Hello, I have been promising an update and this is mainly for the great friendly people I have met on the internet. There has been plenty going on this week, and I have been just a spectator to it all.

I had a good mate come over and finish off the quad around the timber flooring. Here are some pictures of the installation taking place and the finished job. We are really happy with how it has turned out, and we find it satisfying to say that we did it ourselves.

Note the lovely window treatment :-). We still have garbage bags on most of our windows. Window coverings are the current project on the go, and I will update when these are all finished.

I don’t think I have really explained why we did our own floor coverings. Basically the finance broker said, “you have only got X dollars to spend”. We decided to leave the floor coverings to later after we had moved in to save some money. The weird thing is, we had to borrow the amount of our land rebate, and this came back to us when the loan was drawn-down. We then had enough money to do the flooring ourselves and thought “great no cold dusty concrete!”.

During the week we had a monitored alarm installed. We did not consider this at all when purchased the house, but after I saw some of the crime stats for the area thought it would give some peace of mind.

This week our driveway was poured. We were thinking of going for exposed aggregate, but as we wanted a wider drive and modified cross-over we did not have the budget for that. We then decided that coloured concrete would look fine and would fit in with the design rules of the estate.

The concrete is coloured Bluestone and has been sealed. Next week the concreters return to widen our cross-over. This was just something that we had to do as the angle of the cross-over was all wrong.

In an earlier post, I explained that when the painters put the last coat of paint on the façade it rained afterwards and ran. This has all been touch-up now and I am happy to show the façade as it should look.

Our old house was about 12 square, and this house is 28.7 square. We didn’t think of this really when we were building, but we do not have enough furniture. So during the week we went out and ordered a new TV unit, buffet and lounge suite.

We also made a trip to Ikea for some book shelves for the study and rumpus room. Ikea has a good website where you can work out how many parcels you need, the size and weight. We went there on Tuesday and Supermum has definitely earned her title! She was pushing around 240kg of parcels on the trolley, loaded them into the car and unloaded when we got home – all by herself, with me just standing there watching.

After that, she spent the next two evenings assembling the bookshelves and I think she has done a great job as you can see in the photo below. My contribution to this was to hang the glass doors – with quite a few choice words thrown in I can tell you ;-)

On Wednesday night, the kids were playing in the room with all of the bookshelf pieces when we were getting dinner ready. When we walked back in found that little miss five year old had looked at the instructions, taken all the dowels out of the packets and hammered them all into the correct holes! Well, I was one proud Dad and she was there telling me she wanted to be a Builder when she grows up, …. and a Kindergarten teacher, a Hairdresser and Computer Technician ….

Today I met our neighbours Rellie, Jase and their two boys Lachie and Jacob (other half was at work). Very nice people and great to meet them after plenty of friendly exchanges over the internet :-)

There will be plenty going on over the next few weeks, and I will keep this updated for those whom may be interested in having a look.

Cheers

PS, desperately waiting for Broadband! Argghhh dial-up … tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999….