Our house

Ok, no more procrastinating! Here are a bunch of photos of our new house. We haven't moved in yet because we are hoping to get the bathroom redone- you will see why shortly. But, because it's past my bedtime and I'm lazy, I'm going to re-use the captions I made when I put them up on Facebook for our parents/family etc... with additions where necessary :)

The front stairs

Front path past the mailbox.

Looking out onto the road.

Front stairs and driveway.

Gate to the rear of the house.

Back door, all locked up.

My first thought? "Oh no, our first job at our new house is going to be pulling two dead possums from the patio roof!"

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The front stairs

Completely motionless.

Gam banged the wall and one startled- its legs slipped out from their tiny hiding place. The actual roof of the house is possum-proofed but the patio isn't. You wouldn't think it would need it- that gap is only a couple of centimetres! Besides, they look so cute with their tails hanging out...

Searching for which one of the 25 (not a typo!!!!!) keys would actually get us into the house.

Too bad after we found the right one we discovered the old sliding door behind the security screen was locked from the INSIDE! ARGH!

I photographed the view while Gam tried to determine which one of the 25 keys fit the side door...

Our view is the 'poor' view. We get the industrial area of Salisbury and Archerfield... people on the other side of the hill get city views! The upside being, of course that we didn't get charged any extra for the view. Actually the owners probably could have in this market, but they were getting divorced (or so we deduced from the mail we later received in their mailbox addressed from a 'family law practice') and wanted a quickie sale.

View up the hill from the front verandah.

The... erm... vintage-look wood heater thingummy that Gam has dreams of turfing out and replacing with an indoor wood-fired pizza oven... forgot to check if the previous owners emptied the ash tray. I bet they didn't!!! (- We checked. They didn't. And hadn't for some time either, by the look of it, the lazy bastards!).

The side door (thankfully we weren't locked out from the inside for this one too!). We're going to paint the eggplant-coloured feature wall a different shade (it's not quite as smick as it appears in the photo).

The front door from the living area.

The 'dining area'.

Looking from the dining area into the funky little dishwasherless (*sob*) kitchen. We've bought a dishwasher to stick in the laundry next to the kitchen- much more useful than having a dryer.

Once again, the feature wall is not quite as awesome as it appears in the photo- it's much more of an ochre colour than the juicy orange it shows here. I think I would quite like it if it were that colour in real life- it really brings out the best in the green and brown (late 60's/v. early 70's) kitchen, but I think we've agreed on a buttery yellow for that one.

The dodgy ancient concrete double laundry sink- hearking back to the days when people washed their clothes by hand, maybe? Originally we thought we'd tear this out and install a single stainless steel sink, giving us extra room for a dishwasher, but without a dryer it turns out there was plenty of room. Still, in a small house where space is at a premium, it's a lot of space spent on a sink!

Ahh, the 'smart' bathroom, as it was described in the real estate blurb...

I don't know about you, but when I hear the words 'smart bathroom' I think of something with, say, a floor that heats up when someone walks in and a Japanese toilet clever enough to tell when someone's done number one or number two...

'Smart' presumably meant neat... it doesn't look too bad at first glance.

Until you realise no-one was 'smart' enough to remove the asbestos when they did it for the rest of the house!

Paint peeling everywhere in the bathroom.

And the bath... at first glance it doesn't appear particularly offensive...

Let's move on to the handy little storage cupboard... wait a minute- that's not a cupboard at all!! That's some lazy bastard's effort to hide an extremely dodgy old shower with a couple of token shelves wedged into the corner in order to atone for the abuse of space! (the bathroom is a measly 6sqm, and the cupboard takes up a full square metre)

Underneath the house, in the garage, the plumbing to the bathroom... Galvanised piping (rusts/corrodes from the inside out, apparently, which could explain the dreadfully weak water pressure in the house).

The full horror of the bathroom is revealed only when you look up and realise that brown, floor-board-coloured thing is not floorboards... it's the base of that bath! I have visions of sitting peacefully in the tub before suddenly plummeting through the rusted-out bottom of the bath and landing on the concrete floor of the garage... Sounds far-fetched, until you take a look at that photo. What can you say apart from 'ugh!'?

In summary, we not only need to renovate the bathroom, we pretty much need to replace the plumbing for the entire house (one reason to be glad it's a small house, I guess.

The godawfulness of the bathroom is partly redeemed by the nice view from the bathroom window...

Not many bathrooms have a view this good!

The second bedroom. Well, it has built-ins and is bigger than a broom cupboard!

It actually has the nicest built-in, but it is the darkest and pokiest of the bedrooms.

The main bedroom is huuuuuge... at least to anyone who has lived in a unit. You can fit a queen bed and... other stuff. We haven't thought of what the 'other stuff' might be because we haven't been able to fit 'other stuff' in our bedroom for 7 years!

The 3rd bedroom. This photo makes it look bigger than it really is. It's actually pretty tiny!

