Backyard Blitz

Wednesday, 21 September 2011
Can't keep eyes open much longer, but must put some piccies up showing our BIG weekend, when our moonscape was transformed into a back lawn and a front native garden (teeny though those plants may be right now). Thank the heavens for most excellent friends (that's you Ally, Dan, Laura and Ben) or I'd still be out there wrestling with an out-of-control rotary hoe and attempting to get those bits of turf lined up...  Can't tell you how wonderful it is to have greenery around us rather than swirling red dust and mud. Now I just stand at the window in the morning and grin like a maniac!

Friday: first we rake, and shovel, and barrow, and level, over and over again...

Dan in fertilisation mode, so to speak

Finally ready to lay

First roll (of 130 sq m) down!

Ally patchworking

Halfway!

Rosie-dog likes

Twilight laying: on the home stretch

Saturday: start again front-side

120 plants! (Hard to see, but there...)

Week 30, day one hundred and forty-six: moving day!

Friday, 19 August 2011

As anyone who is keeping tabs will know, this post was not written on the above momentous day – more like ten days later but hey, we've been a little busy unpacking...and revelling in our thoroughly gorgeous new house. Sorry for the delay – this time I'll call it post-move malaise.

After beginning the moving process one last time (I really really hope) on the Friday before last (it rained all day long, pretty much) and continuing it for the rest of that weekend, our lack of time in preparing for the move was fairly obvious – it was a messy and drawn-out affair, despite our vast experience in this area! But by this time last week we were feeling pretty settled in, with all the important stuff unpacked and given new homes. Though we were still wandering around in amazement, most of the time, wondering how on earth we managed to find ourselves in such a beautiful, well-designed, warm, sunny and – damn it – cool house! It was quite a bizarre experience for a while, and I personally wasn't at all prepared for just how perfect this house was going to be for us to live in: it shouldn't have come as quite the surprise it did, I guess, given the input we'd had into every decision along the way, but there you go – sometimes the obvious just stares you in the face!

So to live in, it's great. The hydronic heating combined with passive solar design and thermal mass of internal bricks is amazing: the house is toasty all day and night long (we have to turn the heating down at night so it doesn't come on and make us overheat in bed!) while the gas boiler powering it barely ever seems to need to even switch itself on and boost the internal temp up. It's a really lovely, even heat, with no hot or cold pockets and no blowing of air anywhere. The bathroom is glorious (that shower arrangement really works!) and even though it faces south and it's winter, it never feels in the least bit dark. The sun and light throughout the whole house is fantastic – there's always somewhere to sit in the sun at any time of day (if the sun's out, of course) and for a small house it feels remarkably spacious and airy. And wherever you sit, there's always some gorgeous confluence of lines and angles to admire as you look around you... Thanks, Charlie, you bloody genius!

The kitchen...is bliss

So for now, here it is in pictures, without furniture and still with a few cabinetry details to be finished (lounge room cabinet, dining room desk/shelving and windowseat, our bedroom built-in doors, ply light-shades). I may have a couple more posts in me, if anyone is hanging in there: one when all furniture is in place and one when some sort of landscaping transforms the outside moonscape.

Till then, thanks for sharing the journey! It's been a blast and, hell, I'd do it all again someday (with someone else's money)...

Week 30, day one hundred and forty-two

Monday, 15 August 2011

Five days to go, and the pace (for me, at least) is frenetic. 

Re-sanded, re-oiled

Lots of late nights sanding and oiling window reveals as we attempt to get all the messy stuff out of the way before furniture is plonked in the middle of it all on Friday morning. Sanding upside-down with power tools is bloody awful work, I've decided (what a surprise), but the better result gained than my previous hand-sanding is worth it (another thing I've learned from Richie – had no idea what an orbital sander was until a couple of weeks ago). Just the really high window and pelmet still to be sanded (thinking about how to do this – you may call it procrastinating if you wish), but now all the others have a first coat of oil and need a final coat over the next few nights.

Stainless bench side

Richie has been back into it this weekend after a week at uni (the cabinetmaker will soon be a chiropractor) and we now have kitchen, laundry and bathroom cupboard doors on, and very gorgeous they look too (if I may say so myself). He's back to uni again for a few days but will hopefully make it back into the house to get going on the loungeroom cabinet before Friday, tho' not sure if this will be finished before we're in. Then he's taking a bit of leave from Bell St to do some work for his brother (who is opening a cafe in Church Point and needs tables), so the other bits and pieces (kitchen high shelving, desk with shelving, window seat, our wardrobe doors etc) that he's doing for us will happen later in the year...which is financially probably a very good thing!

Before...

...and after

Laundry laminex and cupboards

Island bench back

Island bench front

Water feature

Meanwhile, the newest biggest worry has been the mudpit that currently surrounds our beautiful abode – the focus is shifting as a short downpour weekend before last again brought to our attention the fact that the front door area turns into a swimming pool at the slightest provocation. Peter the Digger Man was booked to again return to the Block, this time in the hope of creating some new levels that might work in with that fab landscape plan (which suddenly scares the living daylights out of me – it was all so far off in the distance and airy-fairy up until now...). So he pushed dirt around for a couple of hours and took a few big bills off me for the privilege, telling me in his laconic Blackheathen way (add your own expletives) that he did what he could and that we should have made the house a foot higher so he had something to work with, or something like that... 

