2025 January continued

     The below photo shows the outlet for the rangehood which is above the stove in the kitchen. The black flaps open when the rangehood is turned on and let the air out. There is steel mesh which stops the bugs from getting in. We chose black as it goes perfectly with the black trim on our windows.

The below photo shows how the rangehood exhaust fits seamlessly into the side of the house.

Meanwhile we put a wall cabinet in the bathroom above the laundry tub, but instead of paying $40 for a door I used this piece of second-hand offcut to make my own door.

I cut a template out of paper based on the doors of the cupboards in the kitchen, so that it would suit the Bunnings Kaboodle Hettiche hinges.

I will admit I made a mistake with my first attempt at cutting the hole for the hinges, but then I turned the door around and cut the right version of the holes on the other side of the door.

Eventually I will paint over the edges and the hole, and no-one will be able to tell the difference between this and an expensive door!

Meanwhile I was trying to sort out a greywater system for the house. I drew up my own plans based on my research.

I thought that the area downhill from the house would be perfect for a gravity fed system, and then we wouldn't need to depend on an electric pump which would suck power, be noisy, and inevitably break after a period of time.

I spent months contacting all the local plumbers, but they all refused to install anything other than the usual septic system with a underground tank of stagnant water, and an absorption trench which would only get clogged with roots in a few years. Of course the system they wanted to install would also cost more too. I kept researching plumbers further and further afield, and eventually had a list of over 30 plumbers who either refused to do the job I wanted, or just never got back to me at all. Eventually I found a plumber who was new to the area, who said he was willing to do the job. Finally!

Meanwhile I kept myself busy making rustic wooden mini-fences which would make the edges of the greywater absorption area.

Eventually in July we had delivery of the greywater system, and were ready for the plumber to come and start work. The next bit gets very exciting!

 2024 November continued...

     The kitchen needed a rangehood above the stove, so we bought the bunnings wall cabinet which is specially made for rangehoods, and also another smaller cabinet to fit in the gap next to it. These cabinets were so easy to assemble that I could do it by myself. Here are all the parts for the small cabinet.

Here is the assembled cabinet sitting below its final spot.

Here are both the cabinets assembled, sitting on the floor.

There was an awkward mini gap between the cupboards, so we custom made our own mini spice rack.

Here is a photo of the box for the range hood.

2024 December - This photo shows the two cupboards after they have been screwed into place on the wall above the stove. You can also see the rangehood has been installed, it is the blue part with the white part above it. You can also see the silver flue which is coming out of the rangehood and exiting out through the wall to outside. You can also see the square hole which was cut into the back of the cupboard so the wiring could come through the wall. This will be a powerpoint that the rangehood directly plugs into, when the electrician comes back to finish the job. You can also see the black power cord from the rangehood sitting there ready to go. We can plug the rangehood in and use it if we want, we just need to run an extension cord over to it. You can see another square hole in the wall under the left side cupboard with wires sticking out of it, this is going to be another power point.

2025 January - The doors for these cupboards are ready to be painted.

Four coats of paint later, and the cupboard doors are now black.

We used the Bunnings Kaboodle Hettiche hinges, expensive but apparently the best ones.

Here are the three doors installed and looking great. You can see we have put some spices in our mini-spice shelf!

The final touch is the 'push to open' magnetic spring latch. We love using these and it means that the cupboard doors don't need any handles.

Next time I'll show the picture of the outside of the rangehood exhaust. Josh did an amazing job!

 2024 August
     After the bathroom vinyl sheet flooring was in place, it was now time to paint the walls. First I used masking tape to attach old newspaper to the vinyl sheet to prevent paint spills. Also cardboard was laid on the foor to help protect it. Then I used the angled paint brush to cut in all the edges, but only as high as I could reach up the walls. 

     Due to a bad knee I am unable to climb up a ladder, so I had to get Josh to help with the cutting in for the top part of the walls. Below you can see the part of the wall which is above the shower-bath.

