From the SCE Bog Archive
Some years before we tackled the three Currarong Beachfront Cottages, we had renovated The Twins, two very cute 1920s cottages about a block up the road in the same beach village of Currarong. They were a pair of two bedroom fibro and hardwood cottages sharing the same block of land. Like most of our purchases, they were in a very shabby state. One had been lived in by a smoker which meant we had to rip everything out.
The Twins were a very hands-on project for us and we did much of the demolition, co-ordination and painting ourselves, particularly on the first one. We had a baby just before we started renovating the second twin so that changed things somewhat.
My fondest memory of that project was when we were installing the new (old, recycled) wooden windows. These huge casements replaced the cheap aluminium sliders which had been installed in the 1970s when the cottages had been “modernised”.
I have to admit, the recycled wooden windows looked pretty awful until they were painted and I recall one old timer walking past shaking his head and saying “why would you take out perfectly good aluminum windows and replace them with those horrible old things?”
The end result looked pretty authentic and eye-catching. The blue house looked so cute it appeared twice on the cover of the Home section of the Sunday Telegraph newspaper and in a couple of glossies like Country Style and South Coast Style magazines.
We will always love those cottages even though we sold them on a while ago. We found we missed Currarong which is another reason we were tempted to buy the beachfront cottages a few years later.
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