We’re now in the thick of the interior renovations to the Queen St house (the original house in front of the Greeny Flat). We started by knocking down the old brick chimney in the kitchen. Luckily there’s a quarry nearby which takes old masonry and concrete, crushes them and recycles them into new road base material so nothing was wasted.
The old brick chimney in the kitchen had served its purpose and was in the way of where we need a new door so out she comes.
Mind you this won’t be the kitchen for long as we’re removing one wall of the living room and opening it up to what will become the new kitchen.
The current view from our living room through to where the new kitchen will be.
As luck would have it, the wall we need to remove (that’s the brown framing in the photo above) is holding up about half of the roof so we can’t just tear it out. First we have to build temporary support walls (that’s the blue/green framing) on either side of it (only done one side so far) to hold up the ceiling and the roof while we take out the old wall framing and install a beam in its place. It’s an interesting puzzle figuring out how to do that without the roof collapsing in the meantime.
The other interesting piece of this puzzle is how to do all the work without damaging the beautiful cornices in the house. One of the quirky delights of this house is that, while most of it was fairly typical of post-war fibro cottages, they went to the trouble (and probably considerable expense) of installing gorgeous cornices throughout the house. This might be the nerdiest thing you’ll ever read from me but the cornices are actually the highlight of house. The following photo doesn’t do them justice but it might give you a bit of an idea.
Poor detail of the cornice in the living room.
This is the cornice in the living room and they are different and special in every room. We can’t match them or reproduce them so it’s fun to try to figure out how to remodel the house without damaging them.
I’ll let you know how it all turns out.
Cheers, Andy
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