I started my First Mouse House Blog with a reference to the fact that “You never know what is around the corner.” This seems to be a bit of a theme for 2016 in Jax land!

In case you didn’t catch that first post, I bought a house and we are now on a huge renovation mission. The plan was for me to document every step of the way but work has taken me away for a large chunk of the proceedings and am currently out of action with my arm in a sling! Yip I fell off my bicycle last week and landed up in hospital with a concussion, a broken clavicle and no recollection of what actually happened! Luckily I had taken some time out of work to deal with the house and the surgery all went well, so besides being an enormous frustration, feeling rather kak with the concussion head and bloody sore in the collar bone area I haven’t been too affected.

On the up side, I recently won the Admired in Africa Wedding Photographer of the year and with this came the incredible prize of a Fjui XT2 which I will definitely be using to take pics of the house! Right now I have been told to rest so …….. Watch this space for new pics.

In the meantime here are some photos of the demolition craziness that has been happening at the mouse house. Most of these were shot by Riaan on his phone.

The pic above shows the wall between the living area and the kitchen which we have now removed to create an open plan space.

Above you will see the old outdated kitchen which has now been removed as you can see below. We are also replacing the old linoleum floors with more tiling and this has meant chipping up the screed which is also a big job. The original old geyser as well as all the plumbing have been replaced and modernized into something more energy efficient. Riaan is going to be upcycling the copper inside of the geyser into light fittings.

And here you will see a pic of the old compartmentalized toilet, shower and bathroom which have been totally gutted to make one more spacious bathroom and one separate toilet.

The floors in the passage and the bedrooms were all covered in old linoleum which we removed to reveal a pretty solid screed. With a lot of elbow grease our builders managed to remove the bitchumen with bitchumen remover. We aren’t quite sure what we are going to do here but I like the look and coolness of screed so I think we are probably going to go with this.

This refurbishing business is incredibly stressful and so time consuming but I am so darned excited to see our vision come to life. This really is a dream come true and even though there have been moments where I have felt like I am about to blow a fuse I am also constantly counting my blessings and giving thanks. I am particularly giving thanks for Riaan who has been my rock through all of this. He is also very clever with design and space so I am very lucky to have him on my team! Next Mouse House post I will introduce you to my new tile obsession and some other people on my team!