Does it smell a bit FRUITY to anyone? :)

Well, it's now Wednesday, and the guys have managed to correct our lovely septic tank problem. The pumpers came in on Monday and drained the tanks, and then on Tuesday, they filled the tanks with rubble and sand...and that's them officially decommissioned!
They've also managed to make a bit of progress on the demolition work...

View from the balcony...you can no longer tell there was ever a problem! :)

They've made a bit of progress on the removal of the pavers in the downstairs room.

This is looking through the doorway of what will be bedroom 4...you can sort of get a feel of how big it will be...it is the smallest bedroom, I believe.

They've removed more of the slab where the bathroom is going. I'll admit that i'm not really sure why they needed to do that, but ah well! :) 

The view of the back of the house...and a silly monkey man :)

Duh duh duh...

Well, as can be expected...nothing ever goes as it's supposed to! Especially when you're dealing with renovating a house from the 60's/70's.
On Friday, Andy worked from home in the morning so he could pack to go down south for his 24-hr adventure race. So, of course, he was at the house with the demo guys. And since he's the best, he gave me a lift to the train station to get into work. As we left, a guy had just showed up with a little bobcat to carry the rubble from the back garden up the driveway to the skip...that would have been a lot of very heavy wheelbarrow loads! So, about mid-morning I got a call from Andy...the bobcat took a bit of a nosedive in the middle of our yard...and thus, we found out that we've got a septic tank in our back yard that was never decommissioned...and it was full to the brim (of course)!
So, work has taken another detour as we sign an blank variation to get our septic tank drained and filled in to allow the rest of the work to continue. Great fun!
A couple of photos of the excitement...

Demolition party! Day 2

Day 2...they seem to be moving pretty fast so far. Just wondering when they put on the brakes because nothing ever happens fast around here! :) See if you can spot the differences from yesterday!

Pile has grown to cover the floor inside the  house.

Outside view of the pile...at least double the size I would guess.

Render removed from the wall and new bricks removed to form new window.

Render removed from this side as well.

Wall & doors removed from the laundry area.

The east-side apartment again...

They have even removed the slab where the new shower will go...

Where the bathroom for the west-side apartment used to be...and where bedroom 4 will be! :)

Demolition party! Day 1

Day 1 of the demolition...I was quite surprised by the progress they made...

The pile of building waste removed after day 1.

The sliding doors removed intact and ready to sell on Gumtree!

Windows & walls removed from the east-side apartment

Walls removed inside the old bathroom in the west-side apartment

Day 3

Well, nothing really happened on day 2, except for another mistake. The plumber came to do the cut and seal on the gas & water lines, but he managed to screw up as well. The only water lines he cut were to the upstairs kitchen sink...the kitchen sink we're still using! And he also cut the gas to our stove...thank goodness we had stuff at home to make an easy salad. It's amazing how many times you use the sink just to cut up some veggies!
Day 3 - the plumber & electrician came today and fixed their screw ups, so we're back to normal. The supervisor also informed us that they should be starting the demolition tomorrow!

And we're off! - Day 1

I think we deserve some champagne this weekend or something! What a momentous occasion! Our major renovations have officially started now! The electrician came yesterday and did the electrical cut & seal on the downstairs to prepare for the demolition to start next week. Unfortunately, he screwed up and also cut the lights to have of the upstairs (kitchen, living rooms, one bathroom). So, we're living by lamp light and head torches this weekend :) It's ok, though, because we've actually started!!

Ceiling in the room downstairs where they have removed & cut the electrical lines.

Getting ready for the builders

Ok. Well, we're still waiting for the building licence application to be approved, but we had our pre-start with the builder on Friday morning. They did a little walk-around and made sure that we're all clear on everything that needs to be done before they arrive on sight. For the past couple weekends, we've already been getting ready for this because we leave this week for holiday to the UK!
Needless to say, we've been busy little bees for the past while, but all of our work has definitely paid off, I think.
Part of the work we had to do was to move the pool fence. The balcony extension is going to interfere with the current location of the pool fence, so we've got to get it out of the way...not only that, but it still has to be properly installed to ensure the builders are properly protected from harm while they are working...crazy! But, that was definitely an interesting job and definitely not something that I thought would take as long as it did. It turned out quite nicely, though, I think.

Andy working away getting ready to start on the pool fence.

After we had taken down the fence panels and removed a couple of the posts, which have to have 1/3 of their length concreted into the ground...yuck!

With the posts fully repositioned and concreted into place...a full days work!

The fence complete! What we thought would take less than 1 day took us 1 1/2 days!

One of our other chores to complete before the Summit guys show up on site was to trim the trees along the driveway. I guess this wasn't really a requirement, but after the quote to get them professionally trimmed came back at like $1500, I decided that we could do that ourselves. So, I had trimmed some of them myself while Andy was away, but there was still quite a bit of work to be done, so that was the rest of the Sunday afternoon after finishing the pool fence.

The nicely trimmed (some amazingly HACKED back) trees along the driveway...

The resulting pile of branches...

 So, then we had this massive pile of branches to get rid of. I called about 6-8 different places about hiring a mulcher/chipper to use for a day, but evidently they need to be reserved ahead of time because there were none available. Magically, on the Sunday, the day before I had to leave for Aberdeen, Andy managed to get hold of a guy that would bring out his industrial sized chipper to help us out...he told us to get as many people as possible to help us out because 6 men feeding it wouldn't keep it at it's capacity. I found that hard to believe until he showed up...

The massive mulcher/chipper after he managed to back down the driveway.

After about 45 minutes, we had the pile demolished!

And then the resulting pile of mulch that he left us with to put on the garden. :)

With the garden work and pool fence done, what else is there to do? Well, today is the start of our bulk verge collection...where the council gets rid of your "recycling" (e.g. old furniture, appliances, and other large things that are too big to go in your normal trash)...so, what do we have that we need to get rid of? How about the downstairs kitchen? We had talked about replacing it with something from IKEA once the renos are done, so we might as well get a head start, eh?
The downstairs kitchen before...

And after....

So, lots of work over the past weeks...thank goodness we've had decent weather! and we're almost ready to start the real work!