Extreme gardening

I put this picture of our garden up on Facebook a while back and a friend commented that they didn't realise we were moving to the third world. Sometimes I think we may be making the house worse!

Colour Decision

Now that the bathroom is starting to look like a room again, we are thinking of what colour to paint it. Blue perhaps. We've put up a few sample splotches to see what they will look like. At the far side is a very light blue, and closer is a slightly darker light blue. Oh these difficult decisions.

The purple masking tape marks where the towel rails and vanity unit will be. These are getting installed today!

Shiny White!

Look how shiny and new this is! We have a team called Smart Style Bathrooms, lead by the wonderful Cameron, renovating our bathroom at the moment. It took them half an hour to rip out the old shower, bath and sink. 1 week later and it's already plumbed, rewired and tiled. Amazing! Over the next few days they will install the vanity, taps, mirror and glass door for the shower in the bath. Can't wait to use it!

Check out the old bathroom. The new bath above is in on the left where the shower was. The vanity will go on the right where the old bath is, and then there will be lovely floor space in the middle.

The Living Room Begins

We have started to sort out the living room. Hugh and George took all the furniture out and put it in the spare bedroom last weekend. That room is now so full that you have to take a running jump to get in. The living room though is now fine and spaceous.

This is the large window visible on the front left of the house. There are terriflyingly dirty net curtains over the windows, so when we get a full bio suit, I'll have them down. In the meantime, this is going to be the next room to get the zulu plain treatment. 

And these are the double doors that lead into the living room from the hall. This was taken last weekend when the wall was still white in the corridoor. I'm really bad at getting photos off the camera at the moment. These ones are from George. Soon though we'll have the auld internet in the flat again so will be back in full comms action.

We quite like these doors, but they are going to be impossible to paint around so we must figure some way of taking them down for a while. They are on sliding rollers, hanging from the top, but the complication of unhooking them is that there is a decorative cover over the top which is trapping them in. A new power tool is required no doubt.

Hallway

We finally got the whole house clean, so now we are starting to properly renovate. Step 1 is painting everything. We thought that the hall would be a good place to start as then it would be something nice to look at when we first step into the house. Over the past week we cleaned the place, filled all the cracks with polyfilla and masking taped it, so we could do a proper job of it.

Then on Saturday, me and mom painted the ceiling and walls with 2 coats of white paint while the lads were out at the cricket. We both strangely like painting, so are really enjoying it. We have lots of paint brushes and rollers, and a really great stepladder that has a table top for paint cans to make it as easy as possible.

This is it halfway done, how glary does that look? So then yesterday me and Hugh masked the ceiling and painted the walls a colour called zulu plain, which is a light brown. It sounds nasty, but is actually really nice. I'll get a picture as soon as we can.

Also Hugh and George moved all the furniture from the living room to the spare bedroom so now we can properly tackle that room too.

New House!

Here I am in front of our new house. The chimney is a wonderful example of the bad taste of previous generations. I'm starting to like it though. The fireplace inside is no better. And the carpets are the stuff of nightmares. But it is ours.

We started off this weekend with a massive cleanout of the kitchen and main bedroom. This is still in progress as we got distracted slightly yesterday by some friends coming over for a nosy around the new house.

We received some lovely presents from Hugh's family on the morning we moved in! Excellent timing! This is from Carole and Don, and we have a lovely bunch of flowers too from Mamgu, Janet and David in Swansea. I'll get a picture of them later.

Retro

So this is the mighty retro living room of our new house, which we will get the keys to on Friday, if all goes according to plan. Note the wonder of the 70s clock, sofa and awesome carpet. This is probably going to be the first room in the house that we try to renovate. We will rip up the carpets and sand the floors, possibly put in a few extra sockets, and paint it a nice clean off white colour. The wooden furniture in the room is lovely so we'll keep that, but maybe get a new couch.

Rumour has it that if the gas heater is pre-80s (most definitely) that the gas company will replace it with a new model for free. Sweet! Also a bit of rendering on the fireplace may bring it into the 21st century.

Coode Street!

Myself and Hugh have finally gotten mortgage approval for our very first house! It is north of Perth city in the suburbs. From here I can cycle to work in half an hour (at great non-perspiring leisure) and hugh can drive to work in 12 minutes. There is a bus around the corner that will take us to town in around 15 minutes. Also it is a 10 minute walk from Charlie and Jane at the Strand. Get this though, they have also bought a new house and it is across the road from ours ha ha! 100 metres door to door, and that's if we walk straight across the road. If we take it at a diagonal it's even less.

Our house is in need of some renovations. We were a bit worried looking around as there are water marks on the ceilings of both bedrooms, and there is a slight sag in the big bedroom ceiling. We had an engineer come in to have a good look at everything though and he says that the house, in its day, was built brilliantly. The timbers in the ceiling are as good as the day they went in, and the only problem is that it hasn't been maintained very well. A few small jobs need to be done to raise and dry the ceilings, and the roof needs to be painted with a waterproof coating, but that's it. After that it's all cosmetic, and modernising. Phew! We are looking forward to getting going on painting and redoing the kitchen and bathroom. And installing a cinema, enormous barbecue and a pool.

Also, there is a very large sleepout room at the back of the house, which we are going to turn into a third bedroom as soon as possible, so we can fit millions of guests in lavish comfort (hint hint).

We get the keys on Friday 29th and we will move in on Saturday. First house yay!