The grim side of renovating…

It hasn’t always been plain sailing and glossy finishes in this here renovation land over the past month,
and today was one of those grim days where things start to spiral downward fast…

It started off so well –
Today was the day work started on all the new flooring!
Eeek, I was so excited!

Due to an early morning vet check up for our dog, I managed to run ahead of our normal school morning schedule and arrive at our house about 45 minutes earlier than normal…
The vinyl layer just bet me up the drive and we were soon both under way with our morning tasks –
However, 10 minutes later, (while I was still busy admiring the work from our previous day and luckily hadn’t picked up a brush yet)
the vinyl layer came to show me something and the morning quickly went downhill from there.
Upon ripping up the old vinyl in preparation for the new vinyl to be laid this is what he found –

It’s not that easy to tell from a photo, but that there is a very damp, mouldy and rotten toilet floor 🙁 🙁 🙁
And just in case that wasn’t enough, the bathroom floor is looking (and smelling) almost as bad…

It’s even harder to tell in the bathroom because as you can see he uncovered another layer of vinyl underneath the existing floor. Mmmm tasty. But the floor around the bath is all water damaged.

So tonight, rather than having a nice finished vinyl floor in 3 bathrooms, I instead had to halt all progress, call my plumber back to come and check for more leaks, ring my builder to schedule him to replace the floors for us and just generally go crazy organising a change of schedule for the entire week…

Notice I said look for more leaks, not just leaks period.
Oh yes, this isn’t our first run in with uncovering both old and existing water leaks with this house…

First we discovered a water leak in Abbie’s bedroom wardrobe…

We found that pretty quickly because on settlement day the previous owner casually mentioned that we’d need the offcuts of carpet in the downstairs closet to fix up the carpet in Abbie’s room from an “old” water leak. Well it turned out that water leak wasn’t so old, and was in fact still leaking!
Yeah, thanks for not mentioning that earlier!!!

Then, during our ceiling plaster scraping marathon we noticed old water leaks throughout the house…

In the stairwell, in the dining room, in the toilet,
In Hannah’s room:

And the real doozy –
in the lounge, where the ceiling was completely knackered in places and the builder ended up having to replace two major ceiling panels… (About 2 days work!!)

That’s a light fitting, which must have been held up by the skin of its teeth…

The scale of the lounge ceiling damages and the builder at work…

Let that be a real lesson if you ever buy a house with plaster “popcorn ceilings” or “whisper”… it hides water stains extremely well!!

Then lastly, there was yesterday when friends of ours came to pick up a washing machine that came with the house and which we didn’t need, and we opened the laundry cupboard for the first time…

Ewwwwwwww – that there is a lot of fusty mould
Blerk!!!

The smell of musty mildew from the uncovered floors was overpowering today and we had every window in the place wide open to air out the house despite the rain.

It’s no wonder that with all these unseen water leaks about, that we’ve uncovered a lot of mould on the walls throughout the entire house.
I have scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed it all away while prepping for painting and we have used anti mould paint through the entire house.
So.not.cool.

I’m sure the house (and our health!) will be extemely grateful to us for getting these problems all sorted properly in the beginning before we move in, but one thing is absolutely not grateful and that is our budget.
Nope, the already stretched to bursting budget is not grateful whatsoever!!
Goodness knows where the money for this fix is going to come from, but it will have to come from somewhere because it all needs to be done…

I can’t believe that our pre purchase building inspector didn’t pick any of these up. It’s because they have been all extremely well hidden behind ceiling plaster and flooring and I get that, but it’s still annoying.

This week was looking so exciting too –
By Wednesday all the floors were supposed to be finished, by Thursday all the curtains were to be installed, and on Friday we are supposed to move in moving in.

Instead now the floors have been bumped over to next week so that on Wednesday the builder can rip out our bath, see what’s lurking behind it and replace the floors as necessary.
Plus the plumber has to now come about 4 times over the span of the week to block off then reinstall the plumbing. Ouch.
That means we won’t have a toilet, or a working bathroom upstairs for at least a week after we move in. Thank goodness for the small bathroom downstairs, even if it will be “fun” in the middle of the night.

Then there is the glitch with the curtains. I can’t even talk about that right now!!!
Nothing like all these things happening at the eleventh hour just to keep you on your toes…

But how lucky that we found the problem before someone sat on the toilet one day and fell through the floor!! heheheh….
And the painting is going extremely well – after some really long days we are right on schedule…
The house is looking more and more transformed by the day. I can’t wait to reveal some more rooms!
Bring on the finish line I say!