beach – Page 2 – A Home by the Sea

Set for ‘Practical Completion’

We have a Practical Completion Date for the Home by the Sea, and it is very close.

Moving date will actually be a further couple of weeks after that. That gives the builder a chance to fix up all the defects, (hopefully none or not too many), prior to handing over the house keys to us and us handing him the big fat final cheque!!

It is getting exciting, but also somewhat daunting knowing what I have yet to do, before I can lay my head down on the bed in my new home by the sea.

The Carpenter returned to re-do the beautiful Western Red cedar roof on the alfresco area, and on the front panel above the famed and maligned cornerless window.

You can see him there hard at work, cursing and teasing me a little good heartedly for making him re-do the section at the front. He is a lovely guy, despite all his intimidating skeletal tattoos!

And for all his tattoos, I asked him if he would let his young daughter get a tattoo when she grew up.

“No way,” he said shaking his head emphatically!

“Good luck with that,” I thought, under my breath.

Further progress included the installation of the Energy Efficient Air Conditioner (an absolute must in northern Australia). Yay!

I won’t have solar power again for a little while, so the less we use it, the better for the planet, right? Mind you, the breeze that persists at the water’s edge might mean we can save a little of the planet’s ecosystems and shut it off for most of the year.

We see that the house has had a QA check and they have found some, well many spots to touch up with the paint. So there are blue dots of tape sprinkled throughout to identify the spots that need fixing with paint.

The bathroom mirrors and shower screens were installed. And I now have somewhere to hang my towel and toilet roll! Yay for that!

The stairs also were dressed with timber grade handrails this week.

All the timber work is to be stained in a teak colour.

The Lows

We discovered that the lovely oak bedside tables we purchased for a reduced price, during a closing down sale won’t fit in our master bedroom with the existing bed frame. Darn it all.

They can go with the two lamps I purchased that were also a mistake. The MOTH took the opportunity to remind me that I had purchased seven lamps this year! Surely not.

**Lesson learnt here. Don’t buy furniture or lamps, without measuring accurately and before your house is complete.

The Highs

We have a resident Mamma Kanga and Baby Joey in our park and sporting fields. Eager to find some freshly watered green grass, I spotted them safely tucked away behind the fencing this morning.

I think we need a name for them.

Do you have any suggestions?

The builder informed us an error had been made and they had delivered the wrong brick to the Little Home By the Sea.

I thought it had to be wrong, but what do I know?

Tim checked into it and found they had delivered the wrong bricks. Austral will swap them over. That feels a lot better now. I can sleep again.

This is the Wilderness design – Blackbutt – with two shadows looming over.

It even looks black. Quite different from the grey with white flecks, seen below. They realized the bricks delivered on the palettes that had sat there for several weeks were completely wrong. Thank goodness we checked.

The waterproofing was complete and excess soil removed and spread out. So now we were starting to get an idea of the internal size of the rooms and yard.

More will become obvious when the frame begins at the end of this week. Then it will really look like a house.