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Our house was built in the 50s and we’ve renovated inside, but now it’s time to tackle the backyard...
We’ve decided that the double car garage, which has a leaky roof and some significant cracks in the concrete floor and daylight between some of the bricks in the walls, is beyond saving. We don’t use it to house the cars as the driveway is a little too narrow to get cars up and down every day.
It’s primarily been used by the kids for table tennis and pool, as well as a place to store bikes, tools and a whole lot of junk.
We’ve decided to install a pool and build a new games room/teenage retreat with a similar footprint to the old garage.
We wanted a flexible space that will primarily be used for entertaining but could be an additional bedroom or granny flat if we needed it to be. We need part of it to be storage and it also seemed wise to include a toilet and bathroom, particularly as we only have one inside.
The first step has been to sell what we can on eBay and throw out anything we haven’t used for a while.
The second step was realising that we’d get a much better result using a friend who is an architect, which has been an interesting process.
Here’s the first design we came up with, which we’ve now had to change to reduce costs… Sadly, we've had to delete the special bricks which had a circular hole - we were going to install glass behind them but the cost was too high.
I’ll give updates as we progress with the build.
Jason
We have now ordered all the bathroom tiles, vanity and tapwear, and looking forward to putting the bathroom together. For the tiles we decided to splurge on the floor tiles with a beautiful large format porclean - a dark grey concrete-style - which we will also run up the wall that has the vanity on it as a feature. For the rest of the walls we are using a cheap white 300x600mm tile.
Very happy with how the bricks are looking. Doors and windows are in. Plumber has roughed in, and the electrician has cabled. Roof goes on today.
In the home stretch now. Have done a couple of coats of paint and the tiling in the bathroom is half finished.
Spent much of the weekend painting again. This time it was painting metal balustrades and timber boards on our deck, which we have had to replace because they now form part of the pool fence. We've painted them black so they hopefully blend into the background. Western red cedar battens are going on top. Site supervisor Humphrey has approved the work.
Also making progress on the back and side fences, which we've needed to raise also for pool safety regulations.
