Creative DIY Renovation of a Small Melbourne Apartment, 42sqm-452sqft

Ciao ragazzi, mi chiamo Sean. Benvenuti nel mio appartamento. Are you Italian? No. I'm trying. I'm Sean. I'm a sustainable buildings officer for local council. Welcome to my apartment, which I renovated myself. My budget for the renovation was $20,000. There were a few little things that kind of pushed it over, but I think if I exclude the couches, it's maybe like $22,000-ish. It's like grand design when they're like always over time, over budget. So I didn't really have a time, but I did go over budget, but only a tiny bit. To make the budget work, I had to take on the majority of the work myself, which was OK because I have a can-do attitude. I only really paid for the essential trades like an electrician and a plumber. I was very fortunate to have friends help me with free labor, particularly during the demolition. The rest of the work, I just watched YouTubes on how to and then just had a crack at it. This apartment is about 40 square meters. These old like six pack brick apartments are really good bones. It had the typical landlord paint job and gray carpets and gray blinds. So it was a bit drab. So I just wanted to bring a bit more light into the space. I did have a pretty intense Pinterest board going. I wouldn't say there was any specific influences other than really nice like timber joinery and like tile work. These minimalist and slick picture frames is also a premium speaker. Yes, we are talking about the Samsung Music Frame. Its versatile design complements any interior style, including Sean's eco-friendly, personality-filled DIY design. What we love most is how easy it is to swap the artwork. You have two options to display your art with Samsung Music Frame. Sean took these two photos. The close-up of a bug was printed on a photographic paper, and we are switching it out for a shot he took in New York, printed on a custom acrylic art panel. You can print your art on a custom acrylic panel or any paper or photo. You can also hang Music Frame on the wall easily with the enclosed wall mount kit, or stand it on any surface with a picture frame like design. What's even better is that you can choose the color and style of the magnetic bezel to curate your space. Simply line the bezel up and snap it on. There you go. New personal art brings a fresh vibe to Sean's home. Streaming music has never been easier, whether via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and it has a built-in Alexa. Music Frame is also compatible with Google Chromecast, AirPlay, and Spotify. Wide Sweet Spot technology helps you enjoy the high-quality, balanced audio throughout your home. And it also allows you to enjoy a richer audio experience with the immersive 3D sound that Dolby Atmos provides. Samsung Music Frame, an innovative blend of sound and style, perfectly tailored to any home. On the right, we've got the storage, which was originally here. And it was actually the wardrobe. It had like a rail that only went this way, so you could probably only hang about eight things in there anyway. A bit of a pantry with a linen closet. Painted that and used some old flooring to create shelves. Yeah, there's a PowerPoint in there, and I was going to put a microwave in there, and then that kind of got lost in translation, which is funny because it's like me doing everything. These doors and in the kitchen were the old handles on the original kitchen, so we've tried to reuse anything we could. I used to live in a studio apartment with a bar fridge. That little internal freezer thing inside used to drive me crazy. Yeah, I made the decision early to get a normal size fridge and freezer, which we got on Marketplace. I've strategically placed these to hide little dings that it has in it. From start to finish, the whole renovation probably took six months. I was working four days a week, and so for three days of the week, I would come to the apartment and probably put in a six or eight hour day, depending on how many beers I drank with some friends. The benchtop is from Urban Salvage, so they do recycled and reclaimed timber. I think one of the scariest moments of doing the apartment was drilling the holes and cutting with the jig the shape out for the induction and for the sink, just knowing that it was a thousand dollar piece of timber. You know, measure twice, cut once. The chopping board is an offcut of the bench, and it's just been like sanded and oiled. I made maybe five of them and gave them to all my friends that helped with the apartment and thought that was sufficient compensation for countless hours of their labor. I don't know if they agree or not, but we've built the kitchen around the hot water unit in the corner. I just need to cut the silicon and remove the top, and then you can access that. And the timber's kind of bowed a bit, so it's made it look a little bit worse. I probably would have spent a little bit more time in making that even more accessible to get into, but you live and you learn the first time you install the kitchen, I guess. It probably wasn't until I renovated this apartment that I realized that maybe I'm not a perfectionist and maybe it was a budget thing. Maybe it was a time thing. I was conscious I was at my friend's house rent free and had to get out of there. But I feel like I was at 95 percent incentive as opposed to spending more time on that. Doing the kitchen through IKEA was pretty easy. The genius part about it is the IKEA invoice will show you the fronts that you didn't order as well and the sizes of them. I took all those like sizes that I needed and went to Plyco and used