I have been poking around this forum for some time but i think it’s time to start telling my tale.

Our renovation/extension is underway after nearly 10 years of planning. Much has been learned and many mistakes have been made to this point and lots of money has been wasted. However, we have also had some wins and fingers crossed we will have something pretty special in less than six months time.

So what’s this 60 thousand dollar step all about?

Well....... it all starts with an inner west Edwardian built at the turn of last century, anyone EVER uses the phrase 'they don't build em like they used to' with me again, and I'll get quite cross. The majority of homes built before the invention of the nail gun and KDH were crap, rubbish, a hotch potch tin shacks covered in lathen plaster. Not to mention the even dodgier remedial work done on them in more recent decades.

60 thousand dollar step?? getting to the point anytime soon?

Ok from day one ,when our second shot at getting a design together, we were told that because our house was so low set (ground clearance zero) we would have to have a step into any new construction. NO we don’t want a step...hate it .. we want a seamless transition into our extension.

OK you will have to have a Slab

Didn’t like that idea but slowly warmed to it, but it would be cold in winter ...right? Ok lets heat it then, along comes Hydronic heating. NICE...... and expensive. Right now what floor covering shall we go for? Tiles ...nah too much maintenance, carpet? yuck, timber? ...doesn’t play well with a heated subfloor.....POLISHED CONCRETE? NICE..........and VERY expensive.

Our contract still has a note on it that states if we decide to ditch the slab, go with stumps we will get an 8k credit...and that includes over 60sqm of tassie oak. So I'm guessing you all have worked out by now how expensive that little itty bitty step in the hallway would have saved me.

Before anyone chirps in with "why don’t you' let me counter with I know I know...I'm nuts. All things considered we are very happy with the decisions made and are going to end up with a pretty high spec home that we intend to live in for a very long time.

That’s the planning done, next comes the build, which has been underway for seven weeks now. Lots to tell but i need to take a moment before I write about the budget carnage that was day one... unless you all want me to stop.

No... keep going... you got me hooked.

HHCIB

Is it a step that's 60 thousand dollars, or is it the whole slab AND timber flooring??
Unless there will be no slab ... I am not quite following , too many options, what have you settled for in the end??

Ha Ha you sound like us. We wanted one more room, we have ended up doubling the size of our house and spending A LOT more than it would have cost for one room!!!
However like you it is our very long term house so we are doing it the way we want to and for us, not for immediate profit.
So what happened on day one???

Right. In the early stages of planning we were considering living onsite ...oh thank whatever god you pray to we jagged a rental close by (but only for 4 months). Much of our old house was to remain, it just needed a quick restump and we would be back in in a week......right?

WRONG

Our expectation was to bring up the carpet, the restumpers would lift the floor along the bearers carefully with a mind to putting it back down, all to take about a week and around 8K.

WRONG AGAIN

I vividly remember that 1st day in early June. The uhohs and mmmmmms just kept coming. To cut to the chase we not only had a nice lake under the house ...we had more stumps down there than station pier, and very few of them had anything to do with holding up the house. In one hallway section alone there was 30+ stumps, every single one had over 5 cms of packing on them. The whole house was hanging on the chimneys, its a wonder it hadn't fallen down. Add to that the joists were cut in the middle of both rooms, bearers didn't make it to the end walls and some corner stumps were missing....my 8k restump job turned into 20k's worth of a whole new subfloor. Add to that the need to put down yellow tongue (so we can move our furniture out of the back yard and back into the house) and the need to buy a new finished floor and you get the picture of how a budget can be shot to pieces in the 1st day of battle.

While all this was going on I was merrily demolishing the back half of our house, uncovering just how awful extensions were built in the 50s to the 90s. I am so glad we are going with a quality builder who has a good rep because I would hate waste my hard earned on the crap that previous owners of my place paid for. I managed to sell a lot of stuff on ebay, windows, door ...the kitchen all in an effort to be eco friendly and recycle. If I ever do this again ...the planet can kiss my arse.... I'm getting in the bobcats and it can all go to landfill. By the end of 2 weeks I was so sick and tired of lifting heavy things, trying not to break a cupboard that someone had paid 20 bucks for... and waiting hours for the weirdest person I have ever met...to come and pick up a washing machine.

