Apologies to one and all for taking so long but the camera cable went missing in the wilds of Katie's 'suite'. Okay, okay, I was also rather slack about looking for it but....enjoy :)

For the non-geeks who may stumble on this page each photo is reached by clicking on the coloured link embedded in the verbiage! You may need to use the 'back' arrow/button of your browser to get back to this tour. Sorry, didn't have time to do anything fancy.

• The front door opens straight into the loungeroom with its cathedral ceiling and polished jarrah flooring. It's actually a very big room but with all the furniture in it you tend to lose all sense of scale.

• This shot is, obviously, of the piano but what you may not know is that the impressive artwork hanging near the stairs is actually a beautiful tabletop! I'd hoped to cut the table down to coffee table size and fit it in that way but once it was in the room it became painfully clear that it was just too big. Whilst agonizing over the decision to sell it I suddenly had an epiphany and my unique, one-only-in-the-world wall hanging is the result ;)

• Crammed into the corner of the stair is the dining area complete with a massive sideboard my mum bought when I was eight. Thankfully it's missing the top bit which, or so I've been told, would have added about another 5 feet to its height.

• This is a nice shot through to the family room. I'm so glad I insisted that the two sets of french doors had to be aligned!

• I doubt that the stairway needs to be captioned but I would like to draw your attention to the painting hanging up there. It's not a painting at all, it's a 'goblein' [tapestry to you plebs!] worked by my late aunt. It's based on a famous hungarian painting. The name of the artist escapes me :/

• The french doors in the family room lead to a small, and hopefully very temporary landing. Some time in the near future [read : 2 years?] I want to have a deck running the full width of the house. If the gods are in a generous mood I may even be able to afford a lap pool. You will, of course, be invited for a dip and a lazy evening meal out with the mosquitoes!

• This is still the family room showing the tv and the door leading to Dad's area.

• This glass fronted sideboard was restored by Dad many years ago and is still one of my favourite pieces.

• Adjoining the family room is, ta dah, my kitchen! I meant to take a photo of the sliding wire baskets I've now installed into two of the cupboards but...I forgot. Eh.

• And now to my pride and joy, the pantry! Technically it is a 'walk-in' pantry but the whole thing is only about 700mm deep so I had deep storage shelves put in on the left [you can't see them] and very narrow shelves at the back and to the right. I LOVE it :D

• Moving right along, this next shot is a very poor attempt at capturing my office. This would have to be my favourite room in the whole house. Despite its small size everything works...and I have a view!

• Okay, this is a slightly better shot of the office taken from up the narrow hallway. This 'wing' of the house contains my office, a dogbox for my bed [and not much else], the laundry and my bathroom. -sigh- It also seems to be the place where the cat and both dogs hang out. Lucky me.

• I'm rather proud of this odd little space. You are looking at the only bit of storage space we currently possess. My chippie friend cut a low doorway into the hallway so I could access the understair area. Can't tell you how often I've brained myself going in and out but I bless every bump because without it even more stuff would be cluttering up the front verandah!

• I hope you literary types recognize the way I'm leading into this next, and last offering! You will see some of the aforementioned clutter but mostly you will see our friendly neighbourhood pony called 'Kenny'. For those with dialup connections DO NOT click on this link because you will be downloading a short movie Katie took of the pony visiting us this morning. It will take forever to download and you will curse me. Don't say you haven't been warned! Here is the pony segment.

