Geoffrey and Carolyn Gillard downsized from their former home, a three-level house on half an acre, to their smaller "retirement" three-bedroom brick cottage in Adamstown Heights almost a decade ago.
"This is our third home together since we were married and we are hopeful it will be our last," says Carolyn.
The house was built in the early 1950s, and the couple appreciated its "lovely features from that era" - such as its timber windows, fireplace, kitchen and bathroom tiles and curved entry wall - and were keen to preserve them. They also appreciated how well designed and built the house was.
"It has lovely clean lines of early Modernism with touches of remnant Deco. Generous built-in cupboards and large windows would have been quite modern at that time."
"It is a single-storey house, although the garden slopes down to the road at the front. It has a nice courtyard entrance and the other rooms look onto the garden and the bush over the road," Carolyn says.
If they ever considered a threat of fire to their property, the couple always imagined it would be from the bush nearby, not an accident.
"At the beginning of August 2019, a fire which started in a neighbour's garage spread to our house. Although we were extremely lucky with most of the house and our belongings being salvageable, it has been a traumatic experience."
After a long insurance approval process, the Gillards were paid out six months later and left to manage the process of finding builders to fix the house. They appointed Newcastle-based custom home builder Indie Living to the job, which included replacing the roof, ceilings and windows. The restoration took 10 months.
"When we realised we were safe, we said to the family that 'everything else is just stuff and can be lived without'," Carolyn says.
"It is wonderful to be back in. We felt at home here from when we first purchased it. Although a couple of features weren't able to be restored, on the whole, it is like new. Very refreshed, we won't need to redo anything for a number of years."
They also made some small changes to the interior.
"We changed the colour of the kitchen to a 1950s blue and the painters were able to match it perfectly for some timber trims and we are thrilled with the result."
"Some remaining burn marks on the timber floors will become part of the house's story. Paint and carpet colours returned as they were, except for the curved entry wall, which became green instead of red."
Some furniture was unsalvageable after the fire, while other much-loved older pieces were able to be recovered. Among them were paintings that were restored by a gallery in Morpeth; their dining table, which had "nearly 50 years of bumps, marks and scratches removed" but they are happy to have repaired and saved; and some chairs that their youngest daughter has claimed and is choosing new fabric for.
"Now we are back, we feel secure and it is lovely having our own memories around us again," Carolyn says.
"Most of our things have been collected over nearly 50 years of marriage and evoke many memories. I also have a lot of old family photographs and am very pleased that they were mostly undamaged."
The pair are appreciative of the small comforts being back in their own space affords them. For Carolyn, it's things like the morning sun in the kitchen and cosying up in front of the fire to do some quilting in winter.
"Geoffrey's favourite place is the garage. He has model trains set up in there and was very grateful to the firemen for the care they took to protect it."
The garden is next on the to-do list of these keen gardeners as "fires, demolishers and builders are not kind to plants".
It's a project that Geoffrey and Carolyn, a horticulturist who ran a design consultancy for 20 years, are looking forward to tackling this spring as the weather warms up.
"Our garden is a plantsman's garden, not particularly designed, but we are trying to keep the 1950s flavour and using mainly Australian native plants. I usually make the decisions and Geoffrey does the hard work."
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