That’s right ,we quietly moved in at the end of October!
I was waiting until we had the house tidy to take some photos but couldn’t wait any longer so here’s some taken as is, no fancy styling here!
So happy to finally be in!!
The crazy paving in Castlemaine slate is almost completed and it looks awesome! There’s been lots of digging and mud around this week so it’s looking a bit dirty in this photo but trust me it’s fabulous in person. This photo is of our north facing courtyard, we’re in the process of arranging a pergola which we’ll grow an ornamental vine over. The vine is actually a cutting from my parents vine which in turn was a cutting from the vine we had at my childhood home, which is a nice connection to have. It turns an amazing rusty colour in Autumn but it’ll be quite a few years before there’s enough to provide much shade :)
This is also the north side of the house, looking east. There will be a nice patch of lawn down there.
Standing on the “lawn” looking south-ish towards the garage. That’s more paving there but you can hardly tell as there’s a lot of mud covering it.
Standing in the back north-east corner which will be the vegie patch.
From the side street.
The front door. Getting in the festive spirit I put up a wreath but it’s so tiny you can hardly notice it amongst the mess :) More crazy paving here.
The front garden. They’re putting in new soil.
By the end of today it should be a lot cleaner and tidier here!
The front deck with assorted pots and stuff. That’s our landscaper’s sign.
And one of my favourite things that we’ve done since we moved in was to put up these two fold out clothes airers. We don’t have a clothes line yet and the clothes horses were driving me crazy as I have to put them in the lounge room and they take up a lot of room in the laundry when they’re folded up. These things however are awesome, they’ll take a full load of washing and they’re right near the machine, so easy to use! (if you’re interested they’re from Howards Storage World and have 9 rungs 120cm wide)
This is where the 600mm wide oven is supposed to go, yeah, it’s 595mm.
I thought we were screwed! Luckily we’ve got some brains between us and we managed to move this cupboard over by cutting down the filler piece on the right hand side and cutting a hole in the plaster and sliding the benchtop into the wall (so we didn’t have to get it cut down). It was all fixed in half an hour, big “phew”!!
Painters, electricians and chippies workin hard.
The stone retaining wall has been finished and work has started on the hard landscaping. They had an excavator in to remove a lot of clay and now they’re preparing the areas that will be paved with Castlemaine slate and digging foundations for the retaining walls.
In the photo below (looking out the kitchen door) the area that the excavator is sitting on will have a retaining wall in front of it, along the back fence there will be olive trees and we’ll have vegie beds in the middle. Can’t wait to be able to potter around in the vegie garden again!
You can see the excavator through the window down the end there, that’s the east side of the house, on the left is the north side and you can see the lovely sun coming in and warming the concrete for passive solar heating. That northern area you can see will be paved also with a narrow garden bed running along the fence.
The privacy screen on the western side has been completed too. This side faces the street and the westerly afternoon sun which would blast through here in summer so we needed something to block it. The screen is galvanised steel clad on the outside with 65mm silvertop ash and retracts into a cavity in the wall when not in use.
And most excitingly, the floor is being ground back today! The floor was not adequately troweled smooth when it was laid, never fully sealed and not adequately protected during construction so it was rough, not level and badly stained from paint, plaster, grease etc and it looked crap. But today all that should be remedied with a great big sander! They’ll take off 1 or 2mm to level out the high and low spots and to get it smooth but hopefully without exposing the aggregate. I can’t wait to see it!
And here’s a photo I took the other day from across the street. Hopefully the curved sections will be finished next week so you won’t have the bright blue bits in the next photos :) (I also can’t wait to get rid of that damn bright yellow site toilet)
The new roof for the lower level is going on today. The old one had been crushed in dozens of places by all the people traipsing over it while trying to sort out the cladding issues.
(sorry about the ass view in this photo)
These are the new downpipes, we’ve changed them from square to round and there’s a bracket to hold it away from the wall so we can paint behind it when the cladding needs to be stained again.
The retaining wall is nearly half done now. The stonemason has had to take a couple of weeks off but will be back next Tuesday and he’ll bring a mate to help him so the rest should go quite quickly.
I love the rusty orange patches in the stone, it matches the colour of the house now that it’s had more coats of stain.
And here’s a current picture of the house. The curved corner is still not done as we’ve had some issues with it. It turns out that Silvertop Ash does not like to be steam bent, the tongue cracked, there were longitudinal splits along the board and the surface was delaminating, it was very bad news!
Finally we have a solution which is to use Yellow Stringybark instead, it looks almost exactly the same but it’s denser and seems to take the steam bending well. Minor problem now is that the supplier only has 110mm boards and we need 90mm so they have to cut them down for us and just when they’ll be ready at the end of next week, the timber bender is taking two weeks holiday, arrrgh! But I am getting very used to setbacks so I’m not fussed, at least we have a solution now. For a while we thought we might have to use something other than timber and it would’ve looked shite (IMHO)!
The garage door is clad for the first time and it looks freakin awesome!
And (some of) the stone has arrived for the retaining wall.
The foundations for the new retaining wall went in on April 29th and I heard today that the stonemason has received the new stone so they’ll be starting soon!
