Summer is finally here, and we're finally doing some work!

Well, it's officially summer here in sunny Perth, but it's definitely been the weirdest beginning to a summer I've seen since I moved here. Usually the temperature is up in the low 30s from November all the way through March and hardly a cloud in the sky...but not this year! Last night we had an AWESOME thunder & lightening storm that dumped over 100mm of rain on the southwest corner of the country...and that was after another similar storm last weekend. Although the rain is great and much needed, it unfortunately means that we haven't yet made it through the dreaded "fly season" that always comes at the beginning of summer....maybe the heat and rain cycles will just kill them off for us!
Anyways...enough about the weather...we're FINALLY starting some work on the house. well, sort of. The asbestos on the garage was removed on Friday...roof, external walls, internal walls (office), and ceiling were all asbestos and are all now gone! So, now we're just trying to get the area ready for the colourbond sheets to be installed and then for some new garage doors! It will be almost good as new!

Our rickety garage with asbestos fully removed!

Andy and I managed to remove the old accordian-style garage door to allow us to pull the trailer into the back corner.

It's hard to believe there was so much asbestos out here. And I talked to the previous owner last week and told her we were having the asbestos removed. She said, "oh the roof? We were told it was safe because we had it sealed." They didn't know that most of the rest of the building was asbestos as well! Craziness!

Also managed to put up the Christmas tree last weekend while I was home "sick".

Well, that's about all that's going on around here at the moment. We're currently speaking to 3 builders at the moment still trying to get an acceptable quote. They are all coming up with their recommendations as well with respect to how the final layout looks. It's been good getting some other ideas, so we'll hopefully find out a bit more over the next few weeks, and we'll try to keep you posted.

We're also planning to start the upstairs bathroom renovations relatively soon. We've got names for plumbers, electricians, etc to help us sort that out on a owner-manager type project...should be interesting! :)

Spring is here!

Well, it's hard to believe that we've been living in this house for 8 weeks now! We went for lunch in Leederville on Saturday, and it brought back lovely memories of walking down for coffee or a meal. We do miss Leederville, but our house is going to be awesome when we finish with it! :)
So, we've spent the past couple weekends doing lots of gardening. We have a bulk greens collection next week, so we've been pruning back the trees and vines and everything else in the garden so we can get it dumped for free! We've now got a massive pile sitting on the edge of our lawn waiting for collection...

So, you may wonder where all of this has come from? What's crazy is that in some places, you can't even tell we've touched it! I will show you a couple of before and after photos to see if you can tell a difference! All of the before pictures are on the left and after on the right.

So, these first photos show where we "trimmed" the bougainvillea back. I know you might be thinking that we butchered it, but don't worry, it will grow back with a vengeance! 

      

These photos are just to show where we've attempted to clean up the side of the house just a bit. Still a lot more work to do here, but at least we cleaned up the vine for now.

 

We finally got rid of all of the potted plants along the stairs outside.  It seems a lot bigger now...and it helps us get ready for renovations!

I know I didn't quite get the same angle here, but we spent about 3-4 hours yesterday clearing out this vine which had leached itself into the roof space of the garage. Unfortunately, the lavender bush was sacrificed during the process. But this will make it a bit easier when the guys come to replace the asbestos garage.

 

Although you probably cannot tell at all, we've spent many hours pruning the trees on the side of the driveway! But you can tell from this picture where the bougainvillea used to be.

 

And our veggie patch...one picture of the before, and a couple pictures of how it looks currently. We've got carrots, beetroots, brocolli, cauliflower, and lettuce all growing wildly along with quite a few other veggies that appear to be growing a bit slower...but we'll get there! :)

  

So...that's really all of the work that's been happening lately. We have been working with Wayne, our guy from Dale Alcock, to get the plans for the renovations finalized. And we're there! Currently, he's working to get the prices drawn up for us, and we're getting ready to choke once we see them! :) As a preview anyways, I'll leave you with the plans as the house currently is and the proposed renovations...speak to you guys later!

This is the upstairs (main house) as it looks now.

This is the downstairs (where the apartments are) as it looks now.

This is what the upstairs will look like after the renovations.

This will be the downstairs after the renovations.

