Renovating our house (part 3)

Today I did some work on the former garage. It was build by my grandpa some 30 years ago and he never finished the rough coating. Since I was young, there was only those ugly bricks. So recently, when I had the chance, I did some work on this part. It looks like not a lot of work, but it was a whole lot! I'm not a brick layer, so I had to teach myself. I think I did ok. Not great, but ok. I also finished the fence door. I painted it yesterday and today I put it back on hinges. I had to make a small warning sign with the inscription RINI! which means PUSH! in Slovenian. My asshat of an uncle pulled instead of pushing and he ripped the whole door out. So I had to redo it. I hope now he'll be at least literate enough to read RINI! and not rip out my door again. I'm tired of redoing it over and over. Here's the pics.

1 The garage wall like it used to be.

2 The garage wall after I put on the rough coating.

3 The fence door, finally back on the hinges.

[Photos by MKL, 2009]

Renovating our house (part 2)

Yesterday was a busy day for me. I was renovating our old house again. I want to show you some progress I made in the recent weeks. It's not yet finished, I have multiple things left unfinished, because sometimes I run out of paint or cement, sometimes I'm lazy, sometimes I have a bad allergy and have to be inside. Anyway, things are heading towards completion. Yay. So here are some snap shots of the stuff I did:

1 I had to sand down the old wood with emery paper. Took me like 15 min, the wood was old and had some sticky rasin. That was harder to remove, but I did it eventually.
2 You can see the recently sown grass popping out. I had to bring a lot of fresh soil to make the terrain even and nice. Once the grass is thick and nice, it'll be a nice lawn.
3 New coat of paint, I used a dark varnish (palisander color), because dark color looks better on old wood. And it really looks like new.

4 That's the pavement I've been working on for many weeks. The hardest was to dig out a long thin hole for the curb stone. Then putting all the curb stones in (it's like 20m long), add cement to make it firm. Then put a lot of sand in the whole area and the paving stones on top. Now I need to sweep some fine sand inbetween the rifts to make it complete.
5 The whole area where I put a lot of new soil on top and sown grass.
6 We added some new white stones on the road, made it even and strong.

7 I filled the hole in the wall. There was an old window, which I smashed. My grandma used to have chickens there some 20 years ago. I wanna clean up the whole place, from outside and inside. It's not yet finished.
8 You can see, I covered the old bricks with rough coating. I will cover the whole wall like that, make it even and in the end paint in white.
9 I built this fence, because my mum was afraid that deer will come into her garden and eat her bushes and roses. They really do that. The worst are the roebucks, who destroy small trees with their horns. We had this accident a week ago, that's why I had to build this fence. Yesterday I made the door (on the right). Today I want to paint it with a dark varnish as well.

Ok, that's it for now. I have to say, I worked whole afternoon yesterday and there was moments where I lost my patience. I hit my thumb 4 times with a hammer and every time it hurt more! So annoying. I cursed like a Serbian shepherd. During sawing, I scratched off some of my skin on my index finger. That hurt! Ouch. And last but not least, my hands were all full of varnish. At first, I was careful while painting, my strokes were very careful. After a while, I lost patience, wanted to finish faster and created a mess. Well, that's how I am. Not very patient. I like things to be done fast. Ok, more to come in the next days and weeks.

[Photos by MKL, 2009]

Renovating our house (part 1)

Today in the morning, we continued with the cleaning our house. This year my grandpa died and my mum inherited this big house where we already lived before. But now my mum owns it and we can finally remove all the things my grandpa liked to keep. Before he would not allow to clear up anything. And now, after 40 years of gathering everything it's literarly tons of trash to throw away. Luckily we have a guy from the neighbouring small town, who has a pick-up and for some small money, he comes over and helps us with whatever we need, be it driving away trash, bringing sand and cement and some other things. We're cleaning and renovating now for almost 5 months. It's so different than before and in my future posts I will put up some before and after photos of various projects I finished. Now there's a lot of things unfinished. Sometimes it's my hayfever preventing it, sometimes I'm lazy or sick of it, then again it's too hot or rainy. Nevertheless, we still did a lot, especially in March. Now I'm fixing the road and trying to make a pavement, a fence, paint all the old doors... Seems like just few things, but it's a lot of work. But somebody has to do it. Let's hope I have enough motivation to finish all that.

[Photo by MKL, 2009]