Tandaland

Whilst we’re still unsure about exactly when handover is, we know it is close! In the next week or so we’re hoping to hear when our first official inspection is. If all goes well, about 2 weeks after that we should have the keys to our new home!

It’s a difficult time because there is so much to do in so little time. Fortunately we’re not in a big hurry to move this time. Last time we moved we had only one week to clean the apartment we were moving to, move all our stuff in and clean the old place. To make matters worse, last time I had the flu as well! This time, however, we can take a bit more time. Obviously we don’t want the house sitting there unoccupied, so we’d like to be in fairly soon after handover. But it means we can take our time moving all the rest of the stuff over.

Other than the moving thing, we have some other big ticket items to pay for. We’ve gotten quotes for blinds ($7k), fences ($4k), driveway ($3k), decking ($4k) and moving ($3.5k)… and it’s actually a LOT of money..and money we don’t really have to go splurging. Needless to say, the new fridge, home theatre and car are well and truly OFF the list for now… especially given we have a kid on the way!

We’re probably going to move ourselves this time. It may take us a couple of trips, but it’s going to beat forking out $4k again like we did last year!

For blinds, we’re probably going to go with a combination of roman blinds with motorised roller blinds where appropriate. Down the track we may have to call in Mum to help us with some sheer light filtering stuff for behind the romans. We don’t have to funds to do it now… so we’re going to leave it.

We got a great quote from a guy for the decking, driveway and path… he’s basically ready to go, so now we’re just waiting for our handover date!

The fence place we got our quote from seem to be a bit confused. Firstly they sent has back a quote for a place in Point Cook, and then when they eventually sent us the correct one the measurements were wrong! So i don’t know what we’ll do there!

We also found out from our new neighbours (Hi Karen and Nik!) that we may not even be able to get the phone on until November! So that may slow down our moving in plans. No phone means no internet, and no internet means no work! EEK!

I hate waiting

We’re still waiting for an answer on our finance….. it’s driving me mental! I know Angela is doing everything she can do, and she did tell us it would be a slow process given our complex situation…. but still!

It’s frustrating because we want to get started on choosing stuff! We know what we want, so we want to go ahead and get moving. We don’t like inaction. It’s hard because there are so many things we want to get moving, but obviously we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves. We need money before we can spend it!

I guess the upside is that having a week or two without actual “house” stuff to think about, I’ve been putting a little bit of thought into our garden. It’s a pretty big space. 17m x 13m, plus 2 alfrescos and a front garden. We’re not gardeners by a long shot. So we won’t be planting a heap of flowers and shrubs and things that need maintenance. The plan is to have a pretty “native” looking backyard. Native being “green thumb talk” for messy.

When I think of what my backyard should look like, I remind myself that I’m stuck in the city, and how lucky I was to have a big backyard and plenty of camping trips when I was a kid. I think I’d go mental growing up in some of the estates around these days! I like to think of what it was like in the bush. I think of the sound of running water, lots of rock, slate or river pebbles around, scrubby paths, long brown grasses, lots of birds, hollow logs. Everything hues of greys, browns and greens. Lots of sounds and textures. Not ornamental by any means, but that feeling of it all being “real”… like this is where we’re supposed to live..out in the dirt and rocks. Then I try and see all that in my backyard.

But I don’t want to just plant out the whole yard as one big scrubby area, because I do want grass for the kids to be able to have a game of cricket! When i was a kid, we had a driveway running down the side of the house with a gate half way down. The perfect batting pitch if the centre of the driveway had been freshly cut and rolled! I can’t imagine Thuy being too thrilled about having a chalk stumps drawn on the new garage roller door somehow!

So that’s two things. The third thing is we used to have a lot of BBQs when I was a kid. I loved eating outside. It was great to be able to run around and come back for a snag or a rissole occasionally and then run off to play some more cricket. So I really want to have this separation between the “yard” and the “entertaining” area. A sort of formal area that flows through to the natural looking yard area.

I’ve drawn up a few sketches of what I think will look good…. but without knowing where we’re up to with costs and money, they will no doubt change considerably!

It’s funny that things I would not normally care about are suddenly tremendously exciting. Just like how new parents seem to go slightly mental when their new baby is on the way, so to it seems that expectant home owners go a little “weird”.

We took Thuy’s little sister to our block of land over the weekend (she stayed with us one night), and it appears that our crossover is complete and that we now have a footpath out front of our block! WOOT! We’re also happy to see that the 3 big pipes have been relocated It made for a good photo for our site header, but I wasn’t looking forward to rolling them onto someone elses lot!

Still waiting on finance to be resolved………………………………………………………….

As mentioned in the last post, we have requested our driveway crossover be built on the northern side of our block rather than the default south side. Bill from Oliver Hume had said to us that the builders had already begun work on the footpaths and crossovers and that our driveway was definitely going to be place on the north side of the block. This was straight from the guy doing the concrete apparently

In the interest of a good night sleep, we decided to go and check out whether our driveway was REALLY being built on the right side, so that if it was mid construction in the wrong location we’d be able to do something about it.

Needless to say, this is the happiest I’ve ever been to see a bunch of metal and wood laying on the ground!

Our crossover…. ahhhhh

Our soon-to-be driveway crossover

Where our driveway NEARLY was before we got it moved! This would’ve had our house with the living area facing south… bad!

The footpaths are just about all done in stage 1… we couldn’t have had better timing!