Renovating update - Hallway Conversion part one...

I think I have finally gotten my head around all that has been happening here the past few months and I am ready to share it all with you. I confess it really did throw me for a six for a while and I honestly didn't know how to put into words all that was and is happening to our little home. It started out as something relatively small and has ended up being an almost full house renovation. Anyway, the best way for me to share our renovating is in small pieces, so here goes, part one of our hallway conversion.

At the very beginning of our renovations our main purpose for starting to renovate was to get a better bathroom for our family. For the whole 11 years that we have lived here (owned this home), our bathroom has been dreadful. You might question me and think I am over exaggerating but honestly, it has been a source of great embarrassment to me and something I was pretty much ashamed of. It is currently situated at the back corner of our home and is in an enclosed part of the verandah that wraps around half of our home. I am not sure that I will ever be able to share photos of our bathroom but let me tell you, it's awful. It has no tiles, an old basin attached to the wall, a shower in a base and a very old toilet. It's just a room that needs to go.

So I had this brainwave. You see, our current (at the time) entry was at the side of the house.

As you walked in the door, you entered a hallway that had three openings in it. This is a before shot of our hallway, looking back at our front door from inside the house. The doorway to the left went to the kitchen and the doorway to the right went into our bedroom and at the end, the opening went into the lounge room. Hope that all makes sense.

Here's a few other before shots of our hallway taken over the past years, and you can see a few shots here in this blog post as well.

This shot is taken whilst standing in our lounge room, looking back into the hallway.

And this shot is taken whilst standing in the kitchen, looking back into the hallway.

I have LONG wanted to return the enclosed verandahs on our home back to their original state, having lovely verandah's wrapping around half of our home. While we would initially lose some rooms in the process it would greatly improve the street appeal of our home, the heating and cooling during different seasons and allow me to have my MUCH longed for front door, at the front of the house.

So this is where my brainwave came in. I had the idea that maybe our hallway could become an ensuite for us. The opening from our bedroom was already there, it was a nice wide hallway and quite long, so really I didn't see why it wouldn't work. Hubby liked the idea so after borrowing some money to begin and chatting to our builder friend, it was decided this is exactly what we would do.

Before being able to close up our hallway and turn it into a bathroom, we first needed another way to enter the house, hence the temporary new front on our house. You can read all about that here. And after completing the new front, some stairs and a garden, work began in earnest inside.

First the old front door needed to be secured. Our bulider recommended we not enclose that end of the hallway yet so that tradesmen had room to come in and out without having to go through our bedroom - great advice that we happily accepted. We did order a bathroom window for the end wall though, and put that aside while we worked (slowly) on the ensuite.

We then needed to cover up our other door ways to try and prevent as much dust and dirt as possible from getting into the rest of our home while walls were being removed, so vintage sheets were hung in the doorways. This is the door into the kitchen.

It was now time for our builder to get busy pulling down walls, trims, architraves and anything else that was standing in the way.

During the process of our renovations and through chatting with some neighbours, we have decided that our house is close to 100 years old. The walls in the hallway are horsehair plaster so were quite heavy to remove. To my delight, we found some writing on the back of each wall, stating what the room was and it's size (in feet and inches). I loved seeing this particularly because it helped me work out what the rooms in this home were originally set out to be (before enclosed verandah's etc).

It didn't take very long for our hallway to be stripped of it's walls, exposing the hardwood frames and the back of the horsehair plaster from the other rooms.

And here is what our hallway looked by the end of the day, a shell of it's former self but with a little bit of promise for good things to come. There was more plaster to remove above the door heights, that came the next day.

This door, into our bedroom, is the only one that will remain a doorway but will also change. More about that later.

I think that is enough for me to explain in this post, I hope I haven't completely confused you all. I will back to share the next stages of our ensuite reno with you soon. xx Janelle