Update - 18th September

Well, it's been both an eventful and uneventful week in the Marshall/Laster household. Last weekend, we worked our bums off in the garden most of the weekend. We planted our veggie garden, so hopefully we'll have lots of yummy veggies in a couple months. In fact, I think we got a bit carried away at the store when we picked out all of the little seedlings. We've now got tomatoes, carrots, spring onions, yellow onions, leeks, spinach, cos lettuce, celery, beetroots, zucchini, butternut pumpkin, canteloupe (rockmelon), cauliflower, and broccoli all growing in our garden! :) We'll see how we go, eh? We'll post a picture in a couple weeks once they've grown a bit taller than 3 inches! We also found last weekend that the we've got a grapevine...YES!!! It's not a particularly attractive specimen because they never left a leader...so we'll have ground grapes this year if we can keep all the little buggies from eating them. Andy also started the Scarborough "chainsaw massacre" of the garden with his new poletrimmer (a petrol powered chainsaw on a pole). So, we trimmed the palm tree branches that were laying on the neighbor's roof and we managed to rip down an out of control vine that was growing up the side of the house. Although pictures wouldn't show you lots of progress, we made lots of progress last weekend. We also met the neighbor lady...she's lived on the street since the houses were initially built in the 1960's. She lives alone, and she seems very nice.
During the week we met with Wayne, our designer from Dale Alcock, again. We are making some pretty good progress, I think. We should have the floorplan down in another one or two meetings, and then we'll be able to get a quote. He told us that we need to decide what we want in the design of the kitchen and bathrooms, so we spent yesterday (Saturday) driving around to all of the different kitchen and bathroom showrooms to get ideas of what we want.
So...the other exciting thing that happened this week was...we got robbed!!! I came home from work early on Thursday afternoon to find our whole house tossed. They went through every drawer, cabinet, bag, etc. They opened and went through the bag with our DSLR camera in it...but didn't take any of it. The only thing we've been able to find that they took was some gold jewelry (my Aggie ring, high school ring, gold necklace, etc) and one of the iPods in the house. They broke in through one of the front windows (pictures below), went through all of the rooms in the upstairs, and then I think they were disturbed because they left through the office window. Needless to say, we've decided that we won't wait for the renovations to be completed before we set up the security system! I stayed home from work on Friday to meet the police forensics guy, get the window fixed, and meet with a security company to get a quote. It was quite an unnerving experience, and I just consider us very lucky that we weren't home and that they didn't take very much.

Hopefully, we'll soon be able to show you guys some pictures of what our house will look like after the renovations. Either way, we'll keep you posted on our progress.
Have a good week! Speak soon.

3 weeks in...

Well, we've now been in the house for 3 full weeks...and we've just now got the internet connected! Amazingly, we had almost all of the boxes unpacked the first weekend! 

So, over the past 3 weeks, we've been mostly working on the garden, which I must say could be a full time job if we let it be! Yesterday, I spent 3 hours trimming the trees along the driveway, and I swear you can't even tell a difference! We've filled our trailer to the brim with green waste to take to the recycling centre, and we've bought and filled a compost bin so that we can make use of this green waste in the future. We cleaned out the veggie patch area in the back of the lot last weekend...see the before and after photos below...

The veggie patch before.

The veggie patch after clearing of weeds!

So, what we've got going on now includes working with Dale Alcock still to try and decide on what we want to do in the way of renovations. We're also getting quotes to get the asbestos garage removed and replaced. Since it's nearly summer, we're also just trying to get the pool area ready...we need pool furniture, and we want to get a pool blanket.

It's definitely a big change from Galwey Street, but we're enjoying it so far! Hopefully we'll have some exciting stuff going on over the next couple weeks to update everyone about. Until then...

Almost There!

Well, the official moving day is tomorrow! In some ways, it's hard to believe that it's already time to move in, but in other ways, it can't come soon enough! So, the new house is fully painted now, the carpets have been shampooed, and the hardwood floors have been polished. I've also almost got the kitchen cabinets fully stocked with dishes and food. So, we're definitely getting there.

Of course, Andy called the internet company early this week and asked them to disconnect everything on Friday, and they didn't listen, so we now have no internet on the house...and therefore no photos to go with this post. I'll get photos this weekend once the house is filled with furniture and once the old house is empty. SO EXCITED!
On the renovation side of things...I'm speaking with companies to try and get quotes for replacing our asbestos garage with an Alu-bond one...it's not an easy task! We also should be speaking with the designer from Dale Alcock again in the next week or two to have a look at concepts for our major renovations... YAY!

