Getting ready for the builders

Ok. Well, we're still waiting for the building licence application to be approved, but we had our pre-start with the builder on Friday morning. They did a little walk-around and made sure that we're all clear on everything that needs to be done before they arrive on sight. For the past couple weekends, we've already been getting ready for this because we leave this week for holiday to the UK!
Needless to say, we've been busy little bees for the past while, but all of our work has definitely paid off, I think.
Part of the work we had to do was to move the pool fence. The balcony extension is going to interfere with the current location of the pool fence, so we've got to get it out of the way...not only that, but it still has to be properly installed to ensure the builders are properly protected from harm while they are working...crazy! But, that was definitely an interesting job and definitely not something that I thought would take as long as it did. It turned out quite nicely, though, I think.

Andy working away getting ready to start on the pool fence.

After we had taken down the fence panels and removed a couple of the posts, which have to have 1/3 of their length concreted into the ground...yuck!

With the posts fully repositioned and concreted into place...a full days work!

The fence complete! What we thought would take less than 1 day took us 1 1/2 days!

One of our other chores to complete before the Summit guys show up on site was to trim the trees along the driveway. I guess this wasn't really a requirement, but after the quote to get them professionally trimmed came back at like $1500, I decided that we could do that ourselves. So, I had trimmed some of them myself while Andy was away, but there was still quite a bit of work to be done, so that was the rest of the Sunday afternoon after finishing the pool fence.

The nicely trimmed (some amazingly HACKED back) trees along the driveway...

The resulting pile of branches...

 So, then we had this massive pile of branches to get rid of. I called about 6-8 different places about hiring a mulcher/chipper to use for a day, but evidently they need to be reserved ahead of time because there were none available. Magically, on the Sunday, the day before I had to leave for Aberdeen, Andy managed to get hold of a guy that would bring out his industrial sized chipper to help us out...he told us to get as many people as possible to help us out because 6 men feeding it wouldn't keep it at it's capacity. I found that hard to believe until he showed up...

The massive mulcher/chipper after he managed to back down the driveway.

After about 45 minutes, we had the pile demolished!

And then the resulting pile of mulch that he left us with to put on the garden. :)

With the garden work and pool fence done, what else is there to do? Well, today is the start of our bulk verge collection...where the council gets rid of your "recycling" (e.g. old furniture, appliances, and other large things that are too big to go in your normal trash)...so, what do we have that we need to get rid of? How about the downstairs kitchen? We had talked about replacing it with something from IKEA once the renos are done, so we might as well get a head start, eh?
The downstairs kitchen before...

And after....

So, lots of work over the past weeks...thank goodness we've had decent weather! and we're almost ready to start the real work!

Moving slowly forward...

Well, magically, it's already been 6 weeks since our last post. Time is flying by, and we're ever so slowly making progress on the house. A quick summary of the past 6 weeks...

We had the damp treatment done on the 2 downstairs rooms...looks scary, I know, but we can now plaster the walls back up and not worry about everything having a nasty damp smell...

The nasty room (old blue apartment) with the treatment half done.

Same again with another view...

And one last view of the bathroom area...

The purple apartment half way through the treatment.

As you know, we got the garage doors installed after a seemingly endless mission. Of course, that wasn't the end. Even though the doors were installed, the electrical fuse box for the garage had to be moved because it was originally installed right in the middle of where our car now drives into the garage. So, just like everything else around here, that took a couple of weekends to complete with a combination of Andy, our neighbor Kim (a guy), and our friend Rhys over here moving cabling and installing junction boxes, replacing RCDs, etc. I can now say that it is finally complete.

Andy's handiwork to reroute the power cable under the driveway to enter the garage in the flowerbed.

We've also purchased the flooring for the open-plan living/dining/kitchen and downstairs. Our DIY bamboo flooring that gets to sit in the garage for the next ~4 months...

Last weekend, Andy was on a mission to be productive, and within a span of about 2 hours, he managed to dig and install soak wells on the side of the garage. I was very impressed!

Oh yes...and who can forget the garden! Well, after our hopes of getting the trees along the driveway trimmed were dashed by an insane figure of $1500...I decided that it can't be that difficult to do. Besides, most of our trees really do need a good hacking back...so that's been my mission for the past 2 weekends. I'll tell ya...my shoulders are going to be HUGE from all of the sawing! :)

After weekend #1...notice the very "pruned" tree behind the pile of leaves and branches.


After weekend #2...still a lot more to go. If I show you the driveway, you won't even be able to see that I've done anything!

And on the actual house front...our plans have been submitted for a building licence. Hopefully this means that we'll be starting work in the next 4-6 weeks. Don't worry...we'll keep you posted! :)