The Fintelmansion

Our verandah tiles are by far my favourite part of the house. A lot of terrace houses have room for a small garden at the front but ours doesn't, so I knew the tiles were going to provide the wow factor for our front 'yard'. After about one second of deliberation, we decided to go with a traditional tessellated  pattern rather than a modern pattern so we trawled the fancy streets of Carlton for designs we liked. We took photos of these to a couple of tile-laying companies and they were able to translate them into designs that suited our house perfectly.  For once, Gary agreed with me that this wasn't a job that we could do ourselves to a good enough standard so we had professional tilers do (most of) the work and the results are absolutely breathtaking, if I do say so myself. And I do. Daily. Read on to learn about the process or just scroll straight to the bottom if you love a good before and after bonanza.  Laying the Foundations  We had  alr...

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...