We are renovating our Atelier to be a temporary house while we strip and redo the main house. My girlfriend’s parents have done a full renovation, he is an industrial electrician, her brother is a woodworker just out of school and a modular house designer. They are all super helpful and I am so grateful and learning a lot.

During the 2 weeks I worked only 2 days per week and a few weekends before we have:

• trash removal of previous owner

• ripped out electrical in the main house

• tore down the gyprock in one room and found that the main house and atelier both have a moisture blocking barrier after the first brick layer

• washed away the gritty loam paint that the previous owner had used over much of the house

• primed and painted the entire 44m^2 atelier

• got a quote for switching to 3-phase 25A, 400V and prepared the site

• made a temporary fence to keep our dog in the first piece of our garden that is closed on the sides

• cut and dug trenches inside for gas, water, electric and internet

• broke up and hauled away 6cm thick concrete slab where we had to route things under

• placed and hooked up electrical in the atelier loft, storage room, and the outdoor storage shelter behind it

• made technical drawings for electrical, gas, sewer, and water

• found a quality 2nd hand gas stove to heat during our mild winters

• dug out and mapped sewer and gas lines through the property

• dug a 24 meter trench 70cm deep and laid water, gas, and 3-phase electric (in a flexible pipe) in that layer, and laid internet and sewer at ~40cm deep with a measured 1cm per meter “afwatering.”

• Quotes for redoing the asbestos filled roof in the main house and currently setting up asbestos testing for the slanted wall since the attestation documentation seemed to be wrong and there is asbestos-based insulation according to a roofer + asbestos remover we got a quote from

• temporarily rennovated the small bathroom, repainted, replaced the broken toilet, removed the leaky sink, and re-silicones the tiny sitting bath/shower and replaced the shower head

• Found 30m^2 of click laminate for 40€. Proud of that find. Good condition too.

Next up is hooking up the gas and water fittings fully inside, getting a plumber to come test and hook us up to the main line, place and hook up the electrical in the living room and for the appliances, find a 2nd hand oven, stove, and fume hood, and fill in the inside trenches and re-pour the concrete, place the floors and finish up for the year in the next month.

Oooh, this is a post for me. I have a handful of projects going.

I have a network room that needs a fan installed where the window used to be, I have the fan, just need to cut open the board covering what used to be the window, install the fan, and wire it up to exhaust hot air out of the room directly outside. Non time critical, I have the door to that room open for now, it used to be a root cellar in the basement.

I also need to fix the insane electrical work for the basement lighting that the former owner of this house put in. He put in one of those light socket to plug things, then wired together all the new lights in the basement with Romex (all fluorescent) and finished it to a plug that connects to that light socket. I want to pull apart this hot garbage and wire it correctly, and replace the light switches box in the process (some of the threading in the electrical box is stripped, so the switch doesn’t mount correctly), and move it to a different circuit, because it’s currently sharing a circuit with the recreation room, and a couple of bedrooms for seemingly no good reason.

I also have to replace all the magnetic ballasts in the basement light fixtures with electronic ballasts because we have fluorescent replacement LED bulbs, which only work on electronic ballasts. Yay. I have to check the garage and at least one other room with fluorescent fixtures to see if they’re on magnetic ballasts and replace them too so we can finally have all LED lighting in the house.

Going with lighting here: I have to find my multimeter to test and hopefully fix a lamp my brother purchased that doesn’t work that will go in the living room, and replace all the lightbulbs in the living room with smart bulbs, then have them controlled by an in-wall smart light switch (which is already in place), via home assistant. I also need to do smart bulbs in the recreation room, I also have new light fixtures for the rec room to replace some that had loose bulbs (the bulb base was loose in the fixture), and replace the light switches in there with in wall smart switches.

A whole room is lacking power, it was split between different circuits, one was the basement lights/rec room, the other was to the bathroom, I managed to rewire the room to a single point, and I’m trying to pull a new circuit to the room with 12/2 Romex. Holes are drilled, just need to feed the cable along side another run of Romex, and likely pull one more circuit to separate the bathrooms (which are on different floors above/below eachother), from the fridge in the kitchen. Two new circuits, woo. Need breakers for them.

My brother also bought a gazebo from the hardware store that needs to be built and set up in the back yard, and my father in law bought us some pathway lights that I have yet to unpack.

The back yard garden is overgrown with weeds, and I need to deal with that. We didn’t do any gardening this year so nature took over… I don’t really have many if any tools to deal with it, so I need to do some garden supply shopping.

I’m also prepping to install ethernet throughout the house, I have two boxes of category 6 cable, 1000 ft each (2000 ft total), including wiring going up into the attic for access points.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot, but that’s the projects that are foremost on my mind… Some are pretty easy (like the rec room fixtures, I have them, I just need to hang them, or the new wire pull from the power-less room, I have the cable partly run, just need to pull it the rest of the way).

Longer term, I want to build raised boxes in the garden, plus renovate to add a kitchen and another bathroom (with a shower)… Build a new shed, and replace the old antenna tower with something less rusted and perhaps taller, plus run coax from the antenna tower to my office for my ham radio hobby.

Maybe eventually put solar panels on the roof and perhaps a battery system so we can produce and store our own power…