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...