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The Family Bandwagon

Our family is spread out across the country and across the world, and what better way to keep in touch than a collaborative digital journal?
Showing posts with label house. Show all posts
Showing posts with label house. Show all posts

Thursday, 26 February 2009

My dad is a pirate, what's yours?

Scars, tattooes -- our Dad is turning into a pirate! Perhaps we can get 'im a parrot for his birthday? Argh.

I've heard lots of anecdotal evidence that ground apricot kernels (in the appropriate amount) is good for healing/avoiding cancer growth. One of our friends in Melbourne has gone into remission (I almost said recession -- that's the financial climate over here!) from lymphoma. He had chemo, then super health diet (nothing processed, all fresh) including apricot kernels and mananuka honey. Actually, I'm on the mananuka in tea for a cold at the moment.

Us, we've been quiet because the only access to the Sillyweb we have is from work or on the phone -- so silly Facebook statuses have been updated from phone whilst walking home or at lunch or in a boring meeting or on the bus. Although I must confess I think it was a taste of how parents must feel when their child comes home with e.g. cybernetic implants (or a mobile phone, or a hologram for a friend) to hear that my Mum is reading about me on Facebook.

Well, it's a bit quieter at work today, so here goes. The move went well, because we were more organised and prepared this time than ever before in history. The weekend before we packed almost everything into boxes and put them into Colleen's room -- she'd already moved out. The following Saturday Chris, Andrew (Chris's girlfriend's brother) and I picked up a small van, while Dee and Tina (C's girlfriend) cleaned the new apartment.

The three men loaded the van, drove to the new place, and unloaded. It was regular as clockwork -- complete with roles: I unloaded from van to door (to keep an eye on the van); Andrew from door into elevator (he hates lifts); and Chris unloaded from elevator at the top. Two van loads and we were done by about 3pm! In fact, the only two hiccups were waiting an hour for a van (some mixup in their system) and a bookcase which was slightly too big for the elevator ... and had to be walked up (in shifts) 10 flights of stairs!!

The new apartment is smaller but with more usable space: We've got the desk in our room, the piano in the lounge, and are looking for a shelving unit to put in the kitchen. A few problems, mostly with our estate agents being "pants" about replacing broken stuff -- we've been there almost two weeks and they still haven't replaced the worn out mattresses, nor sent a sparky 'round to fix various lights and sockets. We suspect the last tenants were dodgy -- things have been thoroughly broken, then gingerly put back together to create the illusion of repair. The coffee table, for example, rested on four entirely broken legs, whilst the condition report listed it as "wobbly". The report now looks like a Grade 5 school essay in which the student didn't use spell-check -- it's covered with additions and corrections. I stopped short of giving them a C-minus on the front cover ...

So we're slowly but surely settling in. The boxes are all unpacked now, and today we had the phone-line connected (here comes broadband). Phone number, apparently (haven't tried it yet) is:
+44 207378 1204

The address for postcards is:
1004 Antonine Heights
City Walk
London
SE1 3DF

Here's a map showing the place, and where we work. Takes me probably 20-30min to walk to work:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=100294927689049556522.000463d02ac0f2411c4ae&ll=51.531387,-0.111237&spn=0.071441,0.154495&z=13

I'll get some photos up when we finally get online.

Saturday, 29 November 2008

Nursery update

Hey everybody.. today we bought a change table, finally. Cheryl is going to get a capsule for the car in January, after she finishes work, and then I think we have all the essentials. Somewhere for the baby to sleep, be changed, and a way to get him around :)

We also bought a really cool cot set, with monkeys and turtles and all that good stuff. We put it in the cot just to take some photos to put online.

You can see all the nursery photos here.

Oh, we also had a very kind woman in Toys R Us give us a voucher which saved us about $40 (after the change table had already been reduced by $100 i might add). She was just another shopper there, and being nice.. some people are awesome :)

Saturday we also had the first of our three classes at Flinders Hospital. The second is with a Physio, and covers relaxation techniques and pain relief, and the third is about taking the baby home and looking after it.. Which unfortunately meant that this one was about labour and delivery.

