When I last left off, we were busily prepping the kitchen for installation.

In early December, we got the floors all finished with a stain that blended well with the floors in the living room and dining room.

Ross Ambler from Ambler Joinery was on-site for two days working away with Ollie to install the cabinets.   There were a few hiccups but nothing that couldn’t be overcome easily.   The cabinets and sinks were finally in!

We were all blown away by the transformation of the kitchen.  It felt huge and it felt quite modern, a far cry from the old ‘bach-style’ kitchen that once was.

But no rest for the weary.   In the following week,  Bruce and Ollie installed all the kitchen cabinet handles,   installed the sink fixtures,  did the wiring for the undercounter lights, installed the range hood and vent, and cut some plywood as a temporary countertop since the granite countertops are not coming until the end of January.

It was no small feat to get all that done before the holidays set in.  The sink faucets proved to be a challenge as we kept purchasing the wrong parts which isn’t fun when the store is one hour away.

We also picked up our stained glass windows for the alcove and Ollie finally got them installed as well.

Then it was another week over the holidays to install all the shelving and wipe out all the cabinets and finally start putting things away!   Oh, my heart sings.  We have a gorgeous kitchen now, while not 100% complete, we’re about 90% there and it is totally operational and joyful to work in!

Here’s a try at some ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots:

Another massive (and perhaps the last) project to just about tick off the list!  Just the matter of getting countertops in, making the chopping block counter for the island,  painting the walls, figuring out a back splash, and finishing up the alcove.   All in good time!

You can see from the photos that we only had six small cupboards and the rest of the kitchen design was ‘open’, ie: we had stackable wooden shelves which served to hold all our pots, pans, dishes, cups, glasses and the like.      We’ve often had four to six people working in this kitchen and we always made it work.

But it was really time to make the kitchen the proper heart of our home.

And so when Bruce returned early from his overseas trip last July, I insisted that we make the push to get the kitchen done before the end of 2011.

Bruce met with an architect friend while in Los Angeles in May and Fro drew up initial plans which we really liked.    During July,  Bruce and I met with a joiner (cabinet maker) here in Christchurch and hired him to make the cabinets.  We selected our cabinet style (shaker style, light coloured macrocarpa) and granite for our countertops.

Bruce took Fro’s initial plans and fleshed out the details to come up with an L-shaped kitchen complete with double stacked upper cabinets.   We’re also having a center island made on castors and we’re extending the kitchen flow into the living room by having cabinets made next to the wood-burning cook-stove.    All up, I think we’re going to have a combination of 55 drawers and cupboards when it’s done.   Surely that should be enough for all our needs!  Considering we have no other cabinetry/closets in the rest of the house, we decided more is better.

In August we gutted the kitchen.  Ollie worked on taking out the hot water cylinder and Shacklock coal range which we never used.

Purple wired up new electrical boxes and Pete put in all the new plumbing.

Ollie worked on putting up a new partial wall and kept on gibbing.

It was a week of chaos as six of us lived in a house with what was now a sprawled out kitchen.  The stove and fridge remained in the demolition zone,  but the pantry and excess items got moved into the 3^rd bedroom and the kitchen work area shifted into the dining room.   The bathtub became the washing area.  So in essence, the entire rest of the house turned into a giant kitchen.   Truly a mess!

And then we left on our holiday for two months.

So now we’ve been back three weeks and the boys have been busily working away.  Bruce and Ollie finished putting up the gib.

Last week Ollie made huge progress in moving the kitchen window and opening the outside wall to build an alcove.   We decided to create a little extra space by putting in an alcove which will house all our ‘science’ projects:  jars and bottles in various states of sprouting, fermenting, drying, etc.   We’re adding in a few stained glass windows which should be visually lovely while also letting in a lot more light.    I purchased two six-foot long stained glass windows a few years ago on Trade Me for super cheap.  Some of the panes had cracked and these are getting repaired this week.  The woman at the shop said these were ‘mercedes’ windows and would cost about $1500 each to make now.  Go me!

This week has been sanding week:  the walls had to be sanded and primed and the kitchen floor had to be sanded, stained and left to cure for a week.

