Landscaping mud!

A few photos from Monday after all that rain in Sydney. Getting to our front door required serious navigational skills to avoid sliding or falling into muddy waters. Fast forward 2 days and the scene is completely different. Photos to come tomorrow.

Mud glorious mud!

This is a photo of me outside my front door yesterday...well almost! Oh my, I wish someone was with me and was able to take some video footage to share with you all. I decided to take another load to the house and started to wade through the deceptively OK area of dirt near the front door. I was wearing thongs having recently thrown my gumboots out due to low usage. I took one step into the dirt and immediately sunk low to above my ankle. I very nearly lost balance and topple head first into the mud. I managed to extract my leg only to leave my thong behind. Not wanting to lose my precious $5 thongs, I stuck my arm into the abyss to reclaim the footwear. I decided to change direction and head towards the laundry door on the side of the house. The very small, slippery, muddy walkway made me land awkwardly onto the newly formed concrete retaining wall. Picked myself back up again with 3 limbs completely muddied and get into the house. I hoisted myself onto the laundry bench and twist around to place my feet into the sink. I say a quick THANKYOU prayer for the choice of a detachable spray nozzle, only to find that we have virtually no water. I do the best I can to clean up, feeling fairly miserable about the state of our yard.
In fact, I then go into research mode to try and work out what we are going to do for the official moving day on Friday. Lots of great ideas from friends. I even lost sleep over it last night - it was stressing me. MDF, pallets, cardboard, astroturf, gravel etc. I received a welcome call from Tim, from Hayward Landscapes, today following an email from me asking for ideas. Tim said he would organize a load of gravel for the driveway and some pallets to make a bridge to the front door. Thank you, Tim! Now to organize the inside to prevent further dirtiness - plastic galore to be purchased to protect carpet, tiles and glass balustrading.

And the water pressure? Upon receiving my plea for help, Troy sent an email asking some questions like, hot water too? all taps inside & out? when was it noticed? etc. I had mentioned it to Tim this morning. When he drove past the house, he stopped to check the water meter and found the tap had been turned off! No need for the plumber to make another visit and I provided a few laughs for Bev, the Customer Service Manager when she found out. I think we are going to have a few issues like this being on a 'normal' street as opposed to our private access road off a cul-de-sac. We also found our letterbox ripped out of the ground on Sunday morning.

Landscaping update - photos

It has been a while between posts. I have been very busy moving things into the new house, box by box. I aim to pack the car each night with items and then each morning take them over to the new house and unpack straight away. Yesterday's project was Brad's wine collection. Here is some of it....

The overflow area

The wine cupboard

Back to the landscaping. It started in earnest 2 weeks ago. Each day we have had 4-7 guys working solidly on the site, making more mess ;-) We all have fine dirt in every orifice. Every outside surface of the house is filthy again and the floors inside are incredibly dirty. The concrete will be poured in about 10 days time, giving us a driveway and front porch area. The landscapers have impressed me no end and are a credit to their company. Polite, friendly, courteous, always offering assistance and greeting me each time they see me. A pleasure to have around. Here are some progress photos....

Warm versus cool

A word of warning for those yet to go through their HSI appointment (electricals) with Eden Brae - if you have a preference for colour of your glow, make sure you state it even if you aren't asked about it. The HSI appointment can be daunting especially if your upgrade list is long. So many decisions are made that can be the make or break for a room or the way a house functions. I was not asked what colour I would like my 100 (yes, 100) downlights. I remember walking into my house when the electricals were done and thinking oh, NO! The cool fluro look was not what I was wanting to achieve. Rough calculations showed me that I was looking at about $2K to change them over - um, no, not in a hurry! I left that issue in the too hard basket.
Fast forward to yesterdays electrical maintenance visit. Apart from waiting at the house in the morning as I was told that they would be there then, the guys were fantastic. A real credit to their company, Quiklec. Pleasant, clean, efficient, accommodating, nothing was an issue even though some of the work was a little more difficult than they first thought (possibly due to work not being done correctly earlier). AJ from re-do my space hung out with me for the 3 hours they were there to ensure the lights were place correctly. She subtly asked one of the guys if there was anything we could do about the LED downlights given we were not given a choice and hence the default option was installed. Chris seemed to think that replacing them was not going to be a major issue as we had not moved in yet and used them much at all. We crafted an email to the company and I received a call today that Quiklec would replace them for me. Oh my! I am ecstatic and so is AJ. For my home, it will be a much nicer tone and it will now be the same as the lamps that we have bought. Thankyou Quiklec for your customer service.

We also experienced a plumbing issue today. The powder room toilet won't flush and the water keeps running. Eden Brae have sent a plumber out early tomorrow to investigate for me and to look at a possible leak in the rainwater tank piping.

Lovely Lucinda ;-)

And a BIG public shoutout to my closest of friends, Lu. She has been there through the ins and outs of the build from dreaming days to now near completion. She has listened, given time when she has no time (unless it is 2am!), offered advice, helped me to maintain the vision when things seemed too hard, helped Brad to see the vision that I have for the home and when I have been feeling flat, she has been my 'RA-RA' girl, my personal fan club. Her oohhs and aaahhs have been sweet music to my ears. From the bottom of my heart, thank you Lu. Here's to many a champagne or good red on the alfresco.

Landscaping BEFORE photos

Last week, on one bushfirey evening I took some 'before' photos of the outside of the house. Landscaping started in earnest this week seeing lots of activity around the perimeter. Today proved rather challenging with the afternoon wind storm. I suspect our neighbours might find dust covering every aspect of their blocks of land.
Progress photos to come soon....

A log of some minor issues that I have found so far

Continuing on from my aim to keep this as a log of the good and the not-so-good, I thought I would post photos of some things I have found so far that I would like to bring up at our 13 week maintenance inspection. These are issues that should have been picked up at PCI but weren't or have occurred since then.