Meet our holiday home on wheels, an iconic ‘Kiwi’ caravan. We intended to give her a little makeover, and after a few years of neglect and COVID lockdowns, we took on the task of upgrading and updating our retro caravan. In this blog, we share the renovation process and break down the numbers to show what we spent as first-time caravan renovators!
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Our master bedroom has the most windows in the house and is the largest of the three bedrooms, this room deserved design that made a statement and was retreat from the rest of the house. Our reno recap shows how we did just that!
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Our brief for our dining room is all about what we want as a family, not how to fit in eight people for a dinner party that might only happen every few months at best. What we wanted from our dining room was a place for the family (including toddlers) to eat meals together, a place for Caleb and I to work and a relaxing adult space that won’t constantly be covered in toys and small hand marks! This has lead us to a final design that we love, for so many reasons.
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Renovating the exterior of a house holds a lot of value and importance. Simply put, the exterior is the only space in your house that every single visitor will see, when it comes to high traffic areas the exterior will always rank #1. With exterior renovations you have the opportunity to make a strong first impression in terms of design and create additional living areas to relax and entertain in. It would be safe to say, most New Zealanders place a high value on outdoor living. In fact, as we searched for our relocatable house for our section, we only considered houses that had a layout that would allow for indoor/outdoor flow.
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A common question that we get asked by friends who follow our renovation journey is: WHY? As in why would you consider regularly renovating and give up a significant amount of your spare time? Answering that completely would be a whole blog in itself – but simply because we love it. One of the things I love is the decisiveness required to renovate, there is a skill to making decisions in renovating and experience provides opportunity to develop that. While this is a small-scale renovation, there are still a whole lot of interior design decisions that that took us from Our Plan to Our Presentation.
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When we first started renovating we were complete rookies. While Caleb knew about property from his studies and beginning his career in project management, he had very limited understanding when it came to DIY or anything practical. And while I had a natural intuition with design and colour scheming, I had no idea about interior design techniques or where to source the products I liked. To sum it up - we had a youthful confidence which is probably best described as pure ignorance. Normally within a blog we would share details of our renovation to provide inspiration and advice - but this is more of an example of what not to do! Our first renovation project was our “boot camp” in renovating - and boy did we realise we weren’t “renovation fit”.
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As we were planning our outdoor paving area around our deck, Alice had grand plans but we didn't have a grand budget. When Alice considers “the look”, Caleb considers "the cost" of a project. It causes that balance of what do we want and what do we need, where do we spend money and where do we intentionally save money. We had concrete pavers from our old courtyard and it seemed like a waste to buy new ones. But then again - old tired pavers beside our brand new deck and freshly painted fences was not going to be a good enough look for Alice. Our solution – PAINT THE PAVERS. This transformation is straight forward and total cost is under $300.00.
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Painting is a cost-effective way to achieve transformation in an outdoor space and there are so many surfaces you can paint to add colour and freshness – timber, concrete, tiles, metals. I have a list of areas I want to paint in our outdoor renovation – the house, the roof and trims, the base boards, the fence, the paving edging, outdoor furniture, the pavers – oh and stain the deck! As labour intensive as my list is, the more challenging part is deciding what colours I should use on all of these elements
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It is well known that kitchen’s are the heart of the home and we think windows are the eyes. In an understated way, windows draw visitors inside your home, framing and connecting your outlook, create the perception of space and bring light into your home.
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