It’s a messy job and we did our best to seal off that part of the house so as to keep the dust out (and yes, that is Bruce wearing a vintage 1976 t-shirt which he still fits into!).

Oh the joys of living in a house that’s undergoing a massive renovation!

Cabinet Installation date -  December 13^th and 14^th.   Stay tuned!

So back to the heating project.   The project management schedule looked like the following:

• Phase 1: Demolition of existing infrastructure and installation of temporary stove  {March}  COMPLETED!
• Phase 2:  Opening up of kitchen/living room wall and installation of structural wall beam and installation of reinforcing beams in attic space  {April}  COMPLETED!
• Phase 3 and Phase 4:  Installation of hot water cylinders and some of the radiators  {May}  {June}  PARTIALLY COMPLETED just a wee bit!  {July}  Kind of COMPLETED!
• Phase 5a:   Installation of remaining radiators and piping {June} {July/August} {September} {December}
• Phase 5b:   Installation of Gourmet Cooker {July}  {August} {October} {December}

We were well behind our original schedule and Pete was determined to get the system working for us by Christmas.   His brother, Purple, an electriciany-sort-of-guy, came down for ten days to help out.   There was lots to accomplish.

1)  Movement of our external water tank.    Pete and Bruce decided that we should move our 2000 litre water tank (which fills from our spring) to a new location in order to get better water pressure/flow into the house.    Kat, in truly remarkable fashion, dug out a new platform amongst the trees in the upper part of the backyard for the tank.

Pete diverted water from our 25000 litre water tank (which fills from the stream) to the house while we worked on the moving of the spring water tank.   The tank was emptied, roped, and several of us dragged the tank about 50 metres into its new home.

Kat was bold enough to get in the tank and give it a good scrub as well as work with Pete to add additional fittings so we could divert water to various locales.

2)                  External replumbing of water pipes.   A trench was dug down the length of the backyard to put in water pipes from the newly moved water tank to the house.  Several different pipes were laid which would bring spring water to the house and to the outbuilding (for general water consumption, cooking, and showering).   Additionally, new pipes were laid to bring stream water to the house and outbuilding (for toilets and washing).

Bruce mapped out all the irrigation now laid around the property and it looks something like this.    Pretty scary, eh?   Still needs a bit of work!

3)  Internal replumbing of water pipes.   Walls were opened from the inside and outside to put in new pipes for the kitchen and bathroom taps and shower/bath.  We replaced the old steel pipes which were starting to corrode with newer plastic ones.   Additionally, new pipes were run from the hot water cylinder to all the new radiators in the house.

And Kat got on the roof one day to work on the installation of the hot water overflow pipe.   She’s a multi-talented gal!

4)  Installation of the new Gourmet stove.    The old stove was removed and the Gourmet stove installed.   Pete & Kat welded the pipes together that would circulate water from the stove up to the hot water cylinder.      We had our inaugural lighting of the stove on a hot summers day to burn off the fumes of the new stove.

5)  Rigging up of the electrical controls:   Well, I can’t profess to truly understand what all went on here except to say that Purple spent two full days sitting on a stool wiring up the main control box that would run the hot water heating system.   He and Pete also spent some time wiring up the controls in the attic at the hot water cylinder.

The control box is mounted on the living room wall so we can easily monitor the temperature of the hot water and thermal mass tanks as well as switch on any number of features like running the radiators, heating the thermal mass tanks, etc.

Purple spent another day drawing up a diagram of the system and gave us a one-hour “How To Use Your System 101” class where both Bruce & I took down copious notes.   The diagram looks like this.   It’s complicated!   So complicated that I’ll leave the ‘how it works’   for another post  – it’ll be a good review for me!

So the day of reckoning was now before us.  Six months of installing a system that Pete had never quite done of this magnitude and of which all the design details were firmly entrenched in his head.    The external water tank now filled, the hot water cylinder now filled, the stove hooked up;  it was time to test the system.

Firstly, with the new placement of the external water tank and new interior plumbing, the water pressure in the house is phenomenally better.   The shower is actually pleasant with good flow and the toilet cistern fills up about four times as fast as it used to.

