Next step

these are my miracle workers- Rob and Nicki. they see through the external appearances and know that with perseverance, time and lots of "no more gaps" a hovel can turn into a mansion

this is Nic who painted the roof with Emerclad, a membranous sealant for the roof

this is the house after sealing and painting the roof

the view over the dinning table into the lounge room. the wall on the right at the end was the one that had all the wall paper hanging off and the sludge dripping down the front wall above the window

this is the lounge room, now used in the way it was ment to be used. The floor is Lino boards glued onto MDF underneath. Window pane was replaced with 2ml glass as the rest of the panes were. this was a problem in itself as today 2ml glass is not used in windows but had to be used in this case as the beading around the frame could only fit a 2ml thickness.

The wet area

This was the most dreadful area of all the house. Apart from the fact that there were no doors on either the bathroom or the toilet (yep, truly!) there was water running between the walls of the kitchen and the laundry and the floor was wet when it rained. It also rained from the top of the doorway. There were no lights in either the toilet or bathroom aswell, probably because of the water problems. The missing bricks from the outside wall were replaced and amazingly stopped the water from entering the bathroom. The timber around the window in the bathroom was rotted and the panes of glass were held in place by green sticky tape and one pane was completely missing. The toilet stunk to high heaven and Rob emptied a whole bottle of bleach on it before the smell was finally gone. The toilet can now be used without any problems.
The floor was concrete covered in vinyl and once the vinyl was removed the concrete peeled off in layers probably because it was always wet underneath. Rob shovelled the top layers of the concrete off to try and even it out.
Tiles were missing off the bathtub and off the wall and you had to be very careful in order not to knock the wall so the tiles wouldn't fall off.
The bathroom was a later addition to the house and none of it is level. The door frames are not square and are misaligned and rhomboid in shape rather than rectangular. That's probably why there were no doors on them.
The walls were moldy and dirty with cracks and breakages everywhere.
* rhomboid= A parallelogram in which adjacent sides have different lengths and which does not contain a right angle. That is, a parallelogram that is neither a rhombus nor a rectangle (and hence also not a square).

step 2

this is really the state the house was left in. I had already taken out 2 big bag fulls of rubbish when i realised that I should be photographing the way things were left.
some cupboard doors in the kitchen had been ripped off and thrown out onto the pile of rubbish out the front. I retrieved these and Rob fixed them and put them back on. internally the cupboards smell of mould and need airing and drying. externally the kitchen is in ok condition and apart from a good clean doesn't really need any major work done to it at this point.
this is the state the lounge room was lived in. yes, it was used as a bedroom. the wall paper was peeling off and a huge tarantula lived underneath it. the carpet stunk incredibly. we found a syringe between the carpet and the wall.

step 1

Take one heritage house that has gone to rack and ruin add TLC, workers and dollars and follow the story in this blog


this is the way the house was left by the vendor. shows in one photo how much he cared for his home. this pile of rubbish had to be removed for starters.

this is the backyard. big and over run. a forest of weeds. there are faeries at he bottom of this garden. he he he!

back of the house. door has been broken off. only one window in the whole house was not broken. this was not it.

by the back door. the timber was in very poor condition not just here but everywhere. guttering is just hanging off the roof, does not actually do anything because it doesn't catch the water because it's upside down.