The living room is soooo close to being finished. For old time sake, let me show you a photo of the living room from when we first bought the house 5 years ago. Pokey is an understatement. The walls were made of fibro, the french doors were rotting and the floor was made of cold, ugly brown tiles. Glamorous.
We essentially knocked down this entire room and started again. This time we pushed the right hand wall out by 90cm, and pushed the doors back by another 2 metres. We crossed our fingers that this would be a big enough living/dining space! This next pic shows the new room mid-build. The walls are up and so is the gyprock.
One of the best things about buying a 1920s house are the high ceilings. Most ceilings in our house are 3.3m high, which is for the small front bedrooms and the hallway. However with a room this large, the high ceilings made it feel quite cold and vacuous.
For this reason we decided to put a false ceiling in a foot lower than the original ceiling. This also allowed us to put ducted air-conditioning in the ceiling. Then to add interest, we kept the ceiling high around the skylights and built a bulk-head around them. I think it looks pretty pretty.
We decided to go with timber bi-fold doors, rather than aluminium. You can read all about that decision here. As I have previously mentioned, renovations can be a great marriage tester! One of our more heated arguments came as a result of this door.
You see, we had to decide between 3 glass panels or 4 glass panels. I wanted 3 glass panels, as it meant we could have an access door – an access door is essentially just a regular door (see the door handle on the left?) This means we could just open that panel, without having to fold the rest of them back. 4 panels meant we would have to fold all the panels back to walk in and out. 4 panels would let more light in as they would stretch all the way across the back of the house. Three panels means the doors wouldn’t be as wide so we would need brick “nibs” either side. You can see who won the argument below…
My main point was that I didn’t want to have to fold the doors back every time a kid wanted to get in or out of the backyard. I am nothing if not practical! Here are the doors installed and painted gloss white. That’s one benefit of timber doors – you can paint them. You can also see the lowered ceiling and the bulkhead around the skylights in this shot. It’s starting to look like a real room!
There are so many details I want to share with you about this room. The skirting boards, the cornices, the architraves, the lighting and the paint colours! But I can’t cram them all into one blog post. I promise to discuss all the details with you as I keep blogging along.
Oooo… I’m so close to sharing complete room reveals! I can’t wait!