Secondly,  the hot water comes out of the taps HOT!  Imagine that.   It used to be that you’d turn on the hot water tap and have to wait 20-30 seconds for the hot water to flow through the pipes and to the tap.  Now within seconds, we get VERY hot water.

Thirdly and most importantly, we flicked on the controls to turn on the radiators and within five minutes the radiators were humming along with heat emanating from them.  Oh my gosh, we may just have a warm house this winter!

So I’m a pretty happy gal.   Close to $40,000 later (almost double what we budgeted), we now have our heating system 95% installed.  We won’t fill and test the thermal mass tanks (four additional water tanks) until we finish putting up some cross bracings in the attic and in the kitchen wall.  We hope to get back to this in autumn.   In the meantime, we have our Gourmet cooker stove ready and at our fingertips, waiting for a cold day so we can fire it up.   We have plenty of hot water.  We have heat to all the bedrooms.

But wait, there’s more!

We finally got the washing machine installed and, after three years, I can now do laundry in Wainui.   No more carting bags of dirty sheets/towels/clothes to Christchurch!

And, and, we now have internet plugs in every bedroom in addition to what we already had in the living room!  Purple finished wiring up all the plugs and I can now sit in bed with my laptop and surf the world wide web at my leisure (why we don’t have wireless access is another story that you can ask Bruce about).

My life just got made infinitely better by these small steps forward.  Merry Christmas to me and thank you to Pete, Kat, and Purple for all the hard work they’ve done over the last year!

But the reality was we didn’t get too much rest with being in the midst of two real estate transactions and the small matter of an earthquake.    And so, we plodded along and things have been getting done.

Ollie, being the trooper that he is, has continued to come to Wainui weekly and has been focusing on the outbuilding bathroom renovation.   We have come so far!     The framing, re-shifting of the window, plumbing (thanks to Pete), gibbing, and gib stopping has been completed.   We had fun shopping at the salvage yards for our toilet, shower door, shower fixtures, bench top, faucets, etc and saved heaps of money by doing so.

We’ve been talking and scheming for a while now about doing a tile mosaic in the shower of a mermaid/sea theme.   Ollie’s done heaps of sketches and after several weeks of pondering, the crew has selected the final sketch and Ollie has now drawn it on the shower gib.   We have purchased boxes of colourful tile and I’m excited to apprentice to Ollie for the actual mosac’ing!    Stay tuned on that front.

Pete came up for three weeks and Kat followed shortly behind.  We switched Petes focus from the heating installation project to the outbuilding project.  Pete spent a week+ getting all the plumbing done for the bathroom and then spent the rest of his time working with Kat to finish the moldings for the middle bedroom.  It is complete and looks marvelous!   Just about ready for guests!

Friend Al came and spent a few days with us post-party and we had him help us with fruit tree pruning and general plant transplanting.   We had a big rose bush, maple tree, quince tree, and two large hydrangeas that needed moving and Al was the guy to do it.  Also, old man pear got a BIG haircut.   Al was amazing, navigating the gnarly arms of old man pear, standing on its’ limbs wielding a chainsaw.   Seven hours later, he trimmed a good six to eight feet of height off the tree and it is looking stunning just a few weeks later in its glorious bloom!

And somewhere in the midst of this group gathering we hosted two American woofers, Julie and Loren.   Julie’s a professional dog trainer and so we got some free lessons for Nina. Woot!   And when we weren’t practicing our lessons, I had the gals helping me in the garden, gathering seaweed and making compost!

The team has had the last two weeks off while Bruce & I shifted house and concluded our Clyde Road sale.     But we’re gearing to all convene next week and pick up where we left off!

Bruce, Ollie, and I found ourselves stuck in Christchurch for a week, making repairs on Clyde Road, while Kat and Pete head off to Wainui to continue work on the heating system.

Well, from a pictorial standpoint, it’s not going to look like a lot of work got done in those ten days, but from a technical engineering standpoint, heaps was accomplished.   Apparently the living room floor was laden with copious fittings and pipes which Pete fashioned and welded together and onto our Gourmet stove.  There will be four sets of copper pipes running from the stove up through the attic to the hot water cylinder basket and then throughout the house to all the radiators.  It’s quite a complicated thing to build, but Pete’s our guy to get this job done!

