The kitchen area is now gutted.
The bathroom floor is gone. We weren't quite expecting that.
View through the kitchen to the family room and the new opening which will have double full light glass sliding doors.
And here is another lovely surprise. It was a miracle that our other bathroom hadn't fallen through to the kitchen. There was no wall holding it up. This room has now been completely gutted with floor and ceiling removed and this wall needs to be replaced.
Really there is very little of our house unscathed at the moment.
Do you want to hear about our lovely neighbour? She's gone quiet in the last week but over the last month has been going overboard calling the council. The council have been around three times with complaints that the builders start too early. This is the classic Sydney complaint. Builders can't start noisy machinery before 7am. My neighbour was calling council if the builders walked onto site before 7am. One time the council decided they needed to do something so they told the builder that they needed an extra permit for the cement pour. Cost of this permit? $2000.
Sadly, talking to friends and work colleagues it appears that we are getting off lightly in the neighbour department. A brief survey of experiences reveals that everyone has one difficult neighbour during renovations. One friend had a neighbour who was so incensed with their (approved) building works that he would go behind the workmen with a shovel scraping off cement render from their fence as the builder was applying it. A work colleague (from the UK) said one of his neighbours would fire his shotgun into the air when he was unhappy with anything - trying to intimidate the builders.
We have friends who are about to do a complete knock-down/re-build and they have 13 neighbours due to their unusual block design. Heaven help them I say.
Why are we so uptight about change? If you live in a good council area with the proper approval processes renovations should result in better surroundings, not worse. Really some people just need to get a life.
