Almost Done!

Since returning from our Black Sea getaway, we've been flat out with all the finishing touches on our home renovation.

Afterall, it's only 3 more weeks til we leave Turkey for good ...

Actually, I shouldn't have said "finishing touches" because it has been a lot more than that!  We knocked down one concrete wall, fixed another concrete wall, installed a door into a third concrete wall, painted all said walls, varnished every outside door and window frame in the house, laid some bricks, planted a heap more plants, and after two unsuccessful previous attempts, planted grass seed for the third time (we finally got it right this time).

Now I'm just dying to show you how it's all looking!

This was the garden shed before the door.

We didn't imagine fitting a door into a door space could be such a challenge!  We spent more than an hour manipulating the door frame inside the opening while trying to get the door to close properly ... But no matter how much we adjusted the frame against the wall, we just couldn't get it to happen.  Finally, we realised the wall of the house was not straight!  It was angled out at the top and in at the bottom by what ended up being more than 20 cm!

How can the builders have gotten it SO wrong?  Anyway, with a lot of cement filler we managed to get the door installed.

This is how the shed is looking now.

All that's left to do is the paint touch ups.  That water box next to the store room also needs a door.  We're just looking for the right piece of wood to do the job.

Knocking down the wall inside the sunroom was fun.  It only took Murat a couple of hours to get the thing done and the windows safely removed.  What wasn't so much fun was picking up all the bits of broken cement!  Rendering all the broken edges wasn't so bad either.  Actually, this is always my responsibility because I like it.  Smoothing on layer upon layer of cement to create a nice finish feels like sculpting.  For me, it's kind of therapeutic.

One of the walls we'd just built for the sunroom was badly damaged by the workers installing the glass and doors into the frame.  I have no idea why they felt it was necessary to break down the wall the way they did, but they did.  Anyway, that wall was a pain in the bum to fix.  But we eventually got it looking almost like new and this is what the completed sunroom looks like now.

The next job caused a big fight between me and Murat...  Staining the outside doors and window frames.  I'm a perfectionist and Murat is ... let's just say, he's not a perfectionist.  It took me more than an hour to prepare and stain the front door thoroughly.   After I'd finished I went to find Murat to show off my work but when I found him my smile of pride quickly turned to a grimace of disbelief.   In the time it took me to very carefully stain a single door, Murat had stained five window frames.  It looked as though Kaya had done the work.  I couldn't believe how carelessly he'd painted and I got so mad.  Couldn't he see what a mess he'd made?  Didn't he care?  And that wasn't the end of it.  Later that day while I was putting Ky to sleep, he painted another window and door in exactly the same manner.  Grrrrrr.  Have you ever tried to remove dark coloured paint drips from light coloured, textured concrete walls?  Impossible!

Anyway, we eventually got the whole house done (and if you squint at the windows Murat was responsible for), the freshening up makes the house look so much better.

Front door before the stain.  Look how weather beaten it was!

After

The last thing we finished was the landscaping, my favourite part of the renovations.

Bottom/back of house before any work!

Now

Over the course of several weeks we collected a huge pile of bricks which we found partially buried under a pile of dirt and broken concrete on a vacant block down the road from us.  We used some of these bricks to border our vege garden and the rest of them we used to make a garden in front of the sunroom.  In this garden we planted some lavender, oregano and chamomile plants along with a few other plants I can't name.  Then we prepared the rest of the ground and laid grass seeds.  This time we did it more cleverly so the ants were not able to steal all the seeds.

Front of sunroom before any landscaping.

Now

I'm so happy to be seeing the new grass coming through!!

With all this work we've done, it's going to be really hard to leave ...

We came back to this!

We were away for 3 weeks and we came back to a mixed bag of changes in our garden.

The dead and dying:

We're hoping these tomatoes can be saved.  The woman looking after them said they were diseased... but the disease seems to simply be dehydration! 

We bought these lavender plants just before we left.  We were sad to see they'd passed away ... :(

I think these eggplant (or are they capsicum..?) plants can be saved.

 

These dead basil made be particularly sad because I'd been especially loving to them ;-( 

The disappointing:

What happened to all the lovely lush grass I hoped would be beautifying this area?

Our beautiful log slice path is full of ugly dried out split wood ... Lesson learned = treat the wood to prevent drying out!

The progress:

Yay!  The conservatory was completed without (too many) problems.

I think it's looking quite good!  I can see the potential now!

It was a surprise to see that our front fence had been rendered with slate (along with the entire neighbourhood).  Not exactly what we'd envisioned ... but once we replace the ugly green wire with horizontal lengths of wood, I think it will still look lovely.

The live and proliferating:

At this rate, it won't be long before the grapes vines are growing all over the pergola!

I was a little concerned about whether the fig would get used to it's pot, but it seems I had nothing to worry about!

Tomatoes everywhere!

These tomato plants are so full of little balls of goodness!  

A couple of regular looking cucumbers ...  I also picked several cucumbers as big as Murat's forearm!

Beans!

'Pazar', a type of spinach.

Squash!

And blackberries!  I cannot wait for these!

 

The first gifts from our garden this summer!  Thank you.

