Stuff you find under floorboards!

A mineral water bottle from Flemington Bridge (?)



A milk bottle from P.W. Tomkins dairy in Thornbury (St Georges Road)- I'm thinking circa 1934.

I'll give them a buff and polish...
other stuff we found...medicine bottles and little tea style server trays
oh... and heaps of dirt and some moudly mud!

Floorboards

What is it?
A floorboard puller uppera

Where do you get it from?
You can hire one from Kennards

How much does it cost?
$60 for a weekend

How does it work?
Well you kill a couple of floorboards first and then you just sort of get in there are "jimmy" the rest of them out.

Is it worth it?
Yes!
Either way you'll sacrifice a few floorboards but man if the house is old, those floorboards have been nailed in for like forever... and it's not that easy 'easing' them out..
We split quite a few floorboards but would have split heaps more if we didn't have that crazy tool!

So here's the living room before and after:




B1 went from this:



to this:



And the progression of B2:



And the hallway...



It's just so much fun isn't it??

A video!

Just to get your bearings....
Here is a video of the before

Thinking, planning, scheming, thinking mostly about the bathroom

There's been lots of thinking planning scheming thinking, specially about where to put the future bathroom..
So we sketched it out on the floor with masking tape... the door, the bath, the shower the everything... we walked around it a few times.



Yep, that looks and feels like a good place to have a toilet...!

Skip to 2 .5 years later....

I just read the last post.. yikes has it really been that long? It's probably been closer to 3 years ago... So what happened? Well we finished the little beach flat in Sydney and moved to Melbourne and bought a "miners cottage" a nice way of saying a "small long & skinny brick house" in Northcote, North of Melbourne.... and the "reno's" have started again.
Perhaps it takes 2.5 years to truly forget the pain of the last renovation?
Nevermind, it's too late now, the house is bought, the banks are happy and we are knee deep in a sandpit in our living room, so there's no turning back, we must press on...

So... this little house in Northcote is a miners cottage originally built for the foremen who worked at the local brickworks, we're not exactly sure of the timing but it would have been built really late 1800's or early 1900's, we do know that the brickworks business in Northcote was booming around the 1880's. Let's have a look at some pics of the house...