With most of the outdoor areas of the house under control after landscaping works carried out during Summer and Autumn, our renovation attention turned indoors during Winter and Spring.
Our focus was to remodel the hallway, our bedroom and the front bedroom (to be used as a second living room). We kicked off with our bedroom (briefly "moving out" into the back bedroom), then the hallway and finally the front room. The following photos show these rooms pre-renovation for that "before and after" experience!
Ky's research led to us purchasing paint for all the rooms from Byron Bay company, Eco Colour, who produce a non-toxic paint from recycled waste oil. Kicking off with our bedroom, Al did a good job of covering the ceiling and substantial cornice before doing the walls. Glossing up the window frame and skirting boards essentially completed the paint job and the "white on white" colour really brightens the room. With the painting done, the electrician (from Mr Electric) was called in to hang a new ceiling light and swap over the light switch to a new black HPM Excel unit. We purchased the light from EBay and it makes for a nice feature in this room. Window furnishings were next on the agenda and a big afternoon at Spotlight led to lots of material, linings and curtain railing being purchased! Joan did the honours in making the curtains and the black and white damask pattern makes for a stunning statement in this white room, great job Joan! The old louvre doors on the wardrobe were filled in with hardboard and then wallpapered using the Vision wallpaper we picked up during our trip to New Zealand! This has transformed the dated wardrobe into a feature wall and the wallpaper complements the curtain material very well (even if the actual task of adhering the wallpaper to these doors was an entire weekend job for Lee & Al!). Styling involved moving our existing black timber bed back into the room, adding two new bedside tables from Provincial Home Living, and utilizing the pair of table lamps also sourced during our New Zealand travels earlier in the year! The final touch in this room was a new piece of artwork, being a canvas print of the lyrics to Quo's song "In My Chair" (a 135x90cm canvas sourced from Canvas Printers and inspired by the great work of Matthew Wheller). The completed room looks great, is light and bright, and has undergone quite a transformation!
Next up was the hallway. After some minor surface preparation, the ceiling and walls were painted (by Al and Lee respectively) in the same colour as the bedroom and this immediately transformed the space into a much lighter area. The existing brass pendant lights were replaced by an identical pair of "Le Bastille" basket chandeliers sourced from Mighty Lighting Solutions (on EBay, but actually run through a nice lighting store in upmarket Canterbury called "Federation Lighting and Antiques") and, although they were incredibly fiddly to assemble (a job the electrician wisely opted out of!), they look amazing when lit in this space. A couple of light switches were also swapped over to new black HPM Excel units. The hallway was furnished by utilizing an existing white buffet and hanging some pictures, including a piece of Aboriginal artwork by Walala Tjapaltjarri. Al did a fine job of finishing the front door in gloss black as well to round out the work in the hallway, continuing the black and white theme.
The final room to be tackled during this round of renovations was the front bedroom, which we'd been using sporadically as a sitting room but not making the best use of the space. While it works well as a bedroom (as it has fitted cupboards), we have no need for an extra bedroom and, as the room has the best view in the house, across the park and to the water, it seemed to make more sense to use this as a second living space. The first job was again a full paint job, with Al tackling ceiling & walls and Lee covering skirtings, door frame and window frame. Al also painted the fireplace surround in gloss black to make this a stunning feature of the room. The electrician installed another new chandelier (this time sourced from Thomas Gannon on funky Brunswick Street in Melbourne) and replaced the existing light switch with a new black HPM Excel switch.
The bright new room presented a blank canvas in terms of furnishings. A new French-style black velvet couch was procured from boutique homewares store Madisons Homeliving on Pakington Street, while a new French chair was sourced from Adairs to complement a borrowed period chair (courtesy of Joan!). We re-used a white buffet to act as a TV stand for a new 32" LCD TV purchased from JB Hi-fi (thanks to gift vouchers from Lee's 40th birthday!) and a retro black phone was imported from the UK (Binatone through the Direct Sales Online EBay store) to maintain the period look of the room. In searching for artwork options, our love of Aboriginal art led us to an affordable alternative to an original piece. While being fans of the work of Minnie Pwerle, her original works are now completely out of reach and we'd been looking at pieces by her daughter, Betty, instead. Even decent sized pieces by Betty Mbitjana are now expensive, so we were delighted to see official fabric prints of some of her work on offer leading us to simply stretch a piece of stunning fabric over a timber frame to make a statement (two-by-one metre) piece for the longer wall of this room. The colours and shapes are bold and interesting in this space.
We're delighted with the results of our labours in these three rooms and we will no doubt return to more interior renovations in 2012!