A Work in Progress

Occasionally Varian and/or I would have to drive back up to Ipswich to meet the builders at our house and go through with them, make various decisions..etc. Shortly after the floods one of the inspectors told me that as a father he was telling me not to come in the house again, that it was too contaminated. But after a few months of ripping everything out, sterilizing and rebuilding I too could go back in. Here are some shots of some of the rebuilding process back in April.

 

One challenge we had was picking out things separately. The builders had 6 tile combinations we could choose from. We really wanted a darker non-peachy floor tile so we went with this one. So we took a picture of it and then weeks later picked out carpet and paint colors we hoped would match.

 

The white tiles are for the shower, side of the bath, and splash tiles of the bathroom sink and kitchen. The smaller white square is the color of our cupboards, the smaller grey square is the color of our counter tops, the shiny silver bar is the edging of our kitchen splash tiles (nice and modern) and the feature little square tiles are a strip down our shower and down the wall next to the bath tub.

 

Carpets were sadly not covered by our insurance but luckily we found a nice man giving flood discounts and went with his company. We kept trying to take pictures of everything and hoped to match them from the photos and our memories. We hoped to replace our black furniture and hence the black flip-flop so we could see how the contrast looked. I really do like our carpets and I like the tiles, but my initial impression when they both were finally installed next to each other was that they didn't match. I had picture the tiles as being just a dark charcoal grey and that the carpets would be fine, but the former ended up having a brown tinge to it and the carpets more of a blue cool color tone. Both look great with the wall paint we choose, Frosted Ice (light grey) and our white trim, but when you stand in between the two you notice the discrepancies.

This giant skiff was placed in front of our house for months, ruining our glass and cement edging and filling up again and again with plaster and cupboards and everything else that made up the inside of our home. Meanwhile all our plants were growing wild and unkempt.

We paid extra to have the builders turn our garage into a 4th bedroom and as part of the deal had to go out and find our own bricks to match.

Jaren discovered his love of playing in the front seat (supervised) and it has been an obsession with him ever since. We'll have to drag him out sometimes while he stretches his hands towards the driver's seat and cries, "Car! Car!" Maybe one day he'll be a chauffeur.