The Fintelmansion

Some people dream of a house with a white picket fence, but any terrace house lover knows it has be to a wrought iron fence. Although not many iron fences are actually wrought these days, our version still beats the brick monstrosity we started with, and it looks wrought, so that's good enough for us. Site Preparation Even though it was devastating, we started by removing the old chair. As we all know, nothing says "classy home" like an old, broken chair on the porch. Extra points if that chair is a brown couch. We removed the brick wall and all the other muck including plants, mulch and dirt. The concrete path to the front door was removed using a crowbar and much elbow grease. For the footing of the fence, concrete was poured 300mm wide and 400mm deep. (We also poured a concrete slab 100mm thick reinforced with steel rebar for the veranda area - blog post to come on this!). When the formwork was in, but before pouring concrete, we ran pipes for all servi...

We decided that a beautiful finish to the front of the house would be a gorgeous window above the front door, fancily called a 'transom window'.  Similar houses showed that a leadlight design would be appropriate for the period of the house. Leadlights tend to be unique to each building, so we needed to find someone who could help us to both design the window and to make it. We found Carrie Westcott at Arcadia Leadlight who was absolutely amazing to work with. The process had 4 steps: Creating a design  Drawing up the design Crafting the window Fitting the window  Creating a design We had decided that somewhere on the front of the house we wanted to show the year the house was made. This is usually on a parapet, but we are sadly lacking in parapets, so we decided that the leadlight could feature 1888 as the main design. It was also a good way to be able to avoid those horrific kookaburra and gumtree designs that Australiana enthusiasts seem to treasure...

  These jobs aren't a big deal but they're big to me because I almost never do odd jobs around the house (Honeeeey... can you fix the door? Honeeeey... can you change the lightbulb? Honeeeeey... can you lift the heavy thing?) . This is partly based on the fact that Gary is already good at these things because he's done them all before, and partly because I'm a bit lazy at manual labour, and partly because girls often aren't encouraged or expected to do things like this. Dumb. Anyway, I'm taking charge of lots of little jobs that require not a lot of prior expertise and I'm finding them a good way to build my efficiency with skills that will come in handy for the bigger stuff, like learning how to use the power drill, measuring twice and cutting once, and getting used to jobs that have cobwebs nearby. I'm getting more confident and getting better at problem solving and taking risks. Here is a list of all my finest accomplishments: Door Handle ...