The next adventure was the site cut. Fifteen hundred i budgeted, its a flat site with great access, there was a bit of concrete but no other real surprises. HA I really hadn't learnt much from the first smack this house had given me had I? The cut was contracted to be 100mm down from the final floor height, site manager then asks for 200mm then 300mm. A query email to my project manager was met with a SHOUTING EMAIL response with lots of red text pointing out that the site cut was my responsibility and 100mm was followed by the word approximately. Hmmmmmm in my view a 200% increase isnt approximate at all, but in the interests of keeping things moving I let that slide. And SLIDE they did ....because we hit clay....and lots of it. Slippery, hard to dig out and more expensive to dump turning my excavation budget into my builders approximate math. Yep over 3K later I see the end of the tip trucks.

Ok I'll go have a lie down now.... I have had some wins and lots of positives as well re the budget but I'll save them for a happy post soon.

LOL, and you've only just begun. Reading your post sure brought back memories. Our journey is nearing an end and I still have my sense of humour, just.

If I had my time over, I'd do it all so much differently but that is is beauty of it all. You love and learn.

Oh it brings back memories of our first reno I loved the end result but getting there almost sent me crazy. Can't wait to read the next installment

Hey Screen

Keep going with the blog on your extension. Love it.

I can laugh at your pain as ours is just begininng. Like one of the others said. You start with one thing and it gets out of hand. We were just going to extend two rooms. When we are finished there will not be one thing original inside or outside the house

And of course the minute the builder knocked out the back wall of the two rooms, the rain started and hasnt stopped.

Hope it goes well for you.


Caz

Just a quick post as an update.... we have a slab as of thursday YAY!! Now we get to sit and twiddle our thumbs for two weeks while it cures..... you reckon a blowdrier might help? Anyhoo heres a pic ..its a big lump of concrete....

first pic of our project

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Gee wizz I would have expected at least one comment re my very attractive slab. I mean just look at it, isn’t it gorgeous, well who calls their baby ugly anyway.
Right well the thing has been down for nearly a month now so it should have cured quite well …. Should have come up with a cure for cancer by now me thinks. It’s at this point ..perhaps I’m slow… where we have realized builders of renovations/extensions have their clients by the ball bearings. We have no kitchen, no bathroom, no toilet, or anything resembling civilizations accumulated definition of shelter these days. There is every chance we will be moving back in in less than 8 weeks and yet the site is as quiet as Julia’s fan club. There has been some progress, the frame was started last week.

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We got sooooo excited expecting to be at lockup in maybe 4 weeks. Still haven’t learned anything have we. Things ground to a halt because the steel hasn’t arrived. Why? Cause they just ordered it!
Here is where I get a little cross. If I were owner building this I would have expected delays because I might have failed to think of something like this..pretty sure I wouldn’t have though. So now we wait while they dig up the ore whack it on a train, haul it over to port Kembla, go all harry potter on it, make the hard stuff and post pack it to my builder sometime next decade.
What I have been up to is way more fun that watching the concrete cure, I’ve been vacuuming out our roof, yep im nuts. Over 100 years of dust, vermin and , did I mention dust. In some places it was over an inch thick! Our old house was always dusty and while crashing around in the roof I have discovered many gaps to the rooms below. After sealing them I will replace the batts and put down some ply, we have an attic ladder and the usable space up there is great.

Anyway its back to watching concrete dry and dreaming of that mystical magical state of mind called ‘lock up’.

Whoa! What a journey! Lovely slab

Glad you have a slab and a frame. Very Nice. I know a few boys up north, I will give them a yell and tell them to hurry up with your ore. Keep it coming - Loving it

It's a very nice slab. So neat looking.

Let me make a coupel of comments.