• xxxxxxx

My Little House of Horrors - Pt 1




Perspective is a wonderful thing and it's only through the mellowing effects of perspective that I can talk about this whole housebuilding/housemoving experience without dissolving into tears of self pity. It was...draining... yet my experience seems to have been very mild in comparison to some of the horror stories posted by home owners. Still, this is my horror story and I'm leaving it for posterity...so there!
Thinking back, there were signs that my builder might not be as wonderful as I had imagined. Although the building project basically went well, despite my mother's death and the need to add an extra room half way through, my first chill moment came after the stairs had gone in and I could finally see the upstairs for myself. [My net friends may not know that I'm horribly scared/nauseated by heights so I was the only one who couldn't climb the ladder to inspect the upstairs room].
The design of the upstairs 'suite' is lovely but it was immediately obvious that the wonderful exposed beams protruding at head-bashing angles had not been cut at exactly the right angles because there were nasty gaps in the mitred joints all over the place. I was assured that the construction was still perfectly sound so I had to settle for some cosmetic fixes to hide the worst of the gaps. I put this down to a bit of bad luck and focused on the positive - after all, it was too late to insist they demolish the roof and start again!
After that everything progressed nicely, and more or less on time.
As handover approached Katie and I started what was to become almost 8 weeks of painting. Despite working every day the painting was slow - much slower than I had anticipated. Admittedly Easter, Katie's birthday and Clive's visit all occurred during this time but Clive did help with the painting and I only took 2 days off during this whole period so I think the fault lay with my inexperience. I woefully underestimated the time, especially given our amateur status and the -cough- odd change to the colour scheme here and there. Unfortunately this meant that I didn't start checking up on the status of my sub-contractors until the painting was almost done.
Back before Easter I'd carefully organized tradesmen to come in and do the little 'extras' such as laying and polishing the jarrah flooring in the lounge and family rooms, laying carpet in the bedrooms, building a dog-proof fence, putting in a gorgeous glass splashback etc. It all looked good on paper... Hah.
I'd worked out that if Katie and I got the lounge and family rooms painted first then the floor guys could lay the jarrah and do the sanding and polishing while we got on with painting the bedrooms. Well, they did start and they did a very professional job laying the floor. Vinnie is an excellent carpenter who takes great pride in doing a good job. I can't fault the workmanship, at all. Thanks guys! Unfortunately it was after that that my abysmal luck started to turn. Having already paid one mortgage repayment [the first is always a shock isn't it?] on top of the rent for April I was determined not to pay a 'double' whammy again. The painting was progressing reasonably well, we'd already packed up half of the old house and the floor was laid. Everything was okay... so I gave notice on the rental. We would move the grand piano on May 11, the furniture on May 12 and the potplants [over 200 of them] on May 13. On May 14 we'd hold a garage sale at the rental and the kids would man the cash registers while the carpet was steam cleaned and I cleaned everything else. Gods.....I must have been delirious. Honestly, I think my commonsense must have taken a holiday around about then because no sane person would actually expect such a tight schedule to work. Needless to say it didn't.
The first major snaffu was with the carpet. Although we'd chosen the carpet and placed the order in March? I only rang to tell them we were ready to go with the laying about 2 weeks before the scheduled move. "Oh...that colour is out of stock". Ignoring the down-elevator feeling in my stomach I turned adversity into opportunity by selecting a different colour, one that was in stock and, co-incidentally suited the changed colour scheme MUCH better. Problem solved. Well, not quite. Two days before the carpet was scheduled to be laid I got a call to say that 'they' had sent down the wrong carpet [from Sydney where it's manufactured]. They would now not be able to lay the carpet until the morning of May 11, the same day on which the piano was due to be moved. Gulp.
There was nothing I could do so I just prayed that the carpet layers and the piano removalists wouldn't fall over each other in the scrum.
This may sound incredibly blase but in truth I was starting to get very, very worried about something else entirely so the disruption to my nice, neat schedule was the least of my worries. What could so distract me, you ask? The floorboards, that's what.
At this point it was barely a week before the great removal and my beautiful jarrah floorboards had been sitting, waiting to be sanded and polished for about two weeks. Even I knew that the floor coating needed time to dry between coats. Dragging my attention away from all the other distractions - such as organizing for phones to be put into the new house - I rang the floor guy and discovered to my horror that his sanding machine was out of action. As you have to cross the floorboarded rooms to get to every other part of the house this was a catastrophy of unimaginable proportions. Literally. If I couldn't move all my big, heavy, antique furniture in then I couldn't move out but I'd already given notice so I had to move out. The realestate agent was happy for my to take an extra day or two but not the weeks that now seemed inevitable. Caught between a rock and a damn hard place I was desperate..and getting just a tad hysterical. Fearing for my sanity the floor guy promised he'd get a mate in the same trade to come and finish the floor off for me. Aaaaah the relief. Things would be tight but we'd make it after all. Or so I thought.
The floorpolisher guy arrived on Friday morning to have a look at the job. Great. Very nice guy and incredibly funny - he had us in stitches until he mentioned that he'd be starting on Monday the 9th. WHAT???? "But that's just two days before the damn piano has to come in!"