The second wardrobe... Now there will be no excuse for leaving clothes lying everywhere... uh oh!

Hall cupboard storage! Actual storage space! Such a novelty... can't imagine it ever getting full, but I know I'll eat those words one day.

Thankfully the air conditioner turned out to not be as ancient as it appeared- circa 2005, not 1980s! Still don't know how efficient/wasteful it is with regard to electricity consumption though.

The godawful foam 'sound dampening' tiles that make up the living room ceiling. Hard to believe someone artificially lowered the ceiling height to put those things in. Hopefully one day we can take them out and restore the ceiling. The marks at the side are where the building & pest guy lifted one out (with our permission) to see if there was a view into the roof cavity- there wasn't, and the crappy foam disintegrated when he touched it.

Kitchen sink needs regrouting. That showed up in the building & pest report (it's a lot more pleasant seeing something like that instead of TERMITES TERMITES TERMITES throughout the entire report).

"I've been saving this... I've always wanted to pee in my own toilet" (!!!)

-Gam, 2009

Laundry taps where the washing machine will be hooked up. It's going to be nice not having the laundry and bathroom not smooshed into the one small space... in fact so nice I won't ever complain about having the dishwasher in the laundry!

Our very own garbage bins...

More photos to come, of the 'great outdoors'. Stay tuned for the garden that at first glance looks nice but rivals the bathroom for sheer awfulness.

Tony Abbott moralises over asylum seeker deaths

Tony Abbott, who has never been averse to flavouring his politics with his extreme religious views, has set his dearly-held Christianity aside for a minute or two to score some political mileage from the drowning of twelve or more Sri Lankan asylum seekers when their boat sank near the Cocos Islands. This from a man whose government faced substantial and inadequately investigated allegations that they ignored the plight of a sinking boat full of asylum seekers in waters patrolled by Australian border protection surveillance aircraft just prior to the 2001 federal election. Of those people 353, including 146 children, drowned. That has not prevented Tony Abbott from accusing Kevin Rudd of being responsible for the deaths of the 12 or so people feared drowned in this latest incident, despite there as yet being no evidence that the government did not act to help as soon as it was aware the boat was sinking.

Don’t get me wrong. The display we’ve seen from Kevin ‘hardline’ Rudd of late has ensured his government will never see another preference vote from me until the day he stands up and apologises to the people he has wronged as part of this despicable political stunt. And given the consummate politician and slimebag he has proved to be, I really don’t see that happening. I don’t wish to defend his recent treatment of asylum seekers (of whom around 99% are inevitably found to be genuine refugees) in the slightest. But watching one of the men whose government was likely responsible for the deaths of 353 innocent people in an even more heinous politically-motivated disregard for vulnerable human lives try and score points off the moderately less despicable actions of the Rudd government just makes my blood boil.

Additionally, I'm glad to see the Rudd government has taken its first real hit in the polls since it was elected two years ago. Part of the reason it was elected was because a significant proportion of the community (albeit, sadly, a minority) was not ok with the further abuse of the human rights of vulnerable people who come to Australia seeking help. Hopefully this shows that they're not all willing to put up with the perpetrators of these kind of abuses no matter what the perpetrator's political stripes might be.

The character assassination of the brush turkey

Who, me?

Sheer fucking journalistic brilliance. In this article, Fairfax’s John Huxley equates bush turkeys (a.k.a. brush turkeys) with cane toads, and damage to a hypothetical pensioner’s chrysanthemums by a turkey with the broad-scale environmental devastation cause by cane toads.

Oh, and I've been informed by the intrepid Huxley- after living in Brisbane for nigh on 8 years, encountering a great number of bush turkeys myself and never once realising- that they’re ‘noisy’. Funny, because it was several years before I ever heard a turkey make a noise, and that was when one visiting our back balcony was surprised by our cat, Feifei, and made a soft booming noise in its throat when it realised the creature from which it had been fleeing was in fact significantly smaller than itself. Huxley also implies, through poor writing rather than malign intention, that bush turkeys are responsible for the displacement of small songbirds- a preposterous notion given that they fill entirely different ecological niches.

The article may be tongue-in-cheek in some sections, but it is an absolute travesty to compare a perfectly harmless native bird to the poisonous destroyer of native fauna that is the cane toad. The last thing we need is anyone cultivating such a perception among the general public and leading the usual nut jobs (possum killers, crow-poisoners et al.) to feel justified in killing bush turkeys.

Outrage from alcohol industry as Rudd implements recycling scheme

Oh nooooooo! Not a whole extra $3 on an entire CARTON of beer to fund a national recycling scheme! That's a whole 14c per can! I won't be able to afford to drink 24 cans of beer a night any more if I have to pay 14c more per can! That's a whole $23 a week that Kevin Rudd is trying to slug me :-o Whatever will we dooo? I'm so outraged!!

[Don't mind me, I'm just trying on the response that the alcoholic beverages industry with the aid of the Courier