Home for Christmas

Bathroom Remodel

Wow, two months since I last posted I thought I finally had the blog thing down and ready to go, but then the holiday season crept up, and wham!! No posting anywhere except Facebook.

Well nana went home, the kids weren’t happy, but that’s life. We are currently in NZ on what started as a working holiday, and not to pay either.

The bathroom at my honey’s family home had a major leak and was definitely past its use-by date, so we needed a complete renovation. At first, he was just going to start with the area that was badly rotted, but once we got to pulling stuff down we just kept going. Luckily for us the bathroom is a very, very compact 1600cm x 1770cm.

This is the reason we needed the complete demolition, a hole had led to water seeping behind and rotting the framework, not a pretty sight believe me, plus the bathroom had most definitely seen better days!!

We pulled out the old bath/shower and the vanity and replaced it with a shower, wash basin and a totara, bench surround. My honey had definite ideas about the colour also, and when I, in my ‘wisdom’ decided to get another colour instead of the one he had his heart set on, I realised very quickly that it was indeed NOT the colour I should have bought!! Luckily my brother in law went back and got the original colour and we used my ‘brilliant’ purchase to paint the rather shabby kitchen wall we also had to patch up.

CHRISTMAS

So our renovation took a break for the Christmas ie Christmas Eve to Christmas day!! I had already to decided that we would not buy presents this year but make, (my brothers catchphrase was make, bake or create). Of course I only had the week before Christmas to organise ours and most of that was the renovation.

Being the ultimate reborn recycler, I went to my vast stash of various fabrics and assorted stuff and went to work. The kiddies painted paintings and ‘Lisey did some baking. I made handmade bags for my nephews and a short cape for my sister in law, and then appliqued motifs or their initials on to their presents. My honey used a large piece of the totara we were using for the bathroom bench to make my brother a chopping board (he loved it!!)

Some of the presents we made:

I did run out of time so my kids did not get their own personalised bags. We had to do some Christmas shopping, including food, amazingly we only took just under 3 hours Christmas Eve and that was it. We didn’t spend months buying presents, spent about $300 all up. The kids and I had heaps of fun creating, and none of the pressure that goes along with our usual Christmas splurge. My brother, his family and sister both got in on the whole spirit of it and we all got some wicked presents.

We even handmade our own wrapping paper!!

Anyway, we had a great Christmas and a great New years, but thats another story!!