To shorten this long, sad story I managed to reschedule the piano's arrival until the the Friday but there was nothing I could do about the rest of the furniture or the carpet so my floors only have two of the necessary three coats of whatever on them. One day I'll get that last coat done but for now I'm happy to live with having my jarrah floor looking beautiful but not perfect.
While this was all happening I made yet another shocking discovery - the house had been wired for the phones but through some communication breakdown I hadn't realised that the connection from the house to the street was my responsibility. In two words = no phones. And no DSL. Between carpets, floors, removalists et al. I now had to scramble to get a very long trench dug [$660] so the house could be connected. This is not as simple as it sounds. Although my phone etc accounts were with a company called Optus, all of the infrastructure is owned and installed by a company called Telstra but the digging/cable laying is done by yet another company called VisionStream. Bureaucracy times 3. Add in another couple of small details, such as the fact that Optus kept trying to ring me on the mobile I bought for Dad because it was listed under my name, this despite the fact that I'd given my own mobile number as the contact [did the fact that my mobile was with Telstra have anything to do with it???] led to yet more delays. Still, the two phone lines were finally laid and I thought the worst was over. But no. It takes '5 working days' to 'provision' DSL on a phone line...minimum.
I'm damned if I know what 'provisioning' actually means. One call centre person said it was 'line testing' another said it was something else. Personally I think it means that they have 5 working days to walk over to a switchboard somewhere and throw a switch. But then I am cynical and very cheesed off.
Anyway....-deep breath-....while the telecommunications industry was working hard to get us connected we had other things to worry about.
Down the bottom of our very large block I had a small gate put in so my neighbour's daughter could continue to take a shortcut home after work. She's a sweet girl and I know how long it takes to go around the long way so I was happy to be a good neighbour. Fate, unfortunately, doesn't give brownie points for people with good intentions. Because of the lie of the land and the fact that the existing gate post leans at an angle, there is a gap beneath the gate and another between the gate and the crooked post. My dog found these gaps within 36 hours of moving in and took off with the neighbourhood dogs. Quick fixes simply didn't work and I was too busy moving in and cleaning the rental to do it properly. For three days he'd stagger home, exhausted but happy after playing with the big dogs all day. He had a new found 'pack' and life was good. Then two things happened : the old phone number [the one engraved on his dogtag] was disconnected [and no, I hadn't gotten around to getting a new one because we didn't have a landline did we?] and a well meaning neighbour found this 'new dog' wondering around looking lost. The number on the dog's tag was duly rung and when the message said the number had been disconnected the good samaritan did the responsible thing and took my dog to the pound. In the meantime I spent about three hours driving around the area in the pitch black [no street lighting] and freezing cold trying to find my boy before he froze to death. I gave up around 9pm and drove back to the rental where I worked until midnight. Was I exhausted? Oh yes. It's a half hour drive each way and I'd been shuttling back and for two, three times a day bringing all the things we hadn't trusted to the removalist.
The next morning I spent two hours on the phone ringing vets in the area. Finally I managed to track down the neighbour who'd reported the dog as found. Rang neighbour. Is it my dog? Yes! I'll come and get him right NOW! Er...he's in the pound. Nooooo..... -sigh- Half an hour's drive later I reach the pound to find him shivering in a wet, concrete cell with a bowl of water and nothing warm to sleep on. Much form signing later I took him home where he collapsed from exhaustion. When he was no better the next day I took another 1/2 hour drive to take him to an afterhours vet as I was worried he had been bitten by a snake. [This area does have snakes people]. No snake bite but he was a sorry little pooch for over a week. And the moral of this story is - if you find a lost dog give the owners the benefit of the doubt. They ARE looking. Keep the dog for one night, at least, before taking it to the pound. It's a truly horrible place.
Okay, that last bit probably won't mean much to anyone but a dog lover. For the rest of you just take my word for the fact that losing my dog stressed me out more than just about anything else that's happened. Moving on....
I've lost track of which day or week we'd reached but we were living in the new house and had just finished cleaning out and cleaning up the old rental. Just as an aside, have you got any idea how much 'stuff' you accumulate after living in one place for 10.5 years???? Before we could clean the rental we had to throw out one and a half huge skips full of stuff, some of it really good quality that we simply didn't have the space for. That was sad and incredibly tiring. Anyway, it was all done eventually and we breathed a sigh of relief. The worst was over and our run of bad luck had ended. Wrong again.
Two days after fully moving into the new house my toilet blocked up. I watched in horror as toilet paper and something brown and smelly swirled higher and higher up the toilet bowl. Imagining that the septic tank was to blame I yelled in panic for Katie not to turn a tap on. I was thinking "one more drop of water and the toilet will overflow!" It didn't, thank god, but it was Saturday morning and I could contact neither the builder nor the builder's plumber. Panic stations.
After repeated calls and messages had gone unanswered I bit the bullet and rang an emergency plumber. He came out that afternoon expecting a simple job. He stayed for an hour and a half and finally emerged from beneath the house cursing and fuming and covered in stuff you don't mention in polite society. Apparently the 'drop' of the pipes under the house was all wrong and there were no access panels so he had had to saw through the pipe to get to the blockage...which spilt all over him, of course. He was not a happy man and even the close to $550 he charged didn't soothe him much.
Thus began the saga of the plumbers.
Here ends part 1.




June 13, 2005


• We're in!

• We have phones!

• We have DSL!