HOUSE - We Have Finally Moved In !!!

Hi All,

I realise that since you all know that we have have moved into the new house that you have all been waiting patiently for this update …. well here it is.

 After an extremely busy two weeks leading up to the move and with the help of some good friends we finally moved in on Saturday 16 August.  Handover was at 11am on Friday 1 August and took place at the offices of Ultimate Homes in Osbourne Park - we are not sure why handover does not take place at the house so that we can check that all of the things that were picked up at the practical completion inspection had been done (some of which were not) - but that is where were told that we had to be.  So we paid the final payment and was handed the keys to our new home.  We did plan to get a photo of the “official handover of the keys” but we all got talking about the boys and forgot - but the following photo is Enid unlocking the front door for the first time as an owner.

The plan was that the painting would take a week, but Kevin and Chris were painting machines and it was all finished by Saturday afternoon.   Being the generous site supervisor that I am, I let Chris and Kevin take Sunday off and they caught the train into Perth and did the touristy thing around town and Kings Park etc.

As the work programme was now a few days ahead of time, we decided to get stuck into building the deck on the Monday and knocked it over in what was a VERY long day.   The deck is 7m x 5m and runs off the back of the house outside bed 1. The photos below are from the start of the day with Kevin doing the setting out, near the end of the day and the following day when it was all finished.  On the Sunday in preparation for the deck going down Dale cement rendered the planter box which the deck butts up too.

The last time that Dale built a deck he nailed it down by hand and it just about killed him (that one was only 5m x 5m).  So this time he invested in hiring a nail gun from Anytime Sales & Hire (Port Kennedy) and was most definitely the best $70 that he had spent in a long time.  Chris took charge of the nail gun like he owned it and kept up an awesome pace (he actually said that he was enjoying using the gun) and we got it all down by sunset.

The floor layers were not due to start until Wednesday but we still had a day up our sleeve and they were able to start on Tuesday.  The following photo’s are of the wood floor finished and the carpet nearly finished in bed 1.  We had the whole house except for bed 1 and the home theatre done in the wood and it looks fantastic.  The guy doing the skirting was very particular as you can see from the detail around the base of the laundry sink.

As we said, we moved in on Saturday 16 August and have spent pretty well every spare moment unpacking and moving things around again and again.  It was only today that we started to unpack the shed (the only thing left from the old house where we stored two thirds of everything that we owned during the build). To give you an idea of how much stuff we had packed in there - there shed is a 7m x 6m double garage and there was only a 50cm wide gap left down the centre of the shed to access things stored at the back. After today, we can now get in there and ’swing a cat’ so to speak.

We don’t want to cut this update short, but we will let the following photo’s show you how much we have done since we moved in.

Note for Dad (Kevin) - we took your advice and planted some lawn rather than geting turf.  You can see in one of the photo’s below that it is starting to come on well.   Also the large sleeper thing in the background of the lawn shot is the bench that the pizza oven will be rebuilt on.

In closing (for now) we would like to thank the following people (and we apologise if we have missed anyone):

Boris & Leonie, The Jones’s, Keith, The Chase’s, The Ogrizeks, Grant (for giving us somewhere to live), Robyn,  Dad Tomes, Chris and our neighbours for their patience.  We are bound to have missed someone and if we have THANKYOU !!!

This update is dedicated to our Sammi who we lost last week.   She was 15 years old and our hope was that she got to move into the new house which she did …… we miss her.  Below is the last photo we have of Sammi (Sammi is the four legged one in the middle) which was taken on the morning that she died.

Cheers

D, E, the Boys, Molli & Rusty (Enid’s dog)