Amazing Grace

We bought the house in Nelson Rd on Friday. There were two other offers, we increased our price and now it's ours! Or it will be after we attend to our finance and the building inspection. As soon as we had signed on the dotted line I started to have doubts - what have we got ourselves into, will we be able to manage the necessary improvements and preferred changes, is it too old, is the extension too ugly etc etc etc etc. I think there's a term for it, something like mortgagee's cold feet or something.

Claire and I spent today at Tarsha and Peter's strawbale house build. What they have accomplished as complete novices is nothing short of miraculous, except that there has not been divine intervention - it's been their combined commitment, passions and willingness that is inspirational. It's not complete yet but it's well on the way. What I took from today (apart from some aches and sore hands) is that really, if they can do that, we can manage some relatively minor renovations and landscaping.

So here's my list of things I'd like to do to our new house, in relative priority from high to low.

• Fence the whole block. Yet to research materials.


• Investigate need for cooling/heating in the house, including insulation options.


• Replace floor in kitchen/dining and laundry with recycled boards and polish them.


• Line ceiling in lounge room to be rid of the 1970's exposed beams, insulating at the same time.


• Repaint entire interior of house.


• Replace window coverings through whole house.


• Landscape and redesign the outdoor spaces, porch/deck, paths and plant drought-tolerant, bird attracting garden.


• Renovate the bathrooms, one at a time!


• Repaint exterior of house.


• Possibly knock out wall to WIR in master bedroom to make room bigger, build BIR along that wall and remodel bathroom putting door to bathroom nearer to bedroom door.

I had thought that writing down that list would help, but actually it's just made me feel overwhelmed! Think I'll stop now and go back to watching DIY videos on utube, they make it look really easy!