Meanwhile...

The architect comes, measures up, and is, we hope, currently drawing up plans.
Peter covers over the hole in the floor with mdf and sheets of masonite, and with a rug from the market over the top, the living room looks reasonably habitable.
We are giving up a storage area we've rented for years, and shelves from it are relocated in the second bedroom, giving us a place for the assorted tools that are living in there at present.
We acquire a single bed mattress, which will one day have a bed to go with it in the second bedroom.
After weeks of wet and windy weather, the old climbing rose blows down from the wall. We decide to seize the opportunity to render the newly-straightened wall. Our builders give us the contact for the guys who did the rendering of our renovation, and they are due tomorrow to do the wall. The rose has been cut right back to a mere three old stems, but I'm sure it will grow again. It was overdue for pruning, but it was so high up the wall it was almost impossible to do. So much easier with it lying on the ground!

Renderers come, and render, returning a few days later to do the top coat. Wall looks great, and the rose will be re-attached.

Straightening up the wall

Ready....

Mainmark sends Christian to do a "services location". While he is taking a phone call, we do a bit of digging and by sheer good luck strike the inspection port for the stormwater, which means Christian can put his magic camera doodah down the drain and find out exactly where it goes. With a bit more help from us he finds that the water for our house runs along the wall of 1A Little O'Grady Street (bad news), but the stormwater drain for our house is located about 400mm from the wall (good news).
He also assists with a bit of sewer investigation - we learn that the sewer is deep, probably about 1.6 metres down. We think this makes a new connection from 1A Little O'Grady possible.

Set...

Mainmark suggested that we cut through the brick wall between our place and 1A Little O'Grady Street, just beyond the back of that house, so that when they try to push the side wall back into its proper position, it isn't restricted by the garden wall to which it is attached. After getting a scary quote from a tradesman who was going to make two cuts, take out the bricks in between, and build pillars so we could hang a gate, we go for the simpler approach. Peter rings Profast, and they come by today and cut one neat slot just past the end of the house, in about an hour all up. Job done.

And then there's the inside story

We have to provide access to the wall on both sides. Which means taking up some floorboards in the lounge of 1A Little O'Grady Street. Which means chipping up the horrible 1970s mission brown tiles. Helen has a nice time with a hammer and cold chisel getting that done a day or so ago, creating a tile-free area about 400mm out from the wall. This exercise confirms what we have believed for a while, that the tiles are on a cement bed on an old timber floor, rather than on a slab. Today Peter buys a nice new crowbar at Bunnings, with which he attacks the cement, and the wire mesh under the cement. One floor board now cleared and removed, probably two more to go. Now also confirmed that the floorboards are rotten, full of borer, and not worth saving. Which makes the job of ripping up the floor simpler.

Peter spends another session with the crowbar, and together we clear up the mess of tiles, cement, aluminium mesh and plastic that the wrecking exercise creates. We now have a three floorboard wide hole. And a pile of rubble and borer-infested wood in the courtyard. And dust. A lot of dust.

GO!

Wall day arrives. We are up at 6:30am (what!!?) carpenters arrive at 7am to set up their props in our garden and to make holes in the floor. Which we've already done, because we thought it was our job. They are impressed with the wholesale removal of the floorboards. At 8am, the Mainmark boys turn up, but nothing much happens for the next hour or so because the supervisor is flying in from Wagga. Once he gets there they insert all the tubes, connect up the pressure pumps and start pumping goop in under the wall. This slowly fills up soil cavities, compresses the soil and eventually creates a stable foundation. Initially most of the goop just comes under the wall and finishes up in our garden, but after a bit of relocation of tubes all goes well for a while. The sides of the cut in the wall then jam, and some of the bricks at the top have to be hammered out before the wall is free to move. By the time they finish it isn't completely straight, but the gap between wall and ceiling is much smaller, and the expert thinks the walls been pushed as far as the rest of the house will stand.

So now we're ready for the next step - getting some plans drawn.

Before

Props outside

Injection, inside

More injection

Foam coming up on the garden side

Parallel projects, post-trip

We return from Europe in late August, and start on parallel projects.
We have our first booking from friends who want to stay in late September, so we need to have the house liveable by then. That's Project One.
At the same time, we want to get the renovation project underway: Project Two.
Lists are made.

