These were taken in January, after we picked up the keys but before our stuff had been moved in. By now I figure that those of you who can make it here to see our new home have, so these photos are for the rest of you.

The building is a converted warehouse from the late 1890’s. Until (I think) 1994 it was used as a warehouse. For most of that time as the headquarters, offices and printing rooms of the Sunday Times, Sydney’s third Sunday paper. From the 1840’s to the 1890’s there were smaller buildings on the site, and before that, the area was market gardens.

The envelope of the building (the external brick walls) is original, and a lot of the original materials have been reused in the reconstruction. There’s an old wooden pillar by the front door, for example, and some of the floor joists are original, though the floors themselves have been moved. Moving the floors has given us the 6m ceiling I’ve mentioned before, and the bedrooms have been tucked into a mezzanine that hangs over and opens out into the living area. The black rectangle in the photo is one of those openings.

They don’t mention the joys of living in a converted 1890’s warehouse in the trendy New York novels: our wall leaks. That’s right: wall. Ahh, well. I call it character.