Another small PPOR reno. Sigh.

The family bullied me into it. The girls said, 'Dad, this room is crap. you need to fix it.'
It's the dining room. I did the adjacent loungeroom a few years ago but then got distracted.
Having done two recent kitchens and a bathroom, I'm pleased to be doing a room with no plumbing.
I figure if I post the progress it will shame me into being a more speedy.
Here is the adjacent room I finished some time ago:

 

And the before photos of the 'crap' dining room.
Storage is the problem in lots of old houses. These front two rooms are big - 6m x 6m. The loungeroom was a shop when our place was a bakery 100 years ago.
Storage is the issue - we have a lot of stuff. The loungeroom now has a lot of storage, so it's time for the dining room to get some. That means losing a wall, sadly - we have a lot of paintings and can't afford to lose wall space.

 

Let the fun begin....
This was last Monday. The vertical line on the wall shows the bit coming out. The plan is for that wall to be replaced with cupboards accessed from the corridor near the stairs. The back of the cupboards will protrude into the dining room and will be nice joinery - that's where things will slow down.

 

And this was Tuesday.
For those interested, it's a 4m long UB150 x 18kg. That post, which will be hidden in the joinery, is 100x100 6mm SHS. The second post against the section of remaining wall was not needed, but it gives be a better fixing point for the joinery. Those walls are sandstock bricks, too, so extra support never goes astray.

 

The costs so far:
The steel was $524.
There is a local builder who I get on well with. She often lends me her guys and tools.
She lent me her acrow props, demo saw, nail gun and chem set stuff and Mo the labourer - $900.
She lent me Barney the Yugoslavian bricklayer/renderer/plasterer - $1,000.

So $2,500 so far. If I had given the job to a builder, it would have been $10,000 - it's Sydney.

 

There is already storage under the stairs.
The doorway into that room will be a big 1200mm sliding thing, so the stairs will be a bit more visible than they were. Heat loss in winter is a consideration, too. If that space was open it would be hard to heat those rooms as the heat would head upstairs.

 

Did the floor. I've never been a fan of polished cypress pine - it's nothing special. This floor had poly on it that would have been down for at least 30 years. Boy, it was hard. I got a floor sander guy in to sand it to 120. The floor had been sanded possibly twice previously, so I needed someone who was careful and wasn't going to take much off it lest the piano go through it one day. I then stained it with a Prooftint mix and finished it with Osmo Hardwax Oil. The sanding bloke cost me $400 and the Osmo $220.

(I needed the Osmo one day last week and the car was in use. It would have been nearly a half hour drive, anyway, and that's always annoying when you've got the tools out and are into a project. So I paid for the Osmo over the phone and they said they had a courier service that could get it to me by the end of the day. I needed it sooner, so I booked an Uber to pick it up and deliver it to me. That cost $26 and was so much quicker and easier than a courier.)

 

The storage is in place where the wall was. The back of it protrudes into the room, but it will be clad in sheets of expensive timber veneer. To the left of the cupboards, will be a low timber clad credenza. To the right, will be the 1200mm sliding door. If you look at the cupboards, you can see that the one on the left is deeper than the ones on the right where the pocket for the big slider will be.
It's all going to look great, trust me.
There was a high spot of around 7mm in the old concrete floor right where it met the timber floor. I had to hire a concrete grinder on Saturday. They are one of my least favourite tools and Saturday in Sydney was not a great day to be doing stuff like that. Still, I think that's the end of the really messy stuff.

 

Sanding/staining the floor BEFORE getting the concreate grinder out- bold move!

 

That doorway where the concrete grinder chewed up the timber will be covered by something yet to be determined. It's going to be a 400mm wide transition between the two rooms. I'm thinking Masonite - I've used it before for that sort of thing. I need to do a bit of levelling, though, so I need something that will work on timber and concrete.

 

A bloke came and picked up the bricks from the wall I took down last night. He paid $1 each for 260 of them. They were sandstock bricks, cleaned and in good condition. Much better to sell them than have to pay for a skip. People use those bricks as feature walls and bars and stuff like that. Some would end up in cafes.
Sydney has always been a brick city. The First Fleet found that the local trees were hopeless for building houses and there was plenty of local clay, so brick construction it was. My bricks would have been made in the 1880s and probably locally. There were dozens of small brickmakers scattered across the old inner west. Most had a maker's mark that they stamped into about every tenth brick. The mark on my ones was W.M.

 

How thick do you need the transition? could you use a piece of sandstone?

the floor stain looks great! and those bricks look in top condition, you should have sold them for $2/ea!

 

The transition needs to be something thin I can glue over where the concrete (that will have lino on it) meets the timber. It's 1200mm wide by 400mm. I'll probably just use a Sika adhesive. Still need to work out how I will get it dead level. Cement based floor levellers won't work with the timber.
Not all the bricks were as nice as the ones with the initials on them. I had a bloke offer me 50c each. I said, 'You're dreamin, mate.'

 

haha dreamin alright!

hmmm... you could cut out the timber and concrete then recess something in but that's getting a bit hard.
i would think as long as the conc is ground down with in a few mm of the timber the sika will work well only thing will be if the edges are raised slightly they may be prone to being pulled up by traffic. what about a sheet of aluminium 1.6mm thick but then you could counter sink some screws in to fix it down - with sika to level initially then screw after cured.

 

Yeah, too hard to cut out a recess. I can protect the edges from traffic. The are some low spots in the timber I need to build up a few mm.

 

Okay, I'm back on it. Got distracted and there were some delays with the veneer sheets. The storage in the little corridor leading to the bathroom is done. This was where the brick wall was.

 

This is the storage at the foot of the stairs. The timber tunnel leading into the dining room looks great.

 

Getting awfully close now. Lots of pressure from the clients, 'Dad, this is taking forever. When do we get the dining room back?'
The long, low shelves are done. They look great. The vertical dividers are 5mm steel plate painted matt black. I've done that before. When looked at straight on and when there is stuff on the shelves, the thick horizontals look like they float.
The credenza near the glass external door is done - had a bit of a fail with the far left door. The big panel to the right of the credenza is a fixed panel.
Last thing to do is the big sliding door and the fixed panel that will hide it. The door is going to be a problem, I think.
This room will function as a small gallery a few times a year.