     Then it was time for the first coat of paint, which is undercoat. The job looks awful at this point but that's ok because it's kind of meant to.

     The second coat of paint is the first coat of proper paint, and we used the same colour Twill that we used for the rest of the house. The paint we chose is able to be used in the normal part of the house as well as bathroom areas. You can see a lantern and a lamp in the below picture, as it is quite difficult to see how good the paint coverage as for each successive coat. The third and final coat of paint is the hardest as it is a very subtle visual difference.

Then in October I was painting the internal doors. We bought these doors from Bunnings. They are quite large and so I cleared the dining table and set them up on pieces of wood so that I could paint each side and the edges as easily as possible.

     First the undercoat - then the first coat of proper paint, then the second coat of proper paint, then a third coat just to give it a nice strong finish. Each coat needing time to dry, and then the door turned over to do the other side. And not forgetting the edges! As a contract to the Twill colour walls, the doors were finished with a black colour paint. These were very difficult to photograph, since they were at the same time very dark but very shiny!

     There were two doors which needed to be painted black, one for each of the bedrooms. Once the paint was finished, then it was time to add the hinges and the door handle, and hang them in their door frame. We actually only got one door hung at this point.

     Then in November it was back to finishing the bathroom. The basin, washing machine and laundry tub were all carefully placed, and the holes were screwed in the back of the basin vanity cupboard to match the water pipes coming in through the house walls.

     Then the S-bend for the laundry tub was connected.

     And also the S-bend for the hand basin.

     The bathroom is getting closer to finished!

      2024 June - now the stairs up to the verandah were installed, a hand rail was added. This was purchased from the tip shop a few years ago, kept for this very purpose. To obtain the correct height, Josh pre-poured a concrete stand at the bottom. The top was screwed to the corner of the house wall.

     Below you can see the detail of the concrete support.

     This made for a very enjoyable experience walking up the stairs onto the verandah, and also back down the stairs. Much better than the old metal box we had been using for a few years.

      2024 July - The bathroom floor. We had decided we wanted to use sheet vinyl for the bathroom floor. I didn't want the hardness and coldness of tiles, and I don't like the way the grout always goes yucky after a few years. We purchased this from a store in Casino, and after cutting it the correct size for our bathroom, we laid it on the living room floor for a game of Giant Checkers for a test. Josh won!

Then Josh laid the sheet vinyl in the bathroom ready for installation. 

     It was difficult to find information about how to stick the sheet vinyl to the waterproofing. We would have had a professional come and do the job but no one wanted to travel over an hour for such a small job. In the end the best solution seemed to be just using really strong double sided tape.

 December 2023

          Another job which needed doing was installing the internal doors. We tried to source second-had doors but none of the ones that we came across were the right size for our door frames. Josh bought the doors from Bunnings and he also bought a barn door installation kit as we had decided on a sliding door for the bathroom. The benefit of a sliding door was that you didn't need to have the room to swing open a doo. This would have created a problem, either inside the bathroom which meant there was no room for anything within that swing zone, or outside the bathroom.

Here you can see the door in relation to the whole room and the bedrooms beyond.

2024 March - the next door was one of the bedroom doors. For a hinged door, first you have to install the door frame. This was a kit from Bunnings which came with all the pieces of wood needed, they just needed to be cut to the right length. The door frame needed to be square and plumb, and since the door frame was a little twisted, packers were inserted at intervals around the door to make it perfect,

Here is a close up of the gap between the door frames with the wooden packers. These packers were made from offcuts of marine ply cut to size.

Below you can see the details. There is one piece of wood against the frame, then another piece of wood which is the door stop.

Then the door needed the hole cut in the right place in the right size for the handle to fit in. This door handle was another kit from Bunnings.

2024 April - Another job that needed doing was installing stairs to the deck. First the mini concrete slab (which had been poured into a wooden mould as a way of using the left-over concrete from pouring our footings holes) had to be moved over and buried a little deeper.