They also started connecting the hot water cylinders together.

And, the easy part, several of the radiators got mounted onto the walls.

So, all in all, a good round of work, but it felt, to me, like very little got done.  (I’m a visual kind of gal).  Everyone was starting to feel tired and in need of a break.   The group decided that Pete and Kat should take the month of August off as they had things they needed to take care of at home and we needed a bit of downtime to heal our weary bones and deal with our impending house sale.

So, the schedule slips even more, but hey, we’re actually staying warm through winter with the temporary stove, so we are in a better place than we were last year.  But here’s my latest guestimate of the schedule now:

• Phase 1: Demolition of existing infrastructure and installation of temporary stove  {March}  COMPLETED!
• Phase 2:  Opening up of kitchen/living room wall and installation of structural wall beam and installation of reinforcing beams in attic space  {April}  COMPLETED!
• Phase 3:   Installation of hot water cylinders and some of the radiators  {May}  {June}  PARTIALLY COMPLETED just a wee bit!  {July}  Kind of COMPLETED!
• Phase 4:   Installation of remaining radiators and piping {June} {July/August} {September}
• Phase 5:   Installation of Gourmet Cooker {July}  {August} {October}

Despite the schedule slip and a few dreary days, the sun came out for Kat’s birthday which we celebrated with bunches of bouquets made from the garden and a yummy cream-cheese frosting cake!    Life is still pretty darn good!

Ah, nothing like a deluge of rain and a slide into winter to put us waaaaayyyyy behind schedule.

I have failed miserably as a project manager <grin> as my original ‘guestimates’ for the heating installation project timeline has now slipped by a month or two:

• Phase 1: Demolition of existing infrastructure and installation of temporary stove  {March}  COMPLETED!
• Phase 2:  Opening up of kitchen/living room wall and installation of structural wall beam and installation of reinforcing beams in attic space  {April}  COMPLETED!
• Phase 3:   Installation of hot water cylinders and some of the radiators  {May}  {June/July}  PARTIALLY COMPLETED just a wee bit!
• Phase 4:   Installation of remaining radiators and piping {June} {July/August}
• Phase 5:   Installation of Gourmet Cooker {July}  {August}

We ended Phase 2 on May 7th and Pete, Ollie, and Kat were due to come back May 23rd for their next two-week stint.  But a huge storm front came through and dumped rain on the south island for a good solid week.   Roads were washed out and the days were just miserable.   The main highway from Oamaru (where Pete lives) to Christchurch was closed for a few days due to flooding and Pete was stuck on his property, not able to pull the trailer out of the mud and muck.    So, slippery, slide, work was postponed for a few weeks.

The crew finally made it up on June 7th and in between a long weekend trip back to Oamaru, a few days off to Christchurch, and some more inclement weather, the team managed to get about 15 days of work done in this three-plus week period.

Pete brought all the components of the hot water boiler system on the trailer and laid it all out in the garage driveway so he and Kat could finish up attaching the fittings and piping and Pete could get his head around the mechanics of the system.

The boiler system consists of five hot water cylinders:  one very large copper tank (about 300 litres), which I’ve aptly named Steampunk Sys (just look at the photo!) and four 200-litre plastic drums which Pete has fitted out with heat exchangers, gauges, and pipes which will run our radiators.  It all kind of looks like a pile of random bits and bobs, but I know that it will all be amazing once it’s up and running.       The whole system will sit on a big aluminium ‘drip’ tray which Pete fashioned together.   It’s going to be cool (er, I mean hot!).

So, work commenced slowly on the system.  In addition to putting together the cylinders, there was work to be done in the attic to bolt the beams into place.

Finally, we were ready to move the components into the attic and the only way in was through the roof.  So off came a part of the roofing iron, a planking system was thrown together, and with a bit of help from our Canadian woofers Erin and Mike, the crew carried, rolled, and heaved the cylinders and the drip try into the attic where they now sit strewn about until the next round of work.