their custom cut service and was able to just get premium birch plywood all cut to size how I needed it. And then gave it a light sand and then used Resene colorwood stain, pistachio green kind of finish and a clear sealer on the top. I've installed an extra bench top that slides out and then you can just do one side. I've got larger things, recycling the glass, general and fogo in there. Anywhere there was extra plywood, I tried to just reuse that into everything. So the shelf wasn't really on the cards either to begin with. I just had offcuts. Opted for a round tulip table. I had to go to Marketplace and get a second hand IKEA one. The chairs were Marketplace find as well. I don't know if I have any specific advice about buying furniture second hand. It's more about the shapes that you want. I think that's the most important. Like the chairs were reupholstered about as easy as making a pillowcase, really. You just you can spruce like things up as well if you need. Going for old, durable materials that you can bring back to life or kind of make your own. Nice shelf here. Another Marketplace purchase. I think it's a old IKEA Niklas or it's a like really good replica. Kind of works as a display shelf for the pottery and the vases that I've got and a few plants and the cameras. I don't know where the Hello Kitty thing came from. I bought this for $50 at Marketplace as well, and it is Hello Kitty branded. I feel people are less threatened when I'm taking a photo of them with the Hello Kitty, you know, camera. The most interesting thing on this shelf is this little dongle here, which is a temperature and humidity tracker. It sends the data to my phone. And so I've got all the live down to like minute intervals of the temperature and the humidity in here. Since I moved in, the average temperature has been 20 degrees on the dot with no air conditioner and no like heater. And the lowest it got down to was 12.5 degrees. I'm not sure where the motivation originally came for cork flooring, but it's a really good acoustic insulator, really good thermal properties as well. And it's a natural regenerative kind of sustainable material. I think the flooring costs about two and a half thousand dollars, maybe two thousand dollars. It was a chunk of the budget as well, but then the saving is in installing it myself. The product is called ReadyCork and they're just tiles that clip together. So it's a floating floor. With the help of my friends, we're able to remove the carpet and get back to the concrete slab. I started in the opposite corner of the apartment, so I ended in the most high traffic or the problem area, say the kitchen. If there is any damage and I need to replace any of the flooring in the kitchen, it's pretty simple to start peeling back the flooring from that corner and then rebuild in with the excess that I have. Decided not to have a TV or a cabinet on that side and instead have gone for the lush bachelor pad. Ceiling mounted projector with the PlayStation. The motivation of me doing the majority of the renovation work was probably to save money so I could spend money on treats like a three piece Mondo sofa, which was probably one of the only things in here that wasn't purchased on Marketplace. Because we're on the top level of the apartment and the roof is above us. It was a hot box when I moved in. There's actually just an air gap. There was no insulation in the ceiling. So one of the major things in the renovation was to skin the plaster off the ceiling, put pink bats in the ceiling, R3.5. The internal walls of the west, which is here, and the north in here and in the bedroom as well, we use what is called Cool Therm K17 board. It's got a layer of rigid insulation and then a plasterboard finish. And so this gives the walls an extra R1.15. So all the windows on the north and the west have had the window frame extended out. Before we did any of the renovation, a mate of mine came over and we used a thermal gun and you could see the heat just coming through the brick walls. So that drove the decision to do the K17 board on the inside of the wall. And essentially that was just glued and stuck onto the existing like rendered brick wall and then screw at certain points to kind of like fix it there. And then just like you would a regular plaster, you finish it. The insulation in the ceiling and the wall probably cost me about $5,000 and then another $2,000 to pay someone to re-plaster the ceiling. That was almost a third of my budget was just on the insulation, but it was really important to me and has made a world of difference. We had the heat wave here a few months ago where we had three days that were 38 degrees. I believe the internal temperature of the apartment started to creep up to 32-ish degrees. So obviously then I'd go to the pool and the pub. But for 98% of the year, 99% of the year, it's been a really comfortable space to be in. I added this door or changed the door to fluted glass, which was like almost everything in this apartment, another marketplace find. I had this like fear as I was drilling it out that I was going to hit the glass and it was going to like shatter into a million pieces and with it all my dreams. And then the door has, I've just got a hook up here that can kind of hold the door open. For the majority, it stays open. But if I have a really good breeze in here, I'll latch it open. The electrical board's actually against this wall. So we brought a conduit down and there's a PowerPoint for the computer and the laptop and like charging my phone and stuff like that. The old door that was here was just a hollow cord door, but it wasn't glass. And