Thank you IKEA

For Project One, it's an inventory of what's in the house, and what should be but isn't. Nick has left a few things that are duplicated in his new life, and there is also a collection of stuff that dates back to our time when it was our office. So there is a comfortable couch, two easy chairs that convert to beds, two office chairs, a TV table (but no TV) a kettle or two, cutlery, crockery, some cooking gear and a bar fridge. There is also a small dining table, on semi-permanent loan from one of our colleagues from the Computer Forensic Team days.
Major gaps in the inventory are filled by a couple of expeditions to IKEA, a couple to Bunnings, a couple to the Good Guys, and a lucky find on GumTree of a 37" TV (no longer available new, but just the right size for the space occupied by the TV table). After that there is much work on flat-pack assembly as we construct a bed and two bedside tables, and a set of portable shelves that will fit in the wardrobe in the bedroom.
By the time our friends arrive the house boasts a queen bed with electric blanket and bedlamps, nice linen and towels, a coffee machine, microwave, toaster, TV, CD/DVD player/recorder, hair dryer, iron and ironing board in addition to the furniture already in place. Our friends confirm that the place is now comfortable and enjoy their stay.
We feel that we've moved it from half a star to about 1.5 stars. To get it further up the scale we need to make progress on Project Two.

When not crawling round on the floor saying "Pass the allen key" to one another, we are making phone calls and sending emails to get Project Two going. Before we went away, our builders came and confirmed what we feared, that we would have to begin by straightening the side wall. It's been leaning toward the Finlay Street back garden for several decades (half a century?). We had it looked at from our side some time back, and when assured that it wasn't going to fall down, or even lean further, decided to leave it alone. However from the inside, one is aware of a significant gap between the ceiling and the top of the wall, large enough to admit rain and even a modest quantity of leaves from time to time. We get the experts back in, and make an arrangement to have a wall-straightening exercise done in October.
After much discussion between us, we reach agreement on the best place for a relocated bathroom. Deciding to move it is a no-brainer as it presently occupies prime real estate in the corner of the living area, and is as far from the bedrooms as you can get without going outside. We settle on sacrificing about half the second bedroom, leaving just enough room for a single bed or bunks, and a small desk. The question is then whether there will be any significant issues associated with moving the plumbing. The loo is currently situated on the back wall. From there the sewerage pipe goes across the back of the house to link up with an old outside dunny built on the back, which still has the original Federation pan and cistern in place, and, we think, still connected. The roof and door of this outhouse have collapsed, and it's full of earth and leaves, so we clean all this out and dump the rubbish in a convenient skip, with the permission of the friendly builders working over the road. The plumber who lives a few doors down kindly comes for a look at the present and planned future arrangements, and tells us he can see no barriers to a bathroom relocation - we can either take a pipe under the floor to the existing trap, thereby lengthening the sewer line by about 6 metres, or we can take a new line straight out under the side wall and join it to the sewer line that it shares with our house (so convenient to own both, as this will involve digging a largeish hole in our lawn).
Last but not least, we re-establish contact with the builder and architect. The builder is coming to cut through the brick wall where the side wall of the house becomes a boundary fence, a pre-requisite for the wall-straightening. The architect is coming late next week or early the following week to talk plans.
We're underway.

Parallel plans, pre June

There's no time to start seriously on our Guest Wing project before we head overseas for a couple of months. We do email the architect and builder that we used for our recent home reno, to let them know we'd like to talk about another project around September. And we get a bit of basic maintenance done - patching a ceiling, replacing light globes and tap washers, replacing window blinds, removing a tree and cleaning up the back courtyard until there is room for a car.

The story so far...

In 1999, the cottage at 1A Little O'Grady Street came on the market. The property is next door to where our garage opens into Little O'Grady Street, and its side wall forms the wall of our back garden. As it is wider than the house it backs on to, we also have a short section of boundary wall near our deck.
When it was up for sale, we listened with great misgivings to prospective buyers standing outside the property talking about adding a second storey, which would have had a very negative impact on our property. We solved the problem by going to the auction and buying it ourselves. As the ink was drying on the contract, we sent someone out to look for Rebecca, the lovely long-standing tenant, and told her she didn't need to move out.
Years passed, with Rebecca happily continuing to occupy the house. Then she bought a place of her own, but her moving out coincided with Computer Forensic Services (Peter's consulting company) being retained to provide expert evidence in two major cases in Sydney. Even with Helen working, Peter found that there was more work than the two of us could handle, and so we hired two more people, and the Little O'Grady Street house became our office. Four of us worked there for a year or so.
At about the time the cases were settled, in 2006, Helen's nephew Nick found himself homeless when the flat he was renting was sold, and the new owners wanted to move in. So he became our next tenant. He didn't mind that by now the house was rather shabby and in need of renovation, because he was paying family-friendly rent.
In 2015-2016, Nick's life changed dramatically when he acquired a wife, a baby and a house within 12 months. He moved out in May 2016, leaving the Little O'Grady Street house vacant.
We decide it's time for it to have an overdue renovation. But we also decide that when that's done, rather than re-let the house on a permanent tenancy, we'll keep it as a guest wing for our friends, and a paying b&b for friends of friends.
Sounds like a plan...