Open for Business!

Wow!  After about eight months of demolition, construction, decorating, furnishing and landscaping, the Ranger's Cottage is open for business.  Our first guests move in on Saturday and while we haven't yet started serious marketing Flick is already getting several inquiries a week via the friends we have talked to about it.

Here's our draft marketing patter (help us improve the copy!) and photos, which were taken by our friend Alastair who also took some wonderful shots of the boys at our local beach last summer.  Photography is just one of his many hobbies.

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The Ranger's Cottage, Manly

Set in a quiet, leafy cul de sac, with a bush reserve on one side of the street and a secluded arm of Sydney Harbour just a stone's throw away, the Ranger's Cottage offers a delightful home away from home. Newly refurbished, fully self-contained and sun drenched, the cottage features a main room (including kitchenette), bedroom, bathroom, laundry facilities and private outdoor courtyard.

The Cottage is located on the famous Manly to Spit Scenic Walkway, with Manly about 30 minutes’ walk away (or 5 minutes by car).  Picturesque Forty Baskets Beach (a sandy and safe harbour beach with enclosed swimming area, jetty, rock pools, free barbecues and swings) is an easy eight minute walk through the bush reserve on a sealed path.  Beyond it is the entrance to the Sydney Harbour National Park, with the Walkway continuing through bush for several hours to reach the Spit Bridge in Middle Harbour.

The local café is a four minute walk via a pedestrian bridge across a cascading stream.  Opposite it is North Harbour Reserve, which features a children’s play area.

A free Manly Council operated shuttle bus (to Manly ferry wharf and local shopping destinations) runs past the end of the street (100m).  Normal buses also operate along this route including peak hour services to the Sydney CBD.  The closest supermarket, along with a selection of over 20 restaurants is 1km away.

Location shot

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Picking up the thread from our last renovation post, we finally decided we were sick of the constant dirt, and in May decided to blow the budget by commissioning a landscaper to build about 50 lineal metres of retaining wall (partly to prop up a collapsed embankment along the boundary) and pave the little courtyard in front of the cottage.  While we were at it we had our plumber bury a series of pipes that will become our storm water reticulation system once we get around to organising a drainage easement across our neighbour's garden.

Ken the Plumber installs pipes

"Boys at Work" in a land Downunder

 Then we had "bobcat man" shift dirt around for a day, followed by many weekends' worth of our effort smoothing and contouring the surface and laying 250sqm of turf.- creating around 150sqm of fairly flat lawn - see Charlie's party post for photos of its first official outing.

First watering

The previous owners of our place seem to have had a thing for rubble, and at some point had a large truckload of it delivered and spread around the place.  While bobcat man had buried a lot of it as fill at the base of the retaining walls we also filled an additional two skip bins totaling seven cubic metres with stones and extra demolition waste from the cottage.  One weekend we were delighted to receive the assistance of our friends Roger and Karen and their children Ben and Emma, who joined us for several hours to fill the skips - thanks again guys!  Amazingly, despite building up the bottom corner of the section by 1.2m with terraced retaining walls, we haven't had to bring in any additional fill - we've just moved dirt from one part of the property to another.

Ben and Roger, Emma in background

Meanwhile inside the cottage, we filled, sanded and painted the ceilings & walls; laid the floating floor boards (extremely fiddly around the doorways!); assembled and installed the kitchen cabinets (with only a modicum of assistance from our builder); chose all our bits and pieces and had tradies in for tiling, splashback, plumbing and electrical fitoff. Outside we painted the exterior (well, the two visible walls and eaves anyway; we bought enough paint for the rest but that is going to be a "sometime project", including the roof), fitted new gates (including a pedestrian gate with a path from the street directly to the cottage) and finally restored our off street parking.

Flick made curtains and blinds.  Finally we unpacked and set up the furniture (more Ikea assembly), appliances, kitchenware, etc (we had a huge lot of cardboard recycling that week) and then spent a couple of evenings cleaning everything in preparation for the photos.

Like I say: wow! It's been an absolute marathon and we're overdue for some family time.  Put it this way, if you ask the boys about shopping they'll tell you about Bunnings, Ikea and the supermarket. While we're now open for business, we still have a the external painting and a bit more landscaping to finish off, not to mention a backlog of maintenance on the main house.  But in terms of transformational experiences this has been right up there for us, and the amenity we've added with the landscaping and lawn work is huge.

Thanks to the boys for their relative patience, to Melissa for keeping them occupied on a number of weekends, Linda who donated a day helping us paint, our builder Dirk, plumber Ken and landscaper Jeremy (amongst other tradies) and for all the friends we've neglected this year (or co-opted into helping for those who have been brave enough to drop round)!