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Jacqueline Storm and Anthony Mok are selling their renovated home at 35 Sheriff St, Petrie Terrace for $1.259 million. Picture: Annette Dew.
JACQUELINE Storm was so busy with finishing touches to her Petrie Terrace home, she hadn’t realised she’d broken her foot until a few weeks ago.
The house at 35 Sheriff St, Petrie Terrace as it looks today.
“I must have done it a while ago, walking to work or running to work maybe, and it never set properly,’ she said.
“They had to re-break it and set it again.”
The house she shares with her husband Anthony Mok at 35 Sheriff St, Petrie Terrace has a similar story, having limped through the last part of its 157-year history.
What it looked like in 1999.
Eight tenants were nesting in the two bedroom worker’s cottage at 35 Sheriff St, Petrie Terrace, kitchen bins overflowed with empty beer bottles and storm water drains were in need of replacing when the couple discovered the property in 2013.
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“Downstairs was enclosed but there was significant damage from water, from dogs, from quite a lot of different things,’ she said.
“It wasn’t legal height downstairs so we engaged an engineer and builder to come up with a plan.”
THE RENO: They dug underneath the house to build a legal height level and fortunately did not hit rocks.
The original house now has new bones in steel beams that support a new lower level with independent living, while the upstairs cottage has been carved out and restored, a process that has sent the couple from Salisbury, to Moorooka, Woolloongabba and Brisbane’s north in search of timber.
THE RENO: Decking stretches out from the kitchen to the new pool area.
“Hoop pine flooring, as anyone who’s renovated before will know, is no longer produced. You have to go and search for those pieces, so we were sent to the demo yard for hoop pine and skirting boards — they don’t make that design any more. You have to get those pieces and have them rehoned separately.”
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Part way through the rebuild, a hailstorm ripped through Brisbane, damaging the property’s roof and inadvertently assisting with the renovation.
“The house got hail damage to the metal awnings and the roof so we had it replaced. We went kitschy with our black and white striped awnings. It just happened at the right time.”
Up until this build, the couple’s renovation CV had included and was limited to regrouting an inner city apartment bathroom.
Restoring one of the first worker’s cottages in Brisbane town has been a mammoth five-year, $500,000 challenge and one they did while both working full time and living in the cottage.
Petrie Terrace as it once looked with the burial ground on what is now Suncorp Stadium and early houses. Picture: State Library of Queensland.
“Petrie Terrace was one of the first areas to be settled and these houses were built for the police and ambulance offers who couldn’t afford to live in the city itself,” Ms Storm said.
The cottage was built in 1862, two years after Andrew and John Petrie finished work on the Brisbane Gaol just up the road. The population of Brisbane was just passing 6000.
Now with a population of around 2.5 million, Brisbane’s earliest homes are largely protected and renovation approvals on this project took 18 months to go through council.
BEFORE: The original lounge and fireplace as it looked in 2013.
A character overlay meant the house could not be raised so the couple dug down another 60cm to make the downstairs legal height.
BEFORE: The kitchen area as it looked in 2013.
The property is now a legitimate dual living home with the lower level featuring polished concrete floors, two ensuited bedrooms, and a rumpus with kitchenette and marble bench.
AFTER: One of the downstairs bedrooms with polished concrete floors and an ensuite.
Upstairs has hoop pine floorboards, two king sized bedrooms and a third bathroom, a large living area, and a kitchen opening out to the rear deck and pool.
AFTER: The open-plan lounge room.
“We’ve put in a new kitchen, and new bathroom,” Ms Storm said.
AFTER: The stylish main bathroom.
“We replaced the doors and put in new entrances between the original house and the extension that was put in by the previous owner in the 1980s.
“We changed the configuration of the lounge and kitchen.
AFTER: The new kitchen overlooking the above ground pool.
“Originally it was a single door, and we put in an archway so there was a line of sight from the front to the back of the house through french doors.”
The property, on 228sq m, is being sold by Jack Dixon of Dixon Family Estate Agents with an asking price of $1.259 million.