On renovating (and otherwise pulling the house to bits)

I haven't blogged for a while.  I haven't really had any brain for it.  The main reason for this is because my house has been driving me nuts.  It's one of the things about being a stay at home Mum - you end up being at home.  A LOT.  Like, most of the time.  And it's not like I dislike being at home - I am, in fact, what could be described as a 'home body'.  But when you are home all the time, the little niggly things about your house are constantly in your face.  So whilst you're running around fighting house-upkeep-fires (aka - surviving your children) you may desperately be wanting to sort out X shelf or cupboard for fear if you have to look at it in it's current state you might start to scream.

And this isn't helped when you feel you don't have enough room to house all the people that live in your home.  Now, we have the standard three bedroom one bathroom home with four people and two cats.  Which should totally meet our requirements.  Especially when you consider that families of five or six would often cram into a little two bedroom bedsits back in the day.  So I get that this is a First World (and middle class) Problem for sure.  But it's still a problem for us.  Some people have larger space-for-sanity requirements than others.  Murray and I are these people.  We have always had an 'extra' room - even when flatting, so we could take time and space to ourselves.

Our home with one child was totally cool.  We had our bedroom, Etta's bedroom and a games room (office).  We planned for this.  This house was our five-year-one-child-plan house.  After being here for five years we would have been reassessing whether or not to have another child and/or move house.  But we got a bonus baby* and Auckland's housing market has gone bananas so now it's more like a ten-year-two-child-house.

So because we are staying here longer than anticipated and need this home to work better for our particular situation I came up with a solution.  We had a ridiculously large bathroom.  Our house was built for a disabled person and the bathroom was (I'm guessing) open plan to accommodate a wheelchair.  The only reason we'd have a bathroom that size now were if we put a friggin Jacuzzi in it or something**.  And because our bedroom is next to the bathroom, I figured we could use the extra bathroom space to simply create an annex to our bedroom via our wardrobe.

I stupidly forgot to take a 'before' picture, so just imagine that entire space behind the divider is also bathroom, cos it was...

And Abby could live in there.

When we got pregnant we did*** joke about Abby being like Harry Potter and having to live in a cupboard under the stairs.  And thanks to creative thinking, and some fabulous help we've managed to turn that joke into a reality. (Really that's one of the best perks of adulthood, alongside eating as much candy as you want.  Which I am doing while I write this post.)  Like most people we didn't have an extra many thousands of dollars stashed somewhere.  What we did have though was a mortgage to be renegotiated, so we just got a little top up to cover the renovation.

Being someone who has never been the grown up responsible for a renovation before the whole idea of this was a bit daunting.  Sure, I've done some stuff and watched some things at our bach working bees.  But other people were in charge.  I had no idea about what the actual big picture was, I just zone out, do the task appointed and hope for the best.  I never actually planned anything.  And you hear stories all the time of X person being screwed over by Y builder and the job never getting complete.  Or being charged way more than quoted.  Or being quoted way more than the work is worth.  Or having their house literally fall down around them.

Fuck that.

So I called in some help from a friend who (handily) co-ordinates this sort of thing for a job.  He didn't initially want to do the job for us as friends shouldn't work for friends (totally agree), and putting the job through his workplace was by no means the cheapest way of doing it.  But in the end he agreed to help out, and I am so incredibly thankful that he did.

Renovating a room like a bathroom is no simple task.  There is no way anyone who hasn't done it before, or who works in or with people in the industry could know what is involved and the order in which things need to be done.  Coordinating the timing of when builders, plumbers, sparkies, flooring dudes and painter/plasterers were needed in terms of where we were at in the build was mammoth.  AND I would have had to find all those tradesfolk myself and felt comfortable with my choices.  I am so thankful to have had someone I trust to be able to do that for us.

 The new wall ^

The amount of extra room we had in our bathroom >

Especially because I have anxiety.  From previous experience, I know having people in and out of the house is quite triggering for me - to the point where I can basically hide from them and forgo usual life needs (food, toileting, general self care).  Because I trusted my friend I trusted the guys working on our place.  And because of this my anxiety was quite manageable.  And I really quite loved the builders.  They were wonderful guys.  So much so that I actually felt sad when everything was over and I knew I wouldn't be seeing them again.

And it did take a while for all the little finicky bits to be done but now we have a normal sized bathroom and an extra Harry Potter room for Abby!  It feels kind of amazing actually.  But with reorganising this space has come the need to have a thorough sort out of our entire house.  So now I'm (slowly) doing an epic re-evaluation of all the things in our home: whether we need them or not and where they should live.  As someone said to me the other day, it's kinda like house tetris.  You move one thing thinking of where the next thing will fit, and the board is constantly moving.****

New bathroom!

 

 

Welcome to our Narnia ^ (mixing up our YA fictions here)

And Abby in her new closet home > 

And while this process is still in flux, much has been done.  I can walk into our games room now and there is actually open space against one wall (to be taken up by epic bookshelf, to get our books out of storage and the dining room - cos tetris).  I actually have ONE place for all the leads in our house, and despite having lost (temporarily) a wardrobe, due to a thorough sort out, we do actually have space available in our remaining wardrobes.  I have given away a lot of stuff and let go of the guilt of having to keep stuff.  It's been very cathartic.

And very good for my mental health.  I am definitely one of those people who is affected by their environment.  And while I have been told 'it (the cleaning) will never end, there will always be something making you crazy' and while this is to some extent true, I am still better for having much of it done.  Because the less stuff there is, the easier maintaining the stuff is.  The less crazy in my environment, the less crazy in my brain.  Sure, there will always be something to do.  But now the amount of somethings is less everything feels more manageable and I feel much more serene.

And with that serenity comes a bit more space for my brain.  So hopefully this means more posts.  I have had a lot going on, so there is so much I would like to write about.  I am hopeful you will hear from me again soon.

* Unplanned, but so friggin' lucky to have a healthy pregnancy that made it to term and turned into the little person that is our Abby.

** And while that'd be awesome, it wouldn't solve our space dilemma and our power bill would go through the roof which is no good for tight arse, frugal, save-on-electricity-as-much-as-we-can me.

*** Joke actually brought to you by Aunty Anne

**** And it's super addictive...  So hard to stop once you're in the zone!