Meanwhile, the rest of us do not sit idle!   Pete and I each did a trip into town to collect the other components of our heating system:  the radiators and The Gourmet stove.   The five radiators made it out in the van and the stove, weighing a mighty 450 pounds, got fork-lifted onto the trailer and hauled out by the 4×4.    Pete backed the trailer as close to the house as he could, and then six of us, slowly lifted and stepped, and lifted and stepped that puppy into the house.

My oh my, what a beauty.

As you can see from the photo, it’s twice the size of the current logburner we are using.   The Gourmet has a baking oven on the bottom and a stove top for cooking and we’re really looking forward to when we’re preparing full meals and heating the entire house from this classic stove!

And while Pete and Kat focused on the heating system, the rest of us did other things.   Ollie continued work on the outbuilding bedrooms and we enjoyed the company of three woofers for a week.  Cathy, a traditional Shamanic sound healer from Wales, spent a week with us, giving each of us two rounds of 1 ½ hr individual healings.  This coincided over the weekend of the full moon eclipse which was very powerful.  We all bundled up and went to the meditation centre in Akaroa for a full-moon meditation and then celebrated the 11:38 p.m. eclipse by belting out our best howls from the front porch.

Erin and Mike, our Canadian woofers, spent ten days with us.  In between downpours, we managed to transplant 40+ strawberry trees into the upper paddock, collect many buckets of cow manure, weed out parts of the lower paddock, prune the hedges around the porch perimeter, and dig in a leaf mold bin, along with making curtains for their van and whipping up many, many delicious meals.   We all also were treated to using Pete’s new foot spa!

We also had the privilege of celebrating Canada Day, on July 1st and were treated to a traditional meal of poutine – a deep fried french fry dish covered with cheese curds and gravy.  Hmmm, the perfect winters’ day staple, though we did try to make it somewhat healthy.  We also gorged ourselves on pancakes and Canadian maple syrup and learned to badly sing the Canadian national anthem.

We love the team!

“Phase 2:  Opening up of kitchen/living room wall and installation of structural wall beam and installation of reinforcing beams in attic space  {April}”

This was going to be quite an undertaking.  Pete hauled up five steel beams on the back of his trailer:  three to be used to frame and brace the wall between the kitchen and living room and two to be put up into the attic.  It took five people to lift the beams off the trailer!

We were a large crew this go around with me, Bruce, Pete, Kat, Ollie (who is a builder friend of Pete’s and whom we met at Easter and who happens to have just moved up to our neck of the woods), woofers Krista and Stephanie, and friend Hippie Tim who came for two days to help, and lastly our San Francisco friend Mei who arrived during the tail end of the week.

Task 1: Tear down the wall!   Pete, Ollie, and Kat were the work crew for the first few days and they took down most of the wall between the kitchen and living room.  We opened up the wall on one side about five feet and opened the wall up to the ceiling about three more feet.  What a difference it made in the flow of the space.       A couple of 2×4’s were erected to brace the ceiling during construction.

It’s amazing to dismantle a house as you get a glimpse at some of its secrets.  When we took off the gib board that was lining the kitchen wall, underneath were preserved weather boards from the existing exterior of the house.  We’d suspected that the kitchen had been an ‘add-on’ at some point, and now those suspicions were confirmed.

Task 2: Pete worked on the beams as he had to weld on metal plates to which some very large bolts were going to be fastened.  Meanwhile Ollie dug out and framed up the holes in which the two vertical beams were going to be cemented into place.

Task 3: All hands on deck!  It was time to move the three beams into place and it was going to require all seven of us to work together to carry them into the house.  First came the lateral beam which, once inside, was held temporarily into place by a pulley system.

Once latched on, we all then lifted and hoisted and lifted and hoisted to bring the beam up about nine feet.

Next, it was time to bring the vertical beams in and put into place.  These were a bit lighter and shorter but still took six people to carry into the house.  Getting them into place took a bit of finagling as we didn’t have a lot of leeway to maneuver them.  But we did it!

Now it was time for the most ingenious part yet.  Pete constructed a dual jacking system whereby he could slowly jack the lateral beam up to the ceiling.  Ever so delicately, like a lovers’ dance, he knelt on the ground and cranked one side and then the other, back and forth, as we watched the beam move ever so gently higher and higher.  It was truly a fascinating feat.

