhead framework in this photo.


Then there is more excitement as a truck with a forklift arrives...


... and unloads our new roof tiles, on a rainy Thursday morning!