Crawling Around In My Roof and Underneath The House Has Helped Reaffirm I Love Being A Developer

How is that for a mouthful titled post? The renovations in our house have well and truly started. We are starting with the kitchen which is a common renovation area of the house.

As you can see the entire kitchen has been gutted, stripped back to its bare frame. The mantra of "buy the worse house in the nicest street" is something we bought into when we purchased this home two years ago. The price we paid is about $200k less than the average in the street, but it's a house built in the '60s.

This is what the kitchen looked like before. This is not the whole area we had removed, but it's the main kitchen.

One of the biggest hurdles with the house is the fact its asbestos. The mere mention of the word is enough to make many tremble with fear. The first thing we had to do was get a specialist asbestos removal company to come out and strip away the old cupboards and sheeting on the walls because you can't drill or disturb asbestos in any way without compromising the house with loose fibres.

Almost $3k later (including disposal costs) the kitchen is a blank canvas, but none of the real work has yet to begin yet.

After the sheeting was removed, the next step needed was to fill in a doorway going into the kitchen. We are putting in a U shaped kitchen, and previously you could walk from the backdoor through a doorway into the kitchen. This needed to be filled in with a stud wall.

Originally, we were going to go with a carpenter to do this for us, but my wife's dad is an engineer and quite good at DIY. So, he offered to help us fill in the walkway with a sturdy frame. This saved us a lot of money doing it this way.

Being an older house, one of the problems you'll contend with is matching the wood. The thickness of the original wood was double the size of what you can get at a hardware store. Hardwood is annoying to work with (drilling and nailing), so we went for structural pine that wasn't the same thickness, but will do the job.

Another issue you'll contend with is over the time the house moves and proportionally isn't square anymore. This is where a mitre saw comes in handy, some of the cuts we had to do were on weird angles to accommodate for the fact different parts of the original frame were different measurements the closer you got to the roof or floor.

It took a solid half a day to get the frame up and in, there weren't really any major issues getting it in, except the very last nail which hit a knot in the wood and wouldn't go in (typical), so we pulled it out and didn't bother. You can see the new filled in frame in the first picture of the stripped kitchen, the new wood is way lighter than the dark old hardwood.

In amongst all of this is the new plumbing work needed as well as the electrical work for the new kitchen. Usually, if we had to pay people to come out, this would easily climb into the $6-8k range for what we needed to be done.

Fortunately, there are two plumbers in the family and one of our good friends is an electrician (a real standup guy). He has spent two solid days at our house so far. Before we could even do the wiring another hurdle had to be crossed, the main switchboard (where the mains come into the house and supplies it throughout your house) needed to be replaced.

The switchboard we had was super old, the main circuit for the house powerpoints was 16 amps. Most new houses have 20 amp circuits times two. This is quite a major job taking about 3.5 hours to complete, you need to isolate the old wiring in the box, pull everything out, match up the wiring to the new switches, get the positioning of the board right and make sure you use the proper gauge wiring for the different parts of the house.

My brother in law came out and helped install some new fittings in the house, changing the pipework to accommodate for the new fountain taps we're installing both in the kitchen and laundry (adjacent to one another). The house is old, so it's riddled with galvenised pipe which is horrible.

The waste pipes coming from the sink in the kitchen and laundry were thick and corroded galvanised pipe, it was slowly rusting from the inside, so we cut and pulled those out. And then I helped cut some new PVC piping to run through the floor for both.

Unfortunately, the house mains water is also galvanised piping and many other parts. We capped off the new pipework for all of the taps, taped off the new waste pipes so we get no smells coming up through them and stinking out the house temporarily.

This is stage #1 of the plumbing work. The next major step is completely redoing all of the pipework in the house, cutting out the rest of the galvanised pipe, installing new copper pipe where needed and also PVC in place of the galvanised pipes.

Now the interior formwork has been done, the kitchen and plasterer can their work and after the installation of the kitchen, we'll be doing the taps and all of the exterior pipework needed.

Because we really are only covering the costs of the parts, I offered to help wherever I could. So, the last few days I have been an electrical and a plumbing apprentice.

When I wasn't crawling around inside of the roof, I was crawling around underneath the house (it's slightly raised). Part of my temporary electrical apprenticeship included:

• Cutting away old cabling
• Helping isolate existing cables by joining and running them into temporary junction boxes
• Running new cable
• Nailing new cable to wooden beams underneath the house
• Cutting up conduit and shielding cables near pipes, fixing those in a safe space
• Crawling through the house and doing new cable runs, identifying existing cables
• Still inside of the roof, isolating and running cables into junction boxes
• Yep, still inside of the roof, running new cables through the roof
• Drilling through hardwood (it's hard) from the roof through beams into the kitchen

As I write this the plasterer was meant to be here and starting on the new sheeting in the kitchen. I called him up and for some reason, he thought we hadn't locked in the dates. Confirming back in emails, we had booked him in for today and tomorrow.

So far everyone has turned up and things have gone smoothly, so it was inevitable that something had to not go according to plan. I let him know that I wasn't happy, so we'll see what happens. Sometimes tradies can be super unreliable.

We are about three-quarters of the way through. On Friday provided the plasterer has done his work, our friend the electrician will come out and install new light switches, power points and tidy it all up for us. Then we just need to finish the plumbing and kitchen install.

And then, we are stripping back the wooden floors, sanding and polishing them. Then, we need to move onto the laundry (which is easier) and after all of that, we are renovating the bathroom next.

All of this has reaffirmed that I made the right choice of being a developer. I am not afraid of getting dirty or hard work, but crawling around in the roof and underneath the house (which is just dirt and a lot of spiders) isn't what gets me amped up and excited in the mornings.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have itchy fibreglass fibres on my skin making it redraw I need to wash off...