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! :)

The Garage Doors are on!!!

Well, after 6 months and 4 garage door companies, we FINALLY have doors on the garage. Neither Andy or I ever thought it could have been this difficult, but alas, it's done.

Andy's also been working hard to build some shelves in the garage to store all of his man things...and all of the stuff in the house that has to be moved for the major renovations. Now that we've finally got the doors on and we've got a secure place to store things, we've moved everything that was being stored in the downstairs rooms into the garage. And about 10 months after we first got them out to quote, we're finally getting the damp in the downstairs rooms fixed...yes, we are actually beginning our renovations!

Some more good news...we got the city council planning approvals on Friday, so truly one step closer to starting the major works. Now, we've just got to finalize the drawings and variations, and then we'll be ready to submit to council for the building licence...so, based on 4 weeks approval period, it should hopefully be about mid-July once we finally hand our house over to the building contractor! I'm so excited!
In the meantime, we've been taking care of our garden a bit as well, and we've actually got some pretty roses growing...and lots of retarded looking lemons on one of our trees as well! They make good lemonade!

Well, now that we're going to start some work, we'll hopefully have a few more updates over the next couple months to keep you guys in the loop! Watch this space :)

We have a garage...no doors, but a garage!

Happy New Year! Almost the year of the dragon!

Well, the last time I wrote was after the asbestos had been removed from the garage, and we were waiting for them to come back and cover the frame with colourbond.
Since then, we've had a bit of excitement around our household. As you all know, Andy and I got engaged just before Christmas, and then the Christmas period had us running around likely crazy people to hang out with different friends, but it was an awesome time. I think we both thought it would be slower since we didn't have any visitors around, but we stayed busy the whole time.
Oh yes, and another bit of excitement...one of our palm trees had a "baby" :) We had the first instance of seeing one of the seed pods open up. I came home from work, and there were loads of bees...I looked up, and there was this massive golden coloured "thing" (see below)

Anyways, since then, we have made some progress on the house...actually more the garden and garage, but still...
We finally got the colourbond sheeting done on the garage, so now we've just got the garage doors to sort out. It's looking pretty good. We also "built" the office walls back up with plywood the other weekend, so there's once again a slightly more secure storage area. Finally, and most importantly, we've now got a place to store the surf skis, AND we can fit our car in the garage!!!!

The other work we've done is around the pool. We started by ripping out a vine that suddenly died. After we started doing that, we found that the roots had infiltrated the entire flower bed, so we just decided to rip it all out! Now we've got a great idea to turn it into a poolside seating area with storage boxes underneath...and part of it is going to be a cooler box! :) Unfortunately, that project will have to wait until we get back from Aberdeen, and this is what we're leaving our house sitters with!

Well, we're off to travel around the world in a couple of days...first California, Nevada, and Texas. Then back to New South Wales and West Australia...and then to sunny Aberdeen! Speak to you guys later!

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.