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….

A forced break

Hi all

Thanks so much for the well-wishes, I really appreciate your thoughts!

I have been out of hospital for two days after spending a week at the Freemasons in East Melbourne. As explained I had a procedure called a Nephrectomy, which is the removal of a kidney. This was due to complications of a birth defect I had which wasn't discovered until my early thirties (37 now). I did have the problem surgically repaired 4 and a half years ago, but the pain never went away and over the last 18 months I have had 4 opinions on what to do. This seemed like an extreme option to take as the kidney was still working at a reduced function, but having another prerfectly good kidney meant I could take this option. The kidney could not be repaired again due to the scar tissue from the previous surgery - so I agreed to have this done. Basically, most days I felt like dragging myself off to hospital as the pain was a 10 out of 10 and I really wanted some releif.

Anyway, the doctors and nurses treated me very well and on the day of surgery my Anesthetist told me that this is the 2nd most painful surgery that there is. Well, let me tell you that I won't argure with that. I have had 13 other operations in my time and this took the cake for pain!

I have another 6 - 8 weeks of recovery ahead of me and taking some necesarry time off work. Sitting hear in a brand new home with lots to do is quite frustrating but nothing I can do about it.

I will get the camera out and take some shots of the finished flooring, and driveway once completed. There will be some homemade curtain work starting soon, so this will be up on the blog when done.

I guess that's enough about me, this supposed to be about our house. I have been feeling quite guilty about the lack of updates and photo's and will do my best to get this blog up to speed.

Cheers, Tony

Ant's Health Update

Supermum here; Just to give you bloggers a quick update & thank you for the well-wishes.
I don't promise to be as funny as John when he broke into "Geekgirl's" account, You will be lucky if it makes any sense as typing skills are lacking quite a bit!!

Ant had his Kidney removed on Tuesday, all went reasonably well. He had a small pneumothorax (when lining comes away lung, because a small hole was made in the lung when removing the old scar tissue.) he was in CCU for 24 hours, but is in the ward now. He's doing pretty well considering, just a shame I cann't really call him "Man Sick"!!! ;) LOL Ant should be out of hospital early next week.
Thanks again for the messages, I will pass them on to Ant.
Cheers,
Supermum - I wish!

PS. All that whinging about ending up on the concrete every night he could have had a mattress like me but chosse not to get it from old house - but why ruin a good story with facts!!!

Just an update

We have been in the new house for about three weeks now and the schedule has been quite tight. The first week was just me in the house on a blowup matress, concrete floor and no heater (better than camping). The second week we got the carpets put down and then moved our proper bedding in from the old house. Before the carpet was down, the entire family spend the nights in the dining room on blowup mattresses, but I seemed to end up on the concrete floor each night.

Over the last two weekends, we have laid the entire timber floor (about 110sqm) and moved 90% of our belongings out from the old house. This weekend the task is to complete the move and put the beading in over the expansion gaps around the floating floor.

If you are thinking of laying a floor yourself I would recommend it if you consider yourself reasonably handy. The tools used, dropsaw, jigsaw, rubber mallet, sawbench for ripping lengthways (not totally necessary but easier if you have one), hammer, chisel set, profile guage, sliding bevel, square, goggles and a really good dust mask. A simple square room can be laid easily in one hour. The job slows down when you have to undercut at doorways and have angles to work to. For example, the lounge room of about 4 * 4 metres took one hour. The hallway of about 6 * 1.2 metres took 5 hours as this had five doorways to undercut, a linen press and angles to work to.

One day was pretty much spent on just checking all the levels of the concrete slab and putting down some self-leveling compound over the low spots. There was one high spot that technically should have been ground back. I looked at this for a while and thought about the huge mess it would make and then realised it would be directly under a table. So I thought bugger it and just left it. When the flooring went over this you actually couldn't tell.

The driveway is in the process of being concreted and we have changed our mind to just coloured concrete rather than exposed aggregate.

The pics below show the muddy driveway and the makeshift path I constructed from some discarded builders foil. The other photo's show the carpet going down and some of the flooring.

Again, I don't have lots of photo's as they are on someone else's camera, I will get these and some updates on soon.

We have been working quite a lot on the move and I have a deadline of this Sunday, even though the old house doesn't settle for another two weeks. I am going off to hospital next week and won't be doing anything physical for a couple of months afterwards. So the focus has been on getting the flooring done and the move - way too busy to even stop and take some decent photo's.

I will do my best to get some photos up by the end of this weekend....