I know this is a food blog, and that remains its primary purpose.  But I just had to share a renovation story – complete with before and after pictures!

For a bit of background, J and I purchased our first home in November last year.  Quite a bit of renovating has already occurred – a new bathroom, reasonably new kitchen and an enormous deck. However, it still needs quite a bit of work (including re-stumping!) and to keep to our  budget we’re trying to do some of the smaller things ourselves.

Here’s the before we were working from – not bad, but definitely a lot to improve on when looked at up close.  This is a picture from the real estate listing so it includes the former owner’s furniture.

One of the most time-consuming tasks is re-doing all the casement windows.  The windows have not been maintained very well and the paint is peeling, the putty falling out and several panes of glass are cracked or broken.  Unfortunately I don’t have a before picture that demonstrates just how bad they are.  We will gradually be working our way around the house (there are 31 windows in total).  Our first priority was the master bedroom – so for the last two months we’ve been living in the spare bedroom, with black plastic nailed to the master bedroom window frames, while we re-do the windows.

The process took a lot longer than expected, partly because we were a little unrealistic about how long it would take, but also because the weather in Brisbane has been unusually wet, and has limited a lot of the work.  I won’t go into the full detail of what was required, but to summarise – the windows were stripped of paint (by a professional), then we sanded them back, removed the old putty, sourced replacement window panes, undercoated, re-puttied, undercoated the putty, then gloss painted in white (two coats).  In the process I also cleaned most of the old paint off the brass hinges, cleaned and greased to increase the range of motion – some are still tight, but with the aid of J’s dad we have been able to reuse all of them.  To put it in perspective, our master bedroom has twelve (12!) windows.

Over the last two weekends we have been remounting the windows.  The final coat of gloss trim on the sill has now gone on and the windows are all up.  Finally, we can move into the master bedroom!  Here are some after shots of our room partly decorated – we still need some art for the walls.  We also repainted the walls and ceiling, the door trim and sanded and finished the wooden floors (the rest of the house had this done already, but we had old 1970s carpet in this room).

Hope you don’t mind this self-indulgent break from food!