Micks Distractions

A more recent pano of our house taken with a rented Sony DSC-F828. I also pro­duced a full 360 pano with it. See below.
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This pano was taken around 2004. It’s our empty block of land just after we tore our old house down.
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My wife went into the kitchen this morn­ing to start break­fast off and slipped on a huge pud­dle of water. There seemed to be water drip­ping from one of the lights in the kitchen. Great! I went up into the roof and found a big pool of water sit­ting on the ceil­ing plas­ter. From the looks of it it had been there for some time. So I mopped it all up, (all 6L of it), and called the plumber. The leak was com­ing from the cop­per ring that gets used to tighten around join­ers in plas­tic pip­ing. When I was talk­ing to my plumber orig­i­nally he said that it’d be slightly cheaper to go with plas­tic. When I objected to it, (I pre­fer the OLD tra­di­tional way of doing things), he said that he’d never had a prob­lem with plas­tic pip­ing and so man­aged to con­vince me to allow him to use it. Now I’m not so con­vinced, if I had my time again I wouldn’t use it.
It looks like we’ll have to make an insur­ance claim to get the roof fixed.

Now that the ship­ping con­tainer has gone from our dri­ve­way we had a dump­ster bin deliv­ered, and hired a dingo for the day. I man­aged to

exca­vate and level the front yard, and

clean up down the side. I got it all fairly level and straight, but I exca­vated just a lit­tle bit too much in one spot and bent the gas pipe, and knocked over the front tap. We’ll have to get the plumber out to fix them. Oh well.
Next weekend’s job is the retain­ing wall. I’ll have 30m of 150x75 treated pine sleep­ers, and 2T of extra earth deliv­ered for this.

Gee I hate it when peo­ple graf­fiti on your web­site. Some idiot took it on him­self to use the ‘com­ments’ sec­tion to add adverts for some porno/gambling site. I received no request from them whether they could or not. They came in from mul­ti­ple addresses to hide their iden­tity as well. It’s the equiv­a­lent of some­one spray paint­ing an advert on your front fence.
Shame there aren’t any decent laws to pro­vide an incen­tive for peo­ple not to do this. Oh well.

Well, I haven’t updated in a while, (around 1 month). But then again not much has changed. This is always the way. Once you move in every­thing grinds to a halt. Besides; I needed to spend some time with my fam­ily.
Floors: We’ve received the sec­ond load of floor­ing. This floor­ing hasn’t been milled as acu­rately as the old stuff so I’ve had to buy a proper floor­ing gun. This pushes the board in at the same time fir­ing a nail in. The gun is the same as a nor­mal nail gun, but the fir­ing mech­a­nism is a bolt at the top that gets hit with a ham­mer. This then fires a nail at 40 degrees into the tongue.
Bath­room: We’ve been using two par­tially com­plete bath­rooms. I have yet to com­plete the tiling around the bath area, and get the plumber back to con­nect the shower up prop­erly, (I’m using a span­ner as a tap at the moment).
Archi­traves: They’re not up, but I have to fin­ish the floor­ing first. These will go in eas­ily with my old paslode. I’m putting in remove­able mitre-less skirt­ing boards. These will allow me to remove them for ter­mite inspec­tions.
Dingo: I’ll be get­ting the dingo back toland­scape the ground. I need to get rid of the rub­ble out the front and shift a whole swag of dirt around.
Veran­dah: I’ll need to fin­ish off the above first. Then I’ll get the con­cre­tor back to lay the con­crete for the front veran­dah. Then I can put up the veran­dah.
After all this it’ll be fin­ished. Hooray!

Well, it’s the first week of being in the new house. We’ve all been pretty much sick, the place looks like a bomb has hit it, it’s been rain­ing, (mud every­where), and we still don’t have our shower going, (just the bath at the moment). So we’re glad to be back in our own house.
Con­se­quently, I haven’t had a chance to do much. Just a bit here and there. The fin­ish­ing off bits always take the most time. I went and got a load of mer­anti mould­ings to fin­ish the bath­rooms off and have been busy with that.
I didn’t end up get­ting a dingo back in to level off the ground, and will do that in a cou­ple of weeks.

Well, the house isn’t fin­ished, but we’ve moved in — just in time for Christ­mas! I have sorted out my insur­ance issue, (man­aged to find one com­pany that will insure us for con­tents with­out our tem­po­rary occu­pa­tion cer­tifi­cate — no-one else would). We have a fully func­tional kitchen, par­tially func­tional bath­rooms, (the shower doesn’t quite go yet — we have pegs avail­able at the front door for sen­si­tive noses ) ). We have also shifted half of our ship­ping con­tainer into the house. So we’re almost there. It’ll be a rough Christ­mas, but a memo­ri­able one.
I spent the week­end fin­ish­ing off our bath­rooms as much as I could. We decided to have the coun­try look to our bath­rooms by putting in painted half height pan­elling. I’ll whack up a photo when I can find my cam­era.