I have never stayed anywhere as tranquil as Millars by the Lake. Set deep in the karri forest of Quinninup, this sweet heritage cottage has something wonderfully calming about it. Owned by my friend Jade and her husband Andrew for the past four years, I’ve watched from afar, through texted photos and social media, as
What would you want if you were about to sell the house you’d called home for the past ten years? The home that you and your partner slowly, fixed up over the years, painting, DIY-ing and landscaping. The house to which you’d brought two babies home from the hospital, and spent hours playing with your
Don’t fall off your chair. Today I finally have a reveal for you! Our before and after of our Scyon Walls elevation makeover, where we overclad the exterior of our double brick 1970s house. Yep, it’s been a while. If this is your first time to my blog, welcome! Basically we decided to overclad our
Bayswater is one of my favourite suburbs in Perth. If you don’t know it; think old farmhouses, sleepy streets, old trees, character houses with tons of potential, and little pockets of former farming land that make you feel like you could have stepped back in time. It has so much perfectly unpolished charm, and it
I have a soft spot for Penshurst, the historic house I’m going to share with you today – which was actually one of my very first home tours – in fact I visited it before I’d even clicked ‘publish’ on my first blog post! (Original post here). When I was a teenager, after school my
This beautiful home has just gone on the market with Nadija Begovich and Dan Broad of The Perth Property Co. Buying a house in beautiful Coolbinia was a dream come true for then newly-engaged couple Ash and Lisa Mitchell. Both Ash and Lisa had always loved character homes and when the chance came to buy
Le Fanu, Perth’s most expensive home renovation, is up for sale. If you could do with a luxury beach home and have a spare $17 million, this heritage-listed house could be yours! Some of you guys may remember the story I wrote a few years ago on this house. Right by the beach in Cottesloe
The right lights can have a major effect on a room or an interior. In fact there are few things that can date a home more quickly than old, daggy lighting. Hello boob lights and oyster lights! No matter how curated and stylish your décor, or how modern your renovation, if you still have an
I love this house. This is the former home of our friends Tim and Caity Phillips, it’s a cool renovation and a house that I like because it suits its owners down to a tee. You guys may already know Tim’s name from some of my earlier posts; he and his TJP Carpentry team put
Little Nerd is at his Oma’s house, Mr Nerd is at work, the dog and the baby are down and I’ve had two coffees by 9am. What better time to snatch some blogging time at my desk and hastily share some progress photos of our Scyon Walls cladding makeover. (If you haven’t seen our before
Even though our living room is one of the two rooms in our home where we spend the most time, after years of living here, I still never felt like we had fully finished it or properly styled it. A little embarrassing – most people seem to do the living room first, don’t they? I
Whenever I hear of a young couple that has worked their butts off to get into real estate from a young age, I find it easy to empathise. Mr Nerd and I have also worked hard and made sacrifices to get on the property ladder ourselves. Unfortunately, even when you think you’ve done ‘the right
Can you believe that until recently, I had never caught an episode of Selling Houses Australia (we don’t have Foxtel – at least not yet… this may now change) and the show has been around since 2008. Now in its eleventh season on Foxtel’s Lifestyle channel, this multi-award winning show is bigger than ever. I
I love Perth. But in my humble opinion, the rugged NSW coast has to be one of the most beautiful and special parts of Australia. A few years ago my sister-in-law relocated from Sydney to live in a beach house in a small town a couple of hours south of the city (just near Berry,
There’s nothing like stepping into your beautiful, blissful bathroom renovation, carefully designed in a minimalist colour palette of tasteful neutrals… only for your eye to be immediately drawn to the stash of colourful, garishly labelled shampoo and conditioner bottles in your shower. Am I being a little OCD? Yeah, I know it’s a first world
What do you do when you love renovating and building and are itching to do it again… but you love your current location, which is just perfect for your family? Well, it might not happen very often, but these two dedicated renovators sold their much-loved labour of love – and built their next home right
Today I’m finally sharing our laundry renovation on here! I absolutely love our laundry makeover. If you were to ask me which renovation project in our house has given me the most satisfaction, I have to say I think it would be this room. And I don’t even LIKE doing laundry. This is my favourite
Imagine having acres and acres of land around you, no other houses as far as the eye can see. Sounds like heaven – right? But what if it’s so many endless acres of space that every so often you actually end up craving a little more intimacy, a bit more privacy and enclosed space? That’s
“If we ever renovate again, I would…” “Our next house, we should do this…” These are words Mr Nerd and I have uttered to each other many a time as we’ve been ankle-deep in renovation rubble here. I am still FAR from a renovating pro, but we’ve learned a lot of things through trial and
Since we have started our project to rejuvenate the exterior of our house using Scyon Walls™cladding, I have been blown away by the number of people interested in these products and asking me questions about it. I’m not blown away because I’m surprised – I think the products are fantastic – but blown away by
When I am scrolling through Instagram, the photos always guaranteed to stop me in my tracks are ones of renovating. Maybe it’s because I have always been obsessed with a good before and after story – all the bits, from the demo to the drywall to the decking being laid out – but there is
Aside from our own renovations, I haven’t often featured room makeovers on House Nerd – I’ve always gone the whole hog and done a whole house. Even though putting together full home tours – like this one – take me ages, I haven’t often done ‘room renovations’, such as a kitchen or bathroom only, because
So I’m excited to share that we are about to start our Scyon Walls™ elevation makeover! Not long ago I shared in this post that we were going to be making over our house’s elevation with a modern mixed materials look in collaboration with Scyon. We also had a designer on board to help us
Would you buy a house you hated? Could you make an offer on a home with an interior you didn’t like at all – a home that was actually a particularly ugly example of the era it was built? Home owners Craig and Emma Croxford did – buying a 1970s Willetton house that was so
The renovating bug is a sneaky thing, isn’t it? Once you’ve been bitten by it (or the home building bug, which I hear is as equally infectious) it’s never long after you throw down your paintbrush one day and swear, “That’s it! I’m done! I’m not doing any more renovations,” that bug raises its little
This story first appeared on my original House Nerd blog here. It was dilapidated, needed love and had slowly deteriorated to the point that almost none of the doors and windows could be closed properly. But there was something mesmerising about the old weatherboard cottage that drew young couple and serial renovators Nat and Trent
When first home buyer and building designer Janik Dalecki bought a dumpy little Maylands cottage, his friends thought he had lost the plot. “The house ticked all my boxes and I instantly saw what potential it had,” he says. “But family and friends thought I was crazy and said things like, ‘it’s a bowl-over’!” But Janik,
I have always loved the tiny, original workers’ cottages in suburbs like Leederville, Subiaco and Fremantle. But although I look at them from the outside and admire their quaintness and charm, often I think that I could never live in one – I presume that they must almost always be way too small and cramped
Some people like gardens that are perfectly neat, with not a weed in sight or leaf out of place. But I tend to prefer the messy, crazy, overgrown ones; big and rambling, or small courtyard gardens, I like ones that enshroud their houses in dark jungle-like thickets. To me a crazy overgrown garden is so
If you are looking for an inexpensive, easy way to update your kitchen or bathroom, tile paint could be the way to go. Today I’m going to share how we used it to give our dated, 1970s tile a mini-makeover for less than $100. Yesterday I showed you guys the before photos of our kitchen when we
If you grew up in our sun-bleached country, like me, you will be familiar with one of the great Australian home features – the ubiquitous sunroom, or sleepout. When I was a kid so many of my friends’ houses had a sleepout – and so many still do. Commonly tacked onto the back of 60s