Then we got a stair kit from Bunnings which is a black metal support which is exactly the right size for 2 stairs. We got 2 of these. We checked all the Australian building regulations to make sure that the top step and the bottom step were all correct. The metal frame was attached to the concrete slab and also attached to the meta frame of the deck. Then two pieces of wood from Bunnings were attached to make the stair treads. This made it super easy to create stairs, and was pretty cheap too.

Also happening at the same time was more painting of walls. Of course this involved filling screw holes, sanding, prepping, cutting in and primer before the final coats of paint.

 2023 December

          Now that we had finished the bath install, it was time to finally test the hot water system. This had been installed 2 years earlier, in December 2021, when the plumber came and did all the roughing-in of the pipes. It had been patiently waiting all this time, and now was the moment of truth.

          So we turned on the taps and yes water came through - but not hot water. This is a special hot water system design that uses gas to heat the water, and instead of the normal method of igniting the gas by having it plugged into electricity, the actual water flow starts a thing which ignites the gas which then heats the water. Unfortunately this was not working with our system. We did some trouble shooting and first of all we discovered that the internal lithium battery had died. Luckily Josh had a replacement battery of exactly the same obscure size. But then it still didn't work! After some more investigation, it seemed that the problem was most likely that the water pump was not powerful enough to get the system going. Our water pump was quite a few years old and it liked to have its red error light on most of the time - probably not a good sign!

        We had family coming to visit for xmas and really needed a solution for this problem - so Josh took a quick trip to Bunnings to buy a new pump. Here she is newly installed.

     And yes! When the hot tap was turned on with the new pump, out came hot water this time. There is a lag of maybe 30 seconds before the hot water system starts which is a terrible waste of precious tank water. Also the temperature options are burning hot, freezing cold, and if you are lucky you'll get a couple of seconds of something in between the two and a lot of wasted water. Every time you turn the hot tap off and on again you have to wait another 30 seconds for the water to get hot again. This makes washing up very difficult too. I am very disappointed with this type of hot water system. Oh well. Here's what the inside of it looks like, not that I know how any of it works.

          In other exciting news, also in December 2023 we had air conditioning installed. I had imagined the outside box part would be sitting on the ground, and I had spent hours digging the rock-hard dirt under the house so that it was level, and covered it with bue gravel. But it turns out that it's actually better that the unit is installed on the wall, as it discourages rats from chewing the wiring, and snakes from coiling up in the warmth.

          We bought the system from Betta Electrical, and ordered it weeks in advance but still had a lot of trouble getting it when we were promised. We paid around $2000 and we were told that it contained all of the parts that we needed to self install. We were told by numerous people that the only reason that people get certified installers is for insurance purposes. But when we opened the box we discovered that it was missing a lot of parts needed for installation and that we had no option but to get a certified installer. This was the height of summer and rumour had it that all the installers were booked at least weeks in advance. Luckily we were able to get the local guy to come out and install it just before xmas.

          What could have been a relatively quick install straight through the outside wall, instead became a 2 day job when the installer insisted that the best way to circulate the cold air would be through the internal wall between the bedroom and the living room. Maybe he was right but this is such a small house it might not have made that much of a difference. So we paid the installer around $2000 which doubled the cost of air conditioning and made it so much more expensive that it sometimes is a little hard to justify the price. But then we tested it on a hot day, 39 degrees outside and 27 degrees inside. Lovely.

          The good thing about running air conditioning on solar power, is that you want to run it when it's hot and sunny. And that's when you get the most electricity! Another good thing about air conditioning is that it takes the humidity out of the air. So 27 degrees with high humidity feels hot, and low humidity feels cool. Also it stops your house going mouldy which is great. We have to make sure that we turn the air conditioning off around the time of day that the solar panels start getting shade on them, which is usually the same time of day that it starts cooling down anyway. Our other option is to run the generator for extra electricity, but we don't need to do that very often. Air conditioners these days are very efficient, with inbuilt inverters. And our system is also reverse-cycle, so in winter we can turn it on to warm up the house, and don't need to have other forms of heating. Only while it's sunny though!