Week 3 Update

Well, more than 3 full weeks have passed since we got the keys to our house. It's kind of hard to believe, and it's even harder to believe that we're actually moving into the house in 1 1/2 weeks! Unfortunately, the past week hasn't warranted any real photo updates worth posting. That's not to say that we haven't been busy, though!
Last week, we mainly focused on cleaning up the upstairs part of the house in preparation for moving in. It took me 3 1/2 hours on Saturday to clean the inside and outside of the kitchen cabinets...unbelievable!!! Andy is currently working on repairing the hardwood floors in the front bedroom where Darren ripped out the built-in wardrobe, and he's making good progress there. We also spent some time cleaning windows and blinds...ah geez! I think the blinds in the bathroom had accumulated 20 years of dust on them. Cringe-worthy!
We also started packing up the other house to get ready to move. Our official moving day is the 12th August...not far to go now! I'm ready to get moved in and stop living at one place and trying to go over in the evenings to work on the other...very exhausting! Ah well...nearly there!
So, we've also tried to start the process of figuring out the grand master plan for our dream home! So, last Wednesday (27th July) and yesterday (1st Aug), we had two different building companies come around to take a look so we can start getting ideas for renovations. The guy we met last Wednesday works for a big local building company as a designer. He's going to start drawing up some plans for us to give us an idea of what we could do with the space. The guys I met with yesterday are just builders, so they didn't really have any ideas to speak of. That's not to say that they didn't give us some things to think about! All of the details on that will come in due course as we work through the different possibilities. There's definitely a lot of work to do, though.
We'll keep you posted as things progress, and hopefully I'll have some photos for you next week.

Week 2

Ok. So, week 2 continued with a bit less demolition...but more cleaning up instead. We finally got an offer on our current house, so we now know that we have to move in about 4 weeks.
So, this week's activities included lots of caulking of holes in walls....I now consider myself somewhat of a caulking EXPERT! Andy managed to frame his first doorway after much frustration and many bent nails. Darren managed to take out his frustrations on the built-in wardrobe in the second bedroom with a sledge hammer...he made pretty quick time of it!
We also managed to make a couple giant holes in the plaster while removing the horrid curtain boxes in the bedroom...thank goodness our painter George is a master caulker as well! We also sugar-soaped all of the walls in the house in preparation for painting. In 2 1/2 days, our painter George managed to paint all the ceilings and several rooms.
On the cleaning front, we cleaned at least 10 years worth of dust and grime off the ceiling fans using the vacuum cleaner. :) I also had the pleasure of cleaning the top of the kitchen cabinets, which is where some idiot placed the vent hood exhaust...I actually had to use a wallpaper stripper to scrape the grime away before the soap and sponges would even make a dent! (be glad I didn't include a picture)
Andy also made another purchase towards his ever-growing toolshed with a new high pressure washer, which he used to "scrub the deck" of the balcony.
All in all, it was a good week. We still have a lot to do, but we're getting closer to making it liveable!

After Week 1

So, demolition and renovations started on Day 2 and continued thru the first week. We started by removing the curtain rod holders in all of the living areas, removing all of the old nails in the walls, removing the desk/entertainment centre from the living room, sanding walls, etc.
During the week, we had a guy around to inspect the "damp" walls in the downstairs apartments. He noted that in the second apartment the previous owners had put up a jiprock (sheet-rock) wall on two sides of the room to cover up the damp wall. So, the 2nd weekend in the house, we ripped down these walls. It was disgusting! Photos are below. But we've now ripped the walls out and ripped the carpets in both apartments out.

Getting the Keys - Day 1

Well, this is it! We show up to the house at 3pm to get the keys. We were supposed to get them at noon, but the previous owners' car supposedly broke down in the drive way...ah well! So, we meet the real estate agent, only to find out that the owners somehow managed to leave us the wrong keys! Thank goodness their son had conveniently forgotten to take the keys to the front door off his key chain, so they brought them back to us! We nearly started out by having to break into our own house! It's all good. Below are photos from Day 1.