It looks like I’ve set a new record for the biggest gap between blog posts. My excuse?
2020.
We didn’t get the classic version of the apocalypse here, but nonetheless it was a nice attempt. The local version of the Four Horsemen that rode on through in my neighbourhood were drought, catastrophic bushfires, floods and then of course pestilence in the form of covid-19. One of the Four Horsemen is traditionally the Grim Reaper and I think he snuck in at Horsemen Number 2 in this case, disguised as a bushfire and took out 3 billion animals across our east coast. Not to be outdone, Horsemen Number Four took his thing global.
I could rattle on for hours about the fall-out from those equine-riding nasties but lots of people have had a rotten year and there’s not much point whinging about it at length. On a more related note, I am going to have a little whinge about the people in the Blue Mountains doing major renovations because they’ve been working from home due to COVID-19, got a bit bored and then suddenly looked around and realised what they wanted to do the house. As a result it is very hard to get tradies. I had two carpenters who were lined up to do stuff, one on the outside of the house and another on small jobs on the inside and neither have turned up despite a few attempts over the last months.
Although it has been a crappy year the house build has progressed. The completed jobs were relatively small but they’ve made a major difference in making the place more civilised.
Paint and a Rustic Chandelier
The painting inside is finished. Well if you only count the walls and ceilings it is finished, there is still a bit of trim and some bits around the stairs to do. I used Feast Watson Liming White Floor paint on the walls because it is water based and I Iiked the effect better than their stain and varnish version, it was more subtle. I put it on with a sponge to keep it thin and did two coats.
The ceilings are Dulux Pearl Effect paint. I made up a custom colour using Moon Gleam and Gardenia Frost. The paint is not cheap so I cheated a bit, instead of putting on two coats I made up a standard semi-gloss paint in a matching colour and put that on first, then hand-brushed the pearl effect paint over that in a single coat.
Then the fun part started and I finished off my feature walls in the dining and office. I’m carrying through a variation of the colours that started in the bathroom which are a teal blue colour against weathered copper. The bedroom and dining feature walls are both rust effect paint, and the office has got a lovely deep ocean green colour.
I have developed a bad habit of tweaking the paint colours to something custom, often because I have some sample pots that I can mix in to get just the colour I want. I have written down the colour ratios and also kept a swatch on paper to take into the hardware store and match it if I need to. The office wall colour is mostly Dulux “angry ocean” but not quite – I cheered the ocean up a bit with a brighter colour in there, so it’s more like “moody ocean”. I love this colour, it’s behind my computer and is really restful on the eyes. My timber desk looks great against it too.
The “moody ocean” office feature wall, at different times of day. There are artworks and more shelves still to come in the office.
I also finished off my chandelier upstairs. It was originally going to be made of upside-down wine glasses, an idea I took from something I saw at a winery in Western Australia. I half built it and then left it for a while as I hunted around for some more glasses to add, then I realised how much the dust showed up on all the glasses. The chandelier hangs fairly high up and I’m no domestic goddess so regular dusting is unlikely. So I removed the wine glasses and went for chains instead (I bought them at Bunnings and spray painted one set into a more aged copper effect), and then added some vintage-style LED globes that I found at IKEA. I made it from an old iron meat-hanging rack. The hooks are still on there so maybe I could use it to make biltong…
Floors
Once the painting and chandelier were done, the temporary floor/ceiling in the middle of the void came out and the light flooded back in. Then the floating floors went in. I had been looking at using OSB (oriented strand board) or maybe splurging on bamboo. OSB is inexpensive but the labour in staining and getting the OSB to a finished product was considerable, so I looked into more finished floors. I gave some bamboo floor samples a scratch test and they didn’t come up well. I was surprised as bamboo is supposed to be harder than most hardwoods, so maybe it was the varnish layer they use on top which also gives it a gloss look – anyway the scratches really showed up.
I had ruled out laminate as I hate plastic anything, but I looked again into timber laminate and found an ecofriendly version that is also EO (low emissions) and it passed the scratch test with flying colours. So my floor is Villeroy and Boch laminate, their 12mm-thick Country range in Sheffield Oak. I bought the thicker boards as despite some patching the container floors were still a little uneven in the middle where the join is, and where the metal sections join the timber. The flooring was cheaper than bamboo and seems to be Border Collie pup proof, even when I throw the ball down the hallway and he skids sideways along the floor to catch it. Impressive.
I splashed out on 5mm thick recycled rubber underlay because it gets properly cold here and because the steel floor sections in the containers had been letting that cold come right in. The underlay has fixed that and the house is super cosy, the wood-stove heats it up rapidly. I have a reversible fan up on the 6m high ceiling in the void, to push the heat back down in winter, but I haven’t needed it at all. The whole house warms up nicely.
After floors comes the miracle of real furniture, and storage! I’m still working on both. A major moment of transition was getting rid of “the big chair”, a broken recliner chair picked up from the street which had been my comfy chair during the build. Now there is more than one place to sit. There is my dining nook, which sits under the chandelier and the tall north facing windows where the suns pours in. I’m getting a new dining table to go there, I decided it is time to ditch my faithful Fantastic Furniture student table and change it over for something extendable. Then I have added a sofa, whoohooo! IKEA to the rescue once again, because everything has to be 1yr-old-dog-friendly (ie no point buying anything expensive).
My next jobs are still numerous and include adding in white skirting boards, interior doors, deciding how to finish the sections (mid-wall) where the container joins are visible, finishing around the stairs, and adding in more storage including bookcases, a tv unit and finishing my bedroom wardrobe. Plus I have to add a balustrade upstairs where the void starts – I have a temporary timber one there at the moment that one of my disappearing carpenters had sitting in the workshop and loaned to me. I’m thinking of using wrought iron or something that will go with my chandelier. Then on the outside of the house there is still tiling and a balustrade to add to the deck upstairs and the rest of the Flame Zone cladding has to be finished, plus water tanks etc.
So what has broken lately?
There’s always something with this house. The latest is the INEX decking that I used because it was one of the few approved products for use in BAL Flame Zone and seemed to be a popular product. The decking boards are concrete-based and they might not burn but they weren’t properly tested for wear and they are eroding away, with foot traffic and wherever water drips on them. The company (UBIQ) went into receivership because their other products had issues too, particularly the weatherboard cladding that has gone onto a lot of local houses. It’s frustrating that we have to spend money on new alternative products to meet the strict bushfire regulations, but then when the products fail we’re stuck with it. Not impressed. I’m hoping I can patch the boards up since the wear is still shallow, then maybe put on a hardy masonry paint to stop them wearing away again.
Then there is a long story with the water imp that is apparently living in my house, that I’m not ready to talk about yet. It involves more than 6 months of no water coming into the house once the upstairs deck went on (and yes it had rained in that time, quite a bit, I think 300ml in one weekend was the record), then a new drip found its way in ON THE NIGHT THE NEW FLOOR WENT IN. What are the odds on that??
There has been a water theme in this house for a while, from the busted plumbing that caused an indoor flood onwards. I am wondering if I should put a hole in my roof where the water can come in and an indoor terrarium or water garden under it, so water can flow through the house like it clearly wants to…
Or I find a carpenter or builder to finish the outside cladding sometime soon (I wish) and seal this place up, and we test the mettle of this water imp.
More to come, who knows when.
Blue Mountains Shipping Container Home Project 