Driveway Done

We got a few quotes for Driveways but ended up going with Huss from Precision Concreting 0450 919 162.

The driveway was done in plain concrete with a brushed finish, and we hi-lited it with a few parallel dummy joints. Council doesn't allow anything but plain concrete for the crossover, and we didn't want two different colors hence the plain.

The installation wasn't without it's hitches, they hit the gas line as well as a stormwater pipe during excavation, but all was repaired.

The driveway has come out very nicely.

Floor & Bathroom Tiling

There seems to be a massive abundance of tiles out there on the market, ranging from as little as $15sqm to well over 100sqm.

We spent a long time looking at tiles, and after some advice from a tiler went with a tile from RAK Ceramics. We chose the Sandust Lapporto which is a semi polished tile. The tile felt a lot better than the fully polished tiles we saw and had a lot of character, these tiles are made in the UAE. We felt the quality of the tile was also a lot better than some of the other stuff we saw.

Finding a tiler was a bit of a nightmare, quotes ranged from cheap to downright highway robbery for installation. We ended up going with Ping, who another Provincial blogger has used in the past. His work is fantastic, and we are very happy with the end result.

If you will recall, earlier on we wanted to do floor to ceiling tiling but thought the $350 per room to re-install cornices was a bit of highway robbery. It frustrated me even further to find that the Di Lorenzo tiler had done a cash job with the other family who built with provincial to do floor to ceiling tiles. Oh wells.

Half the tilers we got out for quotes, wouldn't even touch the bathrooms, Ping told us it wouldn't be a problem and quoted us pretty reasonably to finish it off. Luckily we knew which brand and colour grout was originally used.

To continue floor to ceiling tiling the following was done:

1. Mirrors came off, took all of 30 mins to remove two mirrors. Mirrors came off fine.
2. Electrical plugs were loosened
3. Ceiling cornices were removed. This was a messy job and took about 2 hours to do, so an hour a bathroom.
4. Lots of drop cloths were laid down.
5. Cornice guys were called out to re-install the cornices after at a total cost of $400, and that was one of the pricier quotes !!!

So how are the results, bathroom's ended up coming out pretty amazing if I must say, and the cost savings of doing it this way was about $2k.

On with the photos. We still need to give the tiles a few more cleans before they are truly photo ready. They are still covered in grout.