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...