Media - renovations - Page 1

We had our air conditioning unit replaced today, the old one worked but holy crap it was loud and the unit that lives in the roof had this incredibly irritating high-pitched whine. You couldn't notice it too much during the day when there was ambient noise, but at night we would have to wear earplugs or it'd keep us up. 😫

Definitely not a great day for it given we just inched over 40˚C, so I can only imagine what it was like up in the roof, I was genuinely concerned for the two tradies who needed to go up there! Now that it's all done though, wow, it feels like we have grown-up aircon. It's so quiet I legit can't hear it over the sound of the fridge, and even on the maximum fan speed it's barely audible! This new unit is a Daikin which apparently interfaces far better with the AirTouch system we got last year, and it seems to use less power as far as I can tell and the temperature control is a lot better.

Posted on 22 October 2025, 20:42

A photo of the front of our house. It's a standard-looking single storey house in red brick, in the middle is a large box window with thick white PVC frames. To the left of the window is the front door also in white, and left of that the side of what is the garage extends out towards the camera and out of frame. In front of the window is a small garden with various trees and plants. The new guttering is the same dark grey as the roof and blends in nicely and looks very nice.

A photo of the side of our house that faces the backyard. Three windows are visible, all with the same thick white PVC window frames as the front, but on the two larger bedroom windows there are tracks for shutters to run down (right now the shutters themselves are fully hidden because they're open since it's GLORIOUS today), and there's a big box at the top of both where the shutter rolls up into. The tracks and shutter boxes are a cream colour and it looks really crap now.

And we're done! I didn't realise just how awful the old gutters looked until now, they had been painted (badly and unevenly) in a really drab-looking brown. Of course, now the frame of the shutters for the bedrooms looks really shit because it's a cream colour and it looks dingy next to the nice cleanness of the white window frames and dark grey guttering. 😛

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Posted on 2 September 2025, 13:37

A photo taken from our home office looking out the window, where there's a metal platform a bit above the windowsill with a tradie in shorts and wearing a toolbelt standing on it. You can't see above his waist and he's working on removing the old guttering.

Current status: banging and crashing.

(We're getting our gutters replaced because they're in atrocious shape.)

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Posted on 1 September 2025, 10:41

A photo of our original cupboard doors, there are four of them and they're in a very white thin frame with very cheap looking wood grain as the actual door material (I honestly couldn't tell if it was the real wood or just a faux-wood covering on top).

A photo of the new cupboard doors, only three of them. They're white, in the "quaker" style, and the middle one has a mirror in, which is reflecting me in the middle of taking the photo.

Today we had our incredibly shitty built-in wardrobe in the main bedroom replaced! Looks so much nicer now, inside as well, and it's good to have a mirror that isn't the weirdly lowly-positioned one on the back of the bedroom door.

our house darkroom renovations

Posted on 13 September 2024, 13:45

A photo of a sunny window behind a kitchen sink, with cream-coloured vertical blinds partially open.

A photo of our box window that's in the lounge room, also with nice cream-coloured vertical blinds partially open and the sun coming in.

We FINALLY got the dingy grey vertical blinds in the kitchen and lounge room replaced with nice new light cream-coloured ones today. @yayKM had a seething hatred of the old ones, I didn't think they were that bad but I'll definitely grant the new ones look much nicer, and they brighten the place up quite noticeably at night.

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Posted on 23 August 2024, 21:38

A photo of a small Android tablet attached to the wall, showing two zones "Living" and "Beds" with separate temperature settings for each.

We've had a problem with our aircon system where it'll cool things down really quickly, the compressor turns off but the fans remains running to keep air circulating, and at that point the system starts blowing humid air and making it absolutely disgusting inside. I've got all sorts of data from our temperature sensor and power usage setup showing that that's what was going on, but when we had the people who installed the aircon out, they'd never heard of that problem before and didn't know what to do.

We gave up for a year (mostly because we stopped needing the aircon because summer had finished), but earlier this year I called someone else, he came out and immediately pinpointed the issue as poor temperature control (the only temperature sensor was on the aircon panel that's directly underneath the air intake). He recommended a new control system with separate sensors and more fine-grained control, and we had it installed today. It lets us have separate temperatures set for the lounge room and office, and early signs are looking promising!

The only thing I don't like is that it's basically a glorified Android tablet, but I've done the responsible thing and set up a separate isolated wireless network for it to live on. 😛

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Posted on 7 March 2023, 13:12

A photo of our old pergola. It's done in timber with white paint over it, and the roofing is polycarbonate. There's a vertical post in the middle of the longest span and the whole thing looks a bit shit.

A another photo taken from underneath the pergola looking out. You can see that the wood isn't very good quality and is rotting in places and the roofing has dust and mud on the top of it. It too looks awful.

A photo of the new pergola. It's done in white metal and looks clean and airy and SOLID. There's no middle vertical post for the longest span and it looks much more open now.

A photo taken from underneath the new pergola. The roofing is primarily white metal and there's two translucent fibreglass panels that provide a wonderfully soft and diffuse light.

New pergola is done! It looks SO much nicer, and it's much brighter underneath than I was expecting giving it's only got two light panels. I'm very excited about it not getting to be a gajillion degrees underneath it on sunny days, too.

(Ignore the piles of dirt at the left and the lights hanging from their cables... the former we need to dump out at the back of the yard, and the latter we need to call the electrician in for because the new pergola needed to get fastened to that panel of wood that the lights were previously on.)

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Posted on 15 March 2022, 13:22

A photo looking up over the hedge the next to our house, with a street light and some trees also visible, all silhouetted again the pre-sunrise sky. There's a hint of orange in the sky at the very bottom.

Man, it's been a while since I've been up before sunrise. I think the last time was when we went to New Zealand RIGHT before COVID hit in February of 2020.

We're getting our pergola redone (yes, again), this time by someone competent. Had someone in to quote just for getting it fixed, and so much had been done wrong that it made more sense to rip the whole thing down and start it over again in metal rather than timber.

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Posted on 14 March 2022, 6:53

A photo of two large bags of "Pink Batts" ceiling insulation.

It's all happening today, we're taking advantage of the fact that Beanie is over at my parents' place to get the ceiling insulation redone as well. (The people that put the ducted aircon in that was put in before we bought the place had just pulled the existing insulation back in places and not replaced it).

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Posted on 29 October 2020, 8:07

A photo of a Tesla Powerwall 2 battery sitting in its packaging on the floor of our garage, surrounded by tradies and their equipment.

Awwww yeahhhhh!

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Posted on 29 October 2020, 7:42