The following are some more pictures of the latest developments

Knocking out walls for the new kitchen

The roof for the new add-on

Extended kitchen from the outside

Our new french doors

My first tiling job

We have a bath, basin and toilet!!

We got home from Europe and immediately sanded and varnished the floors, and painted the walls

We've moved in! We had some amazing helpers to help us move

We are slowly putting our kitchen together

Our first room (the spare room) that's kinda finished

Thank you to all the people that have been helping us. You guys have been amazing!!

A new Window for the main bedroom

A new Window for the bathroom

The wall seperating the two bathrooms

Open Plan vibes. The bathroom door is bricked up and there's an opening for the new bathroom

Yay! A new roof. No more leaks!!

The last bit of sky is being patched up. Thank God we had an amazing sunshiny clear day.

There is a lot more to see at the moment, but I just need to take the pictures of the latest renovation. Yesterday we tried our hand at tiling. I really enjoyed that a lot. Will take some photos of that today.

Later skater

The builders are doing a lot of work on the house at the moment. I will hopefully have some more photos up tomorrow…

The old kitchen

The fake dropped ceiling needs to come out!

This frame has to go, because it's where the shower's going to be

Steve doing an amazing job at taking out the tree. Bye Bye tree!

We're going for the "rustic" bathroom look at the moment

That wall's coming out, so we have to save the frames

We have decided on a builder to do the stuff we can’t do ourselves, so there will be plenty of changes happening soon. Stay tuned….

The Original Plans

And this one is what it will hopefully look like “soon”:

And this is the end result

So just to explain it a bit. The one bathroom and closet will be turned into two bathrooms. There’s actually one little change that we’ve made to the drawing which is that Bathroom 2 will have a door into the dining room rather than Bedroom 2. The current kitchen isn’t much of a kitchen anyway at the moment, so that’s being turned into a bedroom. To create more space in the house we will close in the veranda and extend that wall to create a little laundry area. The front door will now be at the back of the house. Some walls will be knocked out to create an open plan layout. Oh, and we’re replacing the roof entirely. Fun times!

Here are some before pictures of the house (I know, it’s in a shocking state!):

The front Veranda

Bathroom

Lounge and Bedroom

The Kitchen

The courtyard/"garden"

And lastly, Google was so kind to take an aerial photo of our roof. Hopefully by the end of next week, it will look more like our neighbour’s roof.

Google took a picture of our roof

Stay posted as we make progress on the house. Awaiting quotes from builders due at 12:00 today…

So we thought we would document this process in the form of this blog. And why not share it with the rest of the world?! So Join us on our journey of transforming a derelict old building in a suburb in Cape Town (name not mentioned for privacy’s sake) into a delightful love nest. We will post everything under the “love nest” category.

Here’s a little picture to get a feel for the area we’ll be living in. Loving it!

The way we role

So last night we got the keys to the place. We moved some matresses in and spent the night there. Interesting to say the least…. It’s amazing how much of the outside world you hear when you don’t have any furniture in the house. Hence, not much sleep on our part….

Jesus says: “I am the way and the TRUTH and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”.

Truth is not relative. He’s absolutely my relative.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about reading, and how we seem to lose our ability to read properly. I have noticed myself losing focus so quickly. I used to be able to read for hours and hours, and really enjoyed it. The last year or three I’ve noticed that I read less books, I tend to not finish books (which would have been unheard of for me a few years back) and I read several books at a time, instead of focusing on one.

I believe this is due to the information overload the internet delivers. We’ve become information-hungry junkies, and because of the high volumes of material to get through, we read faster and with less focus, skimming through any form of text. They even teach you how to skim read now. I know I’m starting to sound a bit old-fashioned now, but sometimes old-school is cool.

I recently listened to Pastor George Stormont talking about Smith Wigglesworth. Smith Wigglesworth wasn’t the most literate person around, and hence would only read the Bible. But that doesn’t seem to have been such a bad thing at all! History tells us what an effect that had on his life and ministry.

The way Internet is making us lose our reading skills is even affecting my Bible reading. All too often I notice myself having read an entire passage, without having taken in anything!

So I’ve been trying to read less other stuff, and more of the Bible. I started with cutting out some media consumption. I used to read online newspapers a lot. For some odd reason I thought I needed to know about everything happening all the time. I really haven’t missed it at all, and I must say, I don’t think I’ve missed anything either.