I wont go into specifics.. but rest assured, they did ;)

Still, it was really good, and it's left both Cheryl and I feeling better about the whole thing. There were a few things that I had heard, or read in older books, which were completely wrong. Which is good.

And that's about it from us for this week.

Sunday, 9 November 2008

Decorating and cleaning

Hey all,

We finally got the rest of the decorations for the baby's room this week. It's a collection of vinyl stickers of birds in flight.. we stuck them up this weekend on the main blue wall. I've put some pictures up on flickr so you can have a look.. although they were pretty tricky to photograph, so the wall is a different colour in each shot. It should give a fair idea of how it looks though.

Today we hired a carpet cleaner and picked up quite a collection of sludge from our carpets.. we mainly wanted to do the baby's room and the lounge, but we had a bit of time so got some other areas cleaned as well. It's very rewarding to look at the disturbing brown gunk in the bottom of the machine and know that at least now it's not in the carpets any more :)

That's about it from us for this weekend.. now we're off to a much deserved dinner at a Japanese restaurant on the beach. Huzzah! Cheryl has planned something secret for next weekend that doesn't involve cleaning or looking at baby furniture, so it should be a refreshing change.. I don't know what it is though. Should be fun :)

Sunday, 5 October 2008

Painting and Belly Watching



Hey all,

Just a bit of an update. We've started painting the baby's room.. you now all know the gender, so I don't mind showing you the colours :) We've got a light blue for most of it, and then a feature wall in a nice bright green. You can see photos of the progress here. The plan is to finish it off tomorrow, on our public holiday (huzzah!).. assuming I don't sleep in until 12 like I did this morning ;)



We also took a few photos of Cheryl for the week 24 BellyWatch. You can see them here.

We've been looking around for a cot and all the trimmings for the last couple of weeks.. we thought we had found the perfect one at Toys R Us (on sale no less), but unfortunately they don't deliver as far as Morphett Vale and we had no way of getting it from the city to our place.. and the local Toys R Us doesn't have it. Ah well, back to the drawing board. Assuming we can get the painting finished this weekend all we have planned for next weekend is steam-cleaning the carpet so we should have some time to look.

My general plan is to have the room all completely finished before you guys all visit in December, so we have a bit of time still.

Saturday, 8 December 2007

House update

Hi all,

Cheryl and I are well into packing boxes now. For example, exhibit a - our spare room:



Of course if you think that looks bad, you probably shouldn't look at our lounge room at around 3:30 this afternoon, which I like to call exhibit b - armageddon:



It doesn't look quite that bad now.. close though :)
The reason we are in a flurry of packing is that the truck comes to pick up our stuff on Saturday 15th, giving us less than a week to get everything we have into cardboard.. and we seem to have a fairly large collection of stuff. Where does it all come from?

Monday, 26 November 2007

We have a moving date!

Our finance has been finalised, and it also looks like our settlement date will be changed from the 21st Dec to 14th Dec, Yay! We just need to send back the form that we have signed and it'll be official :) Finally we can start organising things like annual leave, a removalist, carpet cleaning ... and start packing everything. Eep! It'll be great to finally be in our own home with a real kitchen, a lounge and dining room (although I can see us still eating in front of the TV Haha!), and a yard with plants! It's quite exciting now that things are moving along again.
So we're going to be very busy and maybe a little poor, but it'll be a very nice Christmas present for us! :)

Tuesday, 13 November 2007

We have a house!

Ok, so there's still a lot of stuff to be done, papers to be signed and the like, but the real estate agent just called and said Cheryl and I have got the house we bid on! Woo! You can see the place here. Tomorrow we meet the agent and sign the contract. Then we have to get a building inspector in to check it over (the contract is subject to inspection) and our mortgage broker will be sorting out the finance for us.

It's all very exciting and more than a little scary.