1) I don't think a concrete slab is cold. Actually, it's probably the most thermally comfortable construction you can have. The ground under the house is about 17 degrees all year round. That's a pretty nice temperature for one surface of your house. (It's even better if you insulate the edges.)

2) Hydronics work well with timber. That is what I've got.

Yes we are having slab heating some of which will be covered with floorboards, the majority though will be polished concrete, see my first few posts. We are about 2 weeks away from laying the top layer of concrete making the slab almost 300mm thick! talk about thermal mass lol.

So an update for this week which for this renovator is another way of saying what went wrong this week

The frame is all but finished, but on friday our elation that the roof trusses were up turned to a twisted up ohhhhhh noooo when we checked out the bathroom. Ceiling heights all wrong! At 1st it seemed like an easy fix untill i noticed a beam holding up the main roof went through our ensuite and robe at the lower ceiling height. I stewed on this over the weekend steeling myself for a fight on monday, at least I had the contract on my side. Mondays meeting went quite well as most of what was wrong was an easy fix. The complication was in the ensuite/robe area which partially includes the old part of the house. To cut a long story short I was forced to accept a lower ceiling height to accomodate ac ducting.

Roof next and the weather looks awesome for the week... looking foward to not caring what the rain gods are up too!
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you write like you talk I'm sure, so funny!

and I had to laugh at this line you said above:

If I ever do this again ...the planet can kiss my arse.... I'm getting in the bobcats and it can all go to landfill. By the end of 2 weeks I was so sick and tired of lifting heavy things, trying not to break a cupboard that someone had paid 20 bucks for...

I know exactly what you mean. I recently finished a renovation of 130yo home near Ballarat and we had to restump first - I smiled when I saw your $8K estimate . Much flooring came out of mine too - cheap early century reno's!!! A lot of it was 2nd hand materials, very common in old homes, during the war they didn't have much new stuff going around, anyways, I remember a woman standing there chatting to me about something oneday and pointing to my timber which I was about to set light to saying, "Oh, why don't you just put it out on the road with a sign saying "free to good home", someone will take it".

I looked at her, as the timber was going up in flames, and said "oh yes, I should have done that" thinking to myself, "why don't you do that lady, I'm over it!"

You probably get what I mean!!!

(btw, your frame is up in quick time, shame about the roof height problem, as you've probably learned by now, you will find these things from time to time, no one takes the blame, but we must move on with the project!!) well done!

Wow, that looks like a fantastic frame structure, that's going to be one nice looking extension!

Thanks for the positive feedback. Its a good looking frame on a sexy looking slab, they always say good looks come from good bone structure...is it wrong that i'm trying to come up with a woody pun.....over my wood? I'll quit while i'm ahead.

I must say how happy I am with my builders chippie! What you see there was built from scratch, and in less than a week too. I followed a truck along the freeway the other day with someones frame on it. Prefabbed in a factory with crappy thin timbers, plate nailed etc.I know I am paying nearly double by extending and not new building.... but even despite the grief this old house has given me, I'm feeling pretty smug right about now.

Don't worry ...I'll get over it...the next cost blowout will knock me off my perch

Looks great! Love the roof line at the back.

Most of the roofing iron went on this week and most of the guttering. The guttering has created its own unexpected problem...with the neighbours. The issue stems from a boundary mistake that a site survey uncovered whereby new fencing was in the wrong spot. For us to build on the correct boundary our south/boundary wall had to sit 40cms further into their personal space. This was all discussed prior to starting and everyone agreed on the plans. Also we love our neighbours and our design from day 1 took them into account, we wanted to increase privacy and minimize overshadowing. As the structure has gone up the realities of what the wrong boundary line means have become more apparent. The bridge too far has been the guttering, and I do agree with them. Even though it is to plan and sits within our boundary, aesthetically it looks wrong. We have asked the builder for a solution, maybe a box gutter to internalize it, just waiting on costings.

Waiting,,, that seems to be the renovators curse