It's been a crazy few weeks since we got our keys! We have done the fence, turf and laid timber vinyl click flooring through the whole house except media room and bedrooms. Our carpet has been installed too (absolutely loving our shag pile carpet in the bedrooms!!!) and I've finally been able to make a start on unpacking some boxes. I am absolutely loving the house, I find myself staying up until midnight most nights without even realising, I'm happily moving stuff around and sorting stuff out and before I know it it's way past my usual bedtime. Also loving our vacumaid and vacpan. I wasn't sold on the whole idea but I'm glad we got it - the vacuum cleaner is so powerful and the vacpan in the kitchen is a god send. You simply sweep towards it (it's in the kickboard of the kitchen cabinets) and then tap it with your foot and the dirt gets taken away by the vacumaid hose! Our floors are great too - they are a vinyl click together product sold by Harvey Norman called Allure Loc. They carry a lifetime residential warranty and have a commercial wear layer. We tried to scratch them with knives and keys when we first looked at them and couldn't! They are a DIY product or you can pay someone to lay it for you - we chose to DIY as it was a saving of close to $4,000. Andrew was cursing ever saying he would do it after a few days - whilst they are click together they are still very fiddly and time consuming. We love them and think they look great and they also hide the dirt really well. We've had a lot of comments from visitors too!
The first few days Andrew was back he noticed a number of things around the house he wasn't happy with (he wasn't around for PCI) and our supervisor happily came out to the house and noted everything down and arranged trades to come and fix them all. We're still waiting on the plumber to fix his part but I'm told he will be out on Saturday.
We hadn't planned on sleeping at the house until the floors were finished but of course I managed to twist Andrew's arm and we set up our camping bed in the middle of the lounge room! Had a horrible sleep on that so ended up putting a mattress on the floor and moved ourselves into the media room for a bit more privacy. Once we had some old sheets on our bedroom windows we then moved said mattress into our room. At the moment I still don't have our bed at the house so the mattress is still on the floor, though having carpet now makes it much more "liveable"!
Our previous home was only a 3 bedroom weatherboard so we really don't have all that much furniture, just a dining table and chairs, our bedroom furniture and two couches so the house is looking rather bare. In the coming weeks / months (when funds permit!) we will be purchasing a new bedroom suite, desk & bookcase for the study and tv unit for the media room and a few other bits and pieces. As well as those things we had wanted to get a new lounge and on the weekend Andrew's parents very kindly bought us a black leather lounge for the media room, it is arriving on Saturday so I'm excited to see that go in. I bought some cushions for it tonight too.
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| Our new lounge (in black) |
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| Cushions for the new lounge! |
Hoping to get some electrical work done over the coming weeks, including putting up our feature light in the entry way. I attempted to put it together tonight but didn't get anywhere!
Next week our driveway is going down so I will finally be able to drive in the garage at night! Then after that we'll be looking to get the house rendered (currently only the front is done), the decking on the entry and alfresco done, and get started on the gardens. I have a fairly long list of odd jobs to do already including filling and sanding nail holes on all skirting boards and giving them two final coats of gloss (we took the skirting off and then put back on after we had laid the floors to give it a neat finish), sorting through our mountain of clothes and looking in to those wardrobe fit outs with drawers etc, organising the block wall for other side of entry and gates for the front, and backfilling our other side against the retaining wall and looking at ground coverings for that area too. I guess the jobs don't stop once the house is built!
A few pictures below of the house happenings of the past few weeks....
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| Getting closer to the finish line... for this area anyway! |
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| The finished product (complete with mop streaks!) |
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| Turf laying progress shot. |
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| Our shag pile carpet! |
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| Media room carpet. |
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| Finally in our own bedroom ..... but the mattress is still on the floor! |
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| My bargain find at Far Pavilions - $105.00 reduced from $350.00 - currently in our entry way! |
