Renovation revolution

Woohoo!

We've taken the leap.

We've committed ourselves to living here; not somewhere else on realestate.com.au, though I continue to scan that site obsessively just-in-case we've made the wrong decision. Perhaps I have some disease whose main symptom seems to be indecisiveness... but that's a whole different blog.

It's hardly a leap to decide to stay in the house you already live in, I hear you mutter. (And Yes I am a voice inside your head as well as my own). The leap is, we've decided to renovate.
To us that is a hugely big deal. It's a commitment to stay put for a bit at least. My gypsie genes are all-a-flutter...

We've refinanced. That only took 6 months - what with a combination of a financial crisis which saw banks devalue homes for a while, as well as a very dodgy broker in the first instance. Long story short: that's done and the first stage of our renovations is based on up to 80% of our redraw.

We've decided that a 1979 bathroom just ain't cutting it anymore. What's more it wasn't a classy 1979 bathroom to begin with (although classy and 1979 don't usually go together in the same sentence). They reckon that bathrooms usually need updating every 15 years, so both ours clearly make the grade, and if I showed you photos you'd be in absolute agreement.
The ensuite bathroom is circa 1990 and was also done on the cheap the first time round.

In fact, we suspect that most of this house was actually done on the cheap. But again that's another whole blog... don't get me started. I'm sure in purely dollar for dollar terms (not taking into account inflation and the changing cost of money), then our new bathrooms will cost more than the original building of the house.

So renos begin in one week. It's already been a long road to this point. The actual work, I'm hoping, will be anti-climactic. Now we know what we want, and we've engaged a reputable builder on a fixed price contract who supplies all the necessary trades, I feel kinda relaxed. Strange. We did all the worrying about costs during the lengthy quoting process and we've been incredibly happy so far with the open communication we've had with our builder.

Stay posted as I tell you how it goes!