A Progress Report

We're leaving Ankara today (in about an hour ... so much left to do and here I am blogging???) for the Black Sea town of Rize.  Just for a couple of weeks to get our fill of the powerful elixir of Mother Nature's beauty.

So I thought I'd give you a progress report of our renovations to date.

This is how the area looked before everything...

Sunroom, Storage Shed, Extension of Balcony

Vege garden and log path

Still a lot to do, but we're getting there...

A bit of Landscaping

As soon as we finished our pergola project we headed straight downstairs to do something about the big mess that was our backyard.

Let me back up a bit and explain why it was such a mess.

Remember my post about our planned renovations?  I waffled on about how the house desperately needed exterior insulation.  Well, we spent weeks and weeks of quote hunting (prices vary drastically here, as does quality of workmanship....) and finally settled on a company that appeared professional, was able to show examples of satisfactory workmanship and even offered a tax-free payment plan!  We made an appointment with them to sign the final paperwork and to pay the deposit ... but they didn't turn up!  They didn't even call!  The day of the appointment was actually a public holiday so we gave them the benefit of doubt and waited for them to contact us the following day.  But nothing!  As with every other company we researched, these people were not particularly efficient at returning telephone calls (but still they were much more professional that every other company we tried) and we were fed up with forever chasing them up.  Did we really want to invest more than $15000 in a company that couldn't even be bothered keeping it's appointment to start work?  We decided the answer was "nope!"

Being as exposed as it is on top of a hill, the house is severely weather beaten - the paint on the rendered-cement walls is flaking off all over.  Insulating the house would have meant a brand new looking home!  And besides the coldness in winter, this was a major consideration in wanting to get the insulation done.  However, we are selling the house and weren't entirely sure that spending this kind of money would improve the value enough to warrant doing the renovations.  Being mucked around by this company was a sign not to go ahead.

Instead, we decided to do some other bits and pieces for a lot less cashito, which we were sure definitely would improve the value to buyers in this area.  The pergola was one addition.  It cost us only $350 to build and looks fantastic even while bare of grape vines and flowers.  We're also in the progress of building-in a decorative (but entirely useless) enclave in the side of the house to become a garden shed.  Once complete the overall cost will be something like $250.  Here's what it looks like so far.

We just need to choose a door, cement-render the bricks and paint it.  All this we'll do once the sunroom is built.  

The other renovation in progress is the building of a glass roofed sunroom, or conservatory along one entire side of the house (cost approximately $6500).  These sunrooms are extremely popular in this neighbourhood and when done properly look modern and very attractive.  To build this sunroom we've had to extend the balcony above (which hubby is doing himself - final cost anticipated to be approximately $300) and extend the patio below (complete at a cost of $100).

It doesn't look like much now but once the original balcony wall is removed and a new wall built, we just have to install a new railing and tiles and I think it'll look really great.

We've already signed the paperwork for the building and work is planned to start in 4 days time.  This is what the area looks like so far.

Imagine those three windows at the bottom knocked out, the entire patio area enlcosed in glass and the brick walls cement-rendered and painted.  This will be such a lovely area to sit and relax.

In the meantime we've been very busy cleaning up the big mess caused by these last two renovations.  Cement, broken bricks, nails and bits of wood were embedded in the ground.

Ky is always keen to help.

It took several days of on-hands-and-knees, nail-chipping work to get the dirt cleaned up and then the area was ready for some much needed landscape lovin'!

I saw this picture a few weeks ago and it became the inspiration for our work.

Borrowed from www.katyelliott.com

We originally planned to make a path exactly like this one but our intended path was so long and when we bought the logs we greatly under-anticipated how many we needed.  So instead of buying more wood, we decided to modify our design.  By the way, total cost of logs, cement, sand and topsoil came to a grand total of $110!

We thought making a path like this would be so easy - simply a matter of digging a bit of dirt, laying some sand and cement and positioning the logs....  Unfortunately, just the digging part took almost an entire day and then positioning the logs turned out to be a very time-consuming challenge.  We asked that the logs be cut into approximately 20cm lengths.  But instead they ranged in length from about 10cm to 50cm!  This meant a whole lot of digging holes for individual logs, banging other logs into place, carefully leveling the logs section by section and repositioning already banged-in logs.

This is how it looked after we positioned the logs to see how they'd look, and before we actually dug them into place.

After that it was simply a matter of filling in the gaps with a mixture of cement and sand, laying topsoil all over the entire yard, spreading grass seed and watering the area very thoroughly.

Notice the vege garden?  Tomatoes, beans, eggplant, capsicum, cucumbers, carrots  and lettuce.  All grown from seed.  It's my pride and joy!  We plan to build a proper brick or wood border to pretty it up a bit... it's on the list.

We're hoping grass will grow amongst the log path but not conceal the logs too much...  But if these little fellows have anything to do with it, we won't have any grass at all!

They may be little, but these ants are very efficient at collecting the grass seeds ... I'm seriously concerned that they'll collect them all!

Already I think it looks pretty nice.  Certainly much better than the muddy wasteland it was before!

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(So all in all, the completed renovations including pergola, balcony extension, patio extension, basic landscaping, garden storage room and sunroom is estimated to be ... $7610!!  Cheap as chips compared to the $15000 we were going to fork out on the insulation.)