Transforming The Parental Pad: Discover how we turned an underutilized outdoor space into a year-round haven. With a covered deck, sleek modern finishes, a fully equipped outdoor kitchen featuring premium cooking appliances, and thoughtful updates like single-level entry and rainwater collection, this transformation perfectly blends style, functionality, and future-proofing.
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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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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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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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What makes a great outdoor space? Designing and renovating our exterior has made us think long and hard about this. Is it indoor-outdoor flow? Is it privacy so you can sit around a brazier at night, or a big deck that you can impress your friends with and have those summer parties on. The more I think about this the less I believe that there is a single right answer. Rather it depends on how you want to use it, what you place a priority on, how it works in relation to your house and property and what you see value in.
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