Pre-Christmas update

Christmas is upon us! Tis the Season, and a HO HO HO! Unfortunately, living in a 3-room corner isn't too conducive to decorating for Christmas, so we're not feeling too festive this year. And even the weather the past couple of weeks has been unseasonably COOL, which has also had an affect on the Christmasy/summery feel. But...that's over now! With a forecast of 40C (104F) for Christmas day, there's no missing the heat this year :)

Back to the task at hand, though. It's been about 4 weeks since I've posted any photos, I know, and I apologise. I have to get into a blog updating mood before I can sit down and do it...or maybe it's just laziness :)

WE have made some good progress over the past 4 weeks, and I say WE because Summit hasn't done much of anything during that same period. 3 weekends ago now, we installed the bamboo flooring in the kitchen/living area so that the kitchen cabinets could be installed, and they look pretty good...at least I think so :)

A progress shot. This was after the first day of prepping and laying flooring.

This is our finished product...well, it's as far as we've gone for now to allow the kitchen to be installed.

A shot from the corner of the living room towards the front door with our protective covering that we bought to keep the builders from messing up our new floor! 

The week following our efforts installing the flooring we had the guys come in and install the kitchen cabinets, the countertop guys come in and measure up, and the air conditioning guys come in to install our ducted A/C system...it was a busy week of Andy & Sara's tradies. Of course, in true Greenwell St style, nothing is straight forward in this house! The A/C cannot be turned on because the wiring in our house is messed up and we didn't have a proper ground connection...lovely...so we've got the ducting and the unit, but no functioning A/C as of now.
This past week (week of 17-Dec...Andy's birthday week) saw lots of progress once again. The kitchen countertops were installed, and we managed to get a plumber and electrician in to do all of the connections in the kitchen, which means that we ALMOST have a fully functional kitchen. I saw almost because he still has to connect the induction cooktop to the circuit breaker box, and he still has to connect the circuit with the refrigerator.

Our kitchen, fully installed! We still need to put cornicing around the top of the cabinets and, of course, paint the walls, but it's in!

View from the end so you can see the cooktop and the drawers on the island.

With the pantry doors open...you can see that there's a countertop in there so I can keep the KitchenAid and other gadgets off the countertop and a broom storage place on the left-hand side.

Another appliance cupboard for the kettle and toaster, and Andy's coffee machine will sit on the left side of the sink above the dishwasher.

This week we also had the rest of our windows replaced. So, every window in the house that wasn't already being replaced by the Summit scope, we have now had replaced with new, more energy efficient ones. And of course, that scope wasn't straight forward either, and we're therefore still waiting on them to come back and finish the window in our bedroom. Joy-o-joy!

New window for the bathroom and front bedroom.

New aluminium framed windows for the theatre room.

And for both bedrooms downstairs as well...

Although the wall still looks really creepy, the window looks a lot better now! :)

So, now a bit of a break for the holidays. We've got a couple of things on our list to hopefully get done. Of course, in true Aussie style, everything trade related, except for Bunnings, is closed from now until 7th January at the earliest! Some even stay closed until the 15th or later...so, we'll see what we can manage to get done.

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Andy and me. Love you!

Progress Update - Week of 26th November

Last week of November...less than a month until Christmas, and we've still got a long way to go! They did make some progress this week, though I wouldn't say as much as we would have liked.
Our bathroom that we've been renovating, though, is almost done. All we've got left to do is to get Summit to finish some plastering, paint the ceilings & a bit of walls, and install the mirror. It's looking good!

The Summit progress really was too minimal to mention, I would say. We did get a schedule for the upcoming weeks, which appears to be pretty aggressive compared to the relative progress of the past weeks, so we'll see how they go against it. The are also expecting to be finished with the upstairs work in a couple of weeks, which means that they will be able to remove the staircase and the scaffolding. As a result, Andy and I realized that we better get our butts in gear and get the eaves painted while we've got the scaffolding in place...much cheaper than paying someone to erect more at a later date! So, that was most of our Saturday and Sunday...sanding, primering, and painting eaves for the parts of the house that are accessible with the scaffolding. A couple of shots of our handiwork below....you can see along the front corner of the house where we haven't yet painted over the hideous terracotta colour along the front of the house...that's for another weekend :)

I mentioned that Summit's work was pretty minimal this week. They did manage to move our "privacy" door from the hallway to near the staircase. This is in preparation for their move downstairs, and it also will allow them to finish the ceiling and cornicing work in the hallway. The cleaning, though, was not done by Summit. Andy had to do that in preparation for our guy coming in on Tuesday to lay battens on the lower floor of the living area to raise it to the same level as the kitchen...so it doesn't look so bad in the photos below!

Hopefully next week will have some real progress to show you if Summit completes what they say they will complete. The following week will be the kitchen cabinet installation and air conditioning installation...yay!!! Just in time for the heat of the summer!
Oh yeah...and one thing I almost forgot. You wouldn't BELIEVE the "pet" we found living in our backyard. We walked down behind the garage on Sunday while moving some roofing tiles from the top of the driveway to store in the back of the garden. There were several large weeds growing back there, so I decided to bend down and pull them...and nearly grabbed hold of this guy...he's quite camouflaged, but it's a bob-tail lizard, and he's at least 12in long, with a head almost as wide as my fist. These guys supposedly aren't aggressive, but they have really strong jaws and will bite and not let go. Needless to say...I nearly wet my pants and was left completely freaked out for at least a minute...then I had to run and get the camera :)

Have a good week guys! More updates to come soon :)