The lateral beam was then bolted on to the two vertical beams after some wiggling about.
The next day Tim and Ollie mixed and poured the cement into the vertical beam footings.

Task 4: Ollie and Pete then gibbed up part of the wall around the beam and re-adhered the molding.  Ollie also did some gib stopping (plastering) on the new walls.

Task 5: We were running a bit behind schedule, but one of the last things to do was to move the remaining two steel beams into the attic space.  These beams are going to be used to brace our three hot water cylinders which are to be installed in the next phase.

Now these steel beams are about eighteen feet long and required five of us to move.  The only way to get them into the attic was to take off part of the roof and slide them in from the back lawn.   Behold the power of Pete!  One, two, three.  We carried them from the driveway to the back yard.  With Pete balanced on the roof, the remaining four of us heaved and hoed and shoved those beams through that hole.   Truly amazing!

I really was in awe of the work we did this go round.  We had a great crew and had a great time and the universe blessed us with a double rainbow on the crew’s last day on site.

Go team go!

This house is extremely cold in winter (partially due to the lack of wall insulation which we plan to remedy) and the existing fireplace, in it’s brick encasing, does not put out enough heat to warm the house.     During our year-long meetings with our architect, we’d researched various heating systems and decided that we were going to install a cooker-heater wood burning stove, called The Gourmet Cooker,  which would be powerful enough to heat the house through a boiler/radiator system and heat our hot water for domestic household use.   This is accomplished through the use of two or three hot water cylinders which will be stored in the attic space directly above the stove.  When in use, the stove, which is encased with a hot water jacket, will heat water and distribute it to radiators in all the bedrooms, living room, and bathroom.    It will also heat up the hot water cylinder for our showers, laundry, and dishwashing needs.   When not in use (in summertime), we plan to heat our domestic hot water via solar panels or by normal good ol’ electricity.    And another virtue of this stove is that we can cook in/on it! (it’ll look like this when we finally get it:)

So, given that we can only work on this renovation part-time, we need to do the heating installation project in phases.  And as I see it, it’ll go something like this:

Phase 1:  Demolition of existing infrastructure and installation of temporary stove  {March}  COMPLETED!
Phase 2:  Opening up of kitchen/living room wall and installation of structural wall beam and installation of reinforcing beams in attic space  {April}
Phase 3:   Installation of hot water cylinders and some of the radiators  {May}
Phase 4:   Installation of remaining radiators and piping {June}
Phase 5:   Installation of Gourmet Cooker {July}

Time will tell whether my project management guestimate skills are on target or not.

But back to Phase 1.    The first task to accomplish was to remove the old fireplace (easy peasy) and take down the chimney (relatively easy peasy).  The brick chimney, Pete noted, was held together by clay and not cement which meant that it could be easily taken apart by light chiseling.  Purple, a chinese astrological monkey, climbed onto the roof and onto the chimney.   As the photo above shows, this was not for the faint of heart yet Purple climbed around like he was only inches off the ground.

While Purple was on top, chiseling away, and dropping bricks down the chimney, Bruce & woofer Brian were down below in the living room, with a wooden board over the fireplace, waiting for a batch of bricks to drop.  Then, voila, wooden board removed, and bricks available for wheelbarrowing out the kitchen onto the lawn.  This little dance of drop and haul took a full eight hour day to complete.   What was left was a rather large enclosure, large enough we joked, to potentially be a wee little bedroom!  And a whole pile o’ bricks, hopefully to be used as paving in one of the future projects.

The next day, it was time to remove the built-in furniture and finish demolishing the wall which had encased the double chimney.  This meant taking out part of the wall in the living room and one of the bedrooms.   Pete and Purple went at it all day, sawing huge chunks of the wall apart.   In the end, we had a very nice wall opening from one room to the other!

Over the next few days, the wall got reframed and insulated.  They put in additional electrical plugs and internet sockets.  And eventually they re-gibbed the wall.

Lastly, the new flue was installed (probably a good 30 feet of it) and the temporary stove was put in and tested that night.  Hmmmm, warm and toasty!    And a wonderful feeling of accomplishment for Phase 1.   Till next month……  {before and after photos:}