So, when I bought my house it was a rundown state home needing a bit of TLC. Initially I had plans of major renovations - removing the wall between the kitchen and the lounge, extending the bathroom and shrinking the laundry.

The first project we tackled was redecorating the living room. The living room initially had carpet on the floor and wallpaper on the walls. We decided to remove the carpet and the wallpaper and paint and varnish the floors, which were a beautiful native timber (matai we think). Stripping the wallpaper and patching the dents in the old plasterboard wasn't too hard. When we took up the carpet we found that it had been glued to the floor. We tried all sorts of things to get the glue off the floor, but found that a paint scraper was the only way we could get it off - turning it into a serious labor of love. We also stripped the skirting boards, which turned out to be beautiful New Zealand Rimu. After we had finished stripping and varnishing the floor we got on to painting, having to work around the two leather couches that we purchased.

Once we had finished redecorating and moved everything back into the lounge from the bedroom, we decided to redo the bedroom, stripping the carpet, relining the walls with new gib, moving the wardrobe and putting insulation in the external walls. We moved into the bedroom into the lounge when we did the renovations.

We then didn't do much, uming and aring about how much we would do. Considering the state of the place, especially the bathroom with a very old bath a paint flaking off the wall, we knew we had to do something if we wanted to sell or rent the place. Setting a date for our OE, we decided that we would finally tackle the expensive side - the bathroom, the kitchen and the laundry. The plan was to:

• rip out the wall between the kitchen and the living room
• move the hot water cupboard (HWC) into the laundry from in between the bathroom and the kitchen
• redo the kitchen, installing a pantry with the HWC door was
• redo the bathroom, extending it into the old HWC and coat cupboard
• redo the laundry
• rewire the house and move the switchboard out of the hallway

We ended up also redoing the living room with new gib and insulation and redoing all the plumbing in the house.

We hoped that the whole process would take a little over a month with me taking the month off to complete the majority of the work (apart from removing the wall and the plumbing, which required consent).

It ended up taking about 4 months with due to delays and not being able to take as many long stints off work as I had hoped.

Having not done anything like this before, we learnt a lot during the process and thoroughly enjoyed it, though we definitely won't be doing it again for a while. I managed to borrow a nailgun from my rescue team, which was absolutely fantastic. If was doing it again and didn't have access to it, I would definitely consider buying one. Something else for the buying list is a drop saw. Though I had a circular saw, it wasn't the best quality and the operator wasn't fully competent at using it, so some of the cuts weren't the straightest. Cutting plywood was greatly improved with the use of a straight edge - another worthy purchase.

We are very happy with the results, even if some things aren't quite completed as we hoped they would be.