Eight years ago, we bought our first apartment in Sydney. It had lino in the kitchen, blue carpet everywhere else, dirty yellow walls with grey blue trimmings. It was exactly what we were after. Underneath the carpet and lino was solid kauri timber with no knots, the ceilings ornate and high, along with loads of character of the Art Deco era throughout the apartment.
I thought I’d share our little renovating story with you in bite size chunks. This was our home until two years ago when we moved to Auckland for Guillaume’s work. We now have tenants renting it and the photos are from my pre-blogging days and were actually taken by our real estate agent. So what you have are “un-styled” photos, just a very tidy version of our home at the time.
We had limited funds to renovate, so the initial thing we spent money on before moving in was ripping up the carpet, polishing the floors and painting the walls a fresh white everywhere. What a difference that made! We attempted to polish the floors ourselves but gave up and hired a professional to do it. The painting and prep work was achieved with the help of an army of lovely friends and family.
Our funds didn’t allow for us to renovate the kitchen at the time so rather than putting up with flaking chip wood and a revolting stove until we could afford a kitchen, we ripped everything out (except the kitchen sink) and installed gas and an Ilve stove that we bought second hand on eBay, along with a stainless steel free-standing benchtop and a bookshelf for storage, both from Ikea. In retrospect I’m glad that we had time to live in the apartment before the major work, because our ideas changed dramatically.
Our apartment didn’t have a dining room so we knocked out the wall between the kitchen and the hallway to allow for a small table. We also opened up the space more by taking part of the wall out between the entry and the kitchen and left the other part of the wall with the lovely old brick exposed. Unfortunately in the photo you can’t see the magnificent ornate ceiling in the entry, it looked stunning with the brick.
Finally we installed our kitchen, simple matt white with lift-up wall cupboards and pull-out drawers. Tip: We saved thousands of dollars by not going for a “kitchen package”, instead sourcing everything ourselves. This enabling us to have a quality German kitchen with designer finishes; pull out tap, polished concrete benchtop, light fixtures and the zellige tiles, laid butt to butt giving a dramatic uneven effect.
Do you have a renovating story? Do you have any money saving tips or advice? I’ll share some more of our renovating story with you soon. Have a lovely weekend everyone!
Mel x
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I’m so glad you’re sharing this Mel, especially after our chat about it the other night! What an amazing transformation – looking forward to the next installment x
Thanks Michelle x
Great transformation Mel, it looks really lovely.
Thanks Catherine x
Lovely, lovely home Mel. I think you did a great job. It’s usually the limited budget that brings out the most creativity! Have a new lens arriving today so can hopefully do a few shots for you in the next week! Have a lovely weekend. It’s freezing and snowing again here :-( !! xx
Thanks Caroline!Very true about limited funds bringing out the creativity! Very exciting about the lens, what are you getting? I hope that the warm weather visits soon x M
Looking forward to this series Mel! Loved the first installment. What a transformation. And impressively you managed to have the end result look as if it belonged rather than a glaring new all white box. So lovely!
Oh thank you Nic! I really love mixing old with new so it was so important to us to leave the beautiful features of yesteryear. I’ll do my best with the installments with the few photos I have – it’s a shame that I didn’t go around take photos before we left, if only I knew I would be doing a blog! Mel x