Spot the difference (same mud, different levels)

So then we had newly sculpted massive piles of mud, and storm clouds threatening: I went into emergency landscaping mode on Friday and ordered four tonnes of coloured roadbase for the driveway and front path, some garden edging, a pile of stakes and a big whomping compactor for a day's hire on the weekend (the supplier talked me out of getting the recycled sleepers for now and just get a basic path in, for which I am eternally grateful – I was having enough trouble with roadbase let alone cutting and levelling sleepers). After shovelling it all around for an hour in the fading twilight of Friday, I finally admitted defeat and called in some garden-savvy friends to come and advise the next day as to whether my plan to create a mud-free entrance to the house before removalists descended was utterly without any basis in landscaping reality. The consensus was that the main focus was getting into the house on Friday mud-free, so a basic coverage of roadbase along the general area where a path will someday be and a bit of mulch anywhere else they might tread was the priority. Order a pile of mulch to cover the rest of the mudpit until we get planting and we'll have an quick, basic, concrete-the-lot-of-it landscaping solution for the short-term.

So that was Sunday, the whole family in there shovelling, raking, compacting (a few more expletives involved there) and gettin' creative with not much. We're still utterly plantless (just get me in that house first) but hopefully the neighbours can now live with us for a couple of weeks as we gather ourselves. Ordered some leaf mould mulch this afternoon to be delivered tomorrow and hopefully, bingo – instant drab garden!

Jem's rock feature

Mat whomping

Slightly wonky driveway

Rosie and new barrow

The (barren) fruits of our labour

Pelmet lights to be finished

Tomorrow we'll have all builders on deck one last time, in theory. Lots of last little jobs to do, like installing the stainless steel bench and kitchen/laundry appliances, putting up the pelmet lighting ply, fixing the odd window latch, cleaning up this and that, getting the all-important bog-roll holder on, etcetera. It'll be like a party!  

Meanwhile, have only managed to pack two small boxes – I'm assuming the moving fairies will be making an appearance sometime towards the end of the week...

Jem and little friend who adopted us for a day this week – he fell in love and called her Pipsqueak, but turned out his name was Rocket (and lived round the corner)

Week 29, day one hundred and thirty-seven

Monday, 8 August 2011

Right, well the countdown is really on this time. Removalist brings our gear back from storage on the central coast on Friday week, 19 August (last removalist cancelled on us, but this time we mean it), and I've made serious indications that we will move out of number 16 and into number 8 that weekend...all we need now are finished floors, a kitchen and laundry, and some way to get to the front door that doesn't involve wading through mud...

Some of the fruits of my labour

My oiling station – Jem says 'you stink'

Have spent the last week, day and night, oiling the plywood cupboard doors for the kitchen, bathroom and laundry. Each door needs three coats, front and back, with a day between each coat. There's a lot of doors when you line them all up, despite the teensy house, so it's kept me pretty busy and introduced me to a whole new world of physical exhaustion. Maybe I'll get me some of those Madonna arms too, Em! Might need to do a few more houses worth though, in my case... Love how the ply doors are looking and can't wait to see them in place. We've gone with a little cut-out handle in the kitchen and laundry that looks a bit seventies space-age, so are hoping that rodents never decide to move in via it (Richie assures me they won't, so I'll be holding him to that). Despite burning the candle at both ends, it's been great to finally be allowed inside the house and get hands-on with things. Have also started up with power tools (sanding the window reveals again – realised they weren't quite up to standard after seeing Richie's orbital-sanded doors) while teetering on high ladders, so feeling like a properly dysfunctional home renovator.

Kitchen progress

Soft-close drawers in (love 'em)

Built-ins in progress

Stainless steel bench arrives (top secret, so still under wraps)

Poulsen pendant over kitchen bench

And as of last Friday, we finally have power and lights! Paul left them all blazing for us to see on Friday evening, and very exciting it was too (more carbon points lost). Have yet to take some piccies of that – next post. Bloody convenient though, I must say. All our light fittings are now in (including the very gorgeous Louis Poulson Danish ebay bargains, though their highly specific fluro globes are still to arrive to see how they light things) bar the homemade numbers still to be constructed and it's all feeling more and more like home. Weird to have such a long transition into it, but kinda nice in terms of getting to know each other!

Mama mops

Spent the weekend vacuuming, scrubbing and mopping the floors now that everyone has cleared out of it for a bit so Warwick can get it sealed this week. He did a first coat in the bedrooms today; looks pretty good so far (nice to have a smooth and finished surface as opposed to dusty, dirty feeling one) but I'm glad I'd come to terms with it being a 'warts and all' beast, as there are even more marks, stains, cracks and imperfections now than ever previously imagined! But for some reason, it doesn't really bother me – all seems part of its story, somehow.

Water tank was connected up today too (which will be used to flush the loo and wash clothes as well as for garden), though a bit of a hitch encountered: seems that a concreter (well, that's who everyone is blaming, anyway) must have put one of their pickets through one of the pipes many moons ago, and now that pipe is connected up and under a whack of concrete path... Waz may have to spend a lot of money getting a camera up there to find the hole, then dig up the path and repair the pipe and path damage (small consolation that the path was one of those that was severely snow affected and needing some TLC to get it looking half-decent). Who'd be a builder?

Vanity coming together

Mouldy towels begone!

Bath revealed, with taps

My that's a big shower head!

Haven't really thought about packing yet, except to make a token effort today to find some toys, books and clothes to purge from the kids' room; we have obviously moved way too many times in the last year as could barely come up with a box's worth. For some reason, moving feels like the easy bit: I've got this insane idea that I'll just throw everything into the car on the day and drive it the few doors up the road...

Meanwhile, kids still do tunnel ball comps in Education 

Week – comforting, isn't it?