Here's a video of an area of water damaged bamboo being removed and replaced Joyzzz. Maybe you'll consider replacing the area in front of your fridge. Like you I also have bamboo in the kitchen (and pot plants throughout the house), but haven't had any issues with spills marking the floor. It's a shame there's so much variation in the manufacturing process resulting in some floors tolerating spills and others not at all. I do have a damaged board though thanks to a guest leaving a tap running causing an overflow...that I wasn't told about until days later, grrr. Fortunately the damage is in a shadowed corner and the sealer is still intact, so it isn't noticeable, just a wrinkled surface to the touch. Which is lucky, because our home is earth-covered and there is nowhere for water to drain out of the sub-floor as we "tanked" it with a sealer to ensure no moisture can make its way in. That board sat there in a puddle for days! I still wonder why only one board suffered damage, very strange...

I'm very sorry, everyone, I am still not getting notifications of comments on this thread. Vy, that sounds like a fantastic idea! You should have a marvelous trip without children, and spend some time re-connecting with each other, having fun. I find that that is actually one of the important things to do in a marriage, is to find ways of laughing at life . It's also important to get on and do some of the things you have always wanted to do, because we never know how long we have on this earth - We see far too many patients who have been waiting for kids to grow up, the mortgage to be paid off, etc etc, and then they get a horrible diagnosis just before they are due to jet off on their once-in-a-lifetime trip. Even if you can't do the big things, try for some of the little things. Weed, get out some of those things you have been saving - rotate them around so you get to see them and take pleasure in them. Sorry, getting a bit carried away with the imperative voice there - we have seen some very sad situations lately that are really hitting us hard.

You have spent a ton of someone else's money and wound up with a house with no style reference. It was already looking bitsy with the half hearted car port and you have emphasized the gables and made that worse. The car port has no gable. There is no point saying "oh, but the orange is only for the big bits of the house, because, you have used the same timber on something so insubstantial as bannisters. If horizontal bands of wood ever looked good in gables, it would have been done by now. It has never been done before, and is not part of any tradition. That will be for a reason. But you have done that to a house that used to be brick and is now rendered. In other words, the house used to be traditional mid century but was not that any more. And then you added another layer. See the problem? Too many ingredients in the cake. White and cream can go together. But not a muted bluish cream with big slabs of orange wood. It makes the walls look insipid and dirty. Talking of insipid, with the old window treatment, there was some character with the sloping bricks. Now, there are shallow ripples in the wood, and shallow ripples in the windows, and shallow, too-small lights on the outside. If it was a woman, she would be wearing two brooches, each 2 mm by 1 mm. And what are those mismatched pimples at shin height. Moral of the story: if you want the viewer to enjoy the subtle textures, don't mess them up. If you want to wear a white suite, that's fine - but please make it clean and with no defects at all. If you want to go for subtle variations in texture, be my guest. But don't have the top of the middle two windows on the right 100 mm lower. The eye says, "what is that for?" Is that supposed to be like that, or were they saving money? When is the top of the middle windows 100 lower? Never. That will be for a reason. You have probably just discovered it. You know how you're really design sensitive? Well, the pitch of the roof on the gables and the pitch of the rails for the front steps is close enough to ask the eye if they match and different enough for the eye to say: nope. You might have had a rail the same colour as the gutter and the angles the same. That might have worked. Actually, the biggest problem is knowing which is the positive and which is the negative space. The gables and rails say "I'm the hero! I'm a loud colour!" And the walls say, "Nope, you are not the important bit of the house, and those who see you know that I am the physically solid one. And there is more of me". And the gables say back "Nope, dope, you are the most insipid colour on the whole house, remember?" If you were alive in the early 80's you might remember Colour Me Beautiful by ? Jackson. Pop cultural phenomenon. Before the "makeover", the house's roof and walls belonged to the same pallet (Summer, as it happens). The fence was there, but able to be ignored. Now, the bright orange fights with the dark brown. (The orange is an Autumn colour.) (The white windows are winter.) The orange and the muted brown are similar darknesses, esp if the top of the gable is in shade. They clash, in other words. Also: how often do you think the owners will go out onto the master bedroom / attic / office patio that overlooks the street? Let me answer that: n e v e r. A bit like Volvo making ugly cars all those years ago: they still cost just as much to make. Disclaimer: I am not a competitor or a design professional. You might take comfort from that. P.S. Just back from looking at the interior. It looks really good. It is uniformly modern. I would have gone with less orange floors. But, blame the clients for that. Now the outside just looks like you were trying to save money. You might ask, why does the angle of the roof have to match the angle of the bannister? The answer is: because you made them the same loud colour and the same material. The edge of the loud orange gable is at a particular angle (actually three angles, but I digress). Also, the ONLY place where the loud orange wood is angled is on the steps: the place where it is least important. You are begging the view to ask if the banister to settle into the rest of the house by being the same angle. About the three angles: if the roof only had one angle, and if the angle was the same as the angle of the bannister, that would look MUCH better. There would be horizontal and vertical (all houses have these), and one diagonal angle. Emphasising one diagonal would have been coherent.

The good kind of mad! (Most) old houses ooze character, warmth and heart as much as new ones do chemicals and cheap fittings. I am a housebody, and love being in my house - I spend my money on it, instead of out clubbing and yes, there are always unexpected costs (new hot water service, leaking toilet...), but if you were renting you would have nothing of your own at the end anyway. Three years ago I bought my first house, a fairly original sandstone 98 year old lady in need of some TLC. No builder's reports in this little town, but then she cost me less than a landcruiser... Things I planned to do, but took forever because of rusting nails, old sizing, old quality workmanship include painting the whole thing, top to bottom, pulling up axminster carpet and getting the floors polished, putting fans and air conditioning in. Things I was hoping to avoid for a few more years but can't, include replacing the original roof, swapping the three-cupboard sleepout kitchen with a bedroom, redoing the bathroom, complete with new plumbing and actual drainage to the septic pit (which I had to have fixed a bit), and then I think the best option for the back room and laundry is just to rebuild them....But I don't regret this house, or the journey it's taken me on. Even if it has turned out to be a much more expensive journey than I thought! With time and google, you can do a lot yourself. Before I moved back three years ago I had always been n provided accommodation, so had never used a drill and only changed a couple of light globes, but now... I took a chimney and fireplace down on my own, then re-pointed the stone and put in a ceiling panel to close it up. I have painted, put up shelves, taken down cupboards that were built into walls, patched cracks, filled gaps, pried off skirting boards, and generally turned it into a home. For the more major stuff, like putting a doorway through a foot thick stone wall and rewiring an original bedroom to house a modern kitchen, I am getting the professionals in. good luck!