I chopped that in half and turned it into the desk here. And it's just kind of bolted underneath to the wall and some cheap little IKEA legs here to hold it up. I've got an LED strip light underneath there. If I'm working until the evening, it's really easy to turn on and it just like throws a warm light behind the computer. You can see I've decorated the space with my Italian homework. Learning Italian, I think, is a part of my long term retirement strategy. Mi piace la spiaggia. I like the beach and I like Italian food. And I went there once on a work trip and it was really like fun. And I've got a few really good friends over there. My friend Marcus, who does Blue House Studios in Sydney, is an architect and a designer. He was able to help me design these. And then the file that he produced went straight to Plyco and they were able to cut the curves. And it just arrived with flat packed and just needed a light sand. This is the brief that the architect got. That and a text message that said, can you design this shelf? Owning a bunch of tools isn't practical if you're only going to use them once every couple of years. So I was fortunate enough in this area, we've got a tool library. I paid an annual subscription there, $80, $85 at the time and was able to borrow all the tools that I needed to renovate this apartment. So I only own a drill. The wardrobes themselves are like simple IKEA packs. They were two separate purchases on Marketplace. I ordered, just like I did with the kitchen, the custom cut from Plyco, stained them in the same pistachio green. You can see there's a bit of a shadow line that's all on the top and we've tried to maintain that. So it kind of looks like it's not floating, but not completely pinned against the roof. This is probably where the majority of my clothes are. And I don't have a nice slide out accessory for the shoes. They just get kicked under there. I was watching the other episode you guys did. I was a bit envious after I saw that episode, actually, that I should redo this and make it look nicer. Ignore my bike, which is another work in progress. We've got the ceiling fan here. So like all the other lights in the apartment, it was those old oyster lights. I feel like they're there just to capture like a dead bug. We got rid of that and have put a ceiling fan in and it's got a light which I try not to use. I'm more of a lamp man. So I've probably been living here for 12 months and I've just realized there's still like paint on the underside of the door handle. So this is real. This is no Hollywood. This is how we live. We've got the bathroom in here. I've got some clothes hanging behind the door here. I think I panicked. It was a bit of a temporary thing that's turned into like medium term, but really handy. Like for a small apartment. This was all white tiles originally with like a half cast iron bath. Probably the heaviest thing I've ever picked up my whole life. We needed a car jack to lift it out of the concrete fittings that had been like stuck into the wall. My dad has done some like waterproofing and tiling in his later years. He's like 70 now. I bought a plane ticket for him and dragged him down to do some unpaid labor for me. If you watch this, cheers dad. This was a like marketplace find. It has a bit of space to, you know, hold things as I'm kind of using them. This is again like made kind of with offcuts underneath. It's actually hiding the plumbing. I can slide under and still access the pipe work. The glass is a double-sided tape in there. So it's not, it's not overly permanent. The only thing about having something exposed like this is the other day I dropped something. I dropped one of these and it fell down and it landed on my tap. So I'm a bit bummed out. I've got a little dent now. Oh, my stick-on toilet brush. Yeah, so it was a gift from an, I want to say ex or a friend or an ex, but she came over. I had a toilet brush, which obviously wasn't cutting it probably functionally and aesthetically. So bless her, she bought me this little like stick-on toilet brush, which is just kind of, you know, double-sided tape to the wall. The bathroom probably took four to six weeks because I was at a friend's house rent-free. I kind of wanted to get out of the space as quick as I could. So I moved in here without the like bathroom being completely done. And so the toilet was always working, but I was like showering at the office or at the gym for a couple of weeks, which is a good motivator to get your bathroom done is to be relying on it and not have one. So it makes you work a bit faster. So we'll go down now to where I've got my washing machine. I mean, a completely shared space would probably be even better. There are shared laundries in between each of the levels. The remaining improvements that I would love to make to the apartment would be double glazing and external shading, but that's obviously a significant cost. I think internally it's landed where I want it to be. We're almost as energy efficient as a brand new apartment. I have a bunch of friends that have since told me to quit my job and do this as a full-time. I don't know who'd pay me to give them advice on how to renovate their apartment, but it was pretty fun. I think I was a bit traumatized immediately after the process. It's probably been about nine, 12 months since I completed the bulk of the renovations. And so I'm almost ready to get involved in another project, maybe for a friend. And definitely have dreams of maybe building or renovating my own house in the future. And can take all the learnings and the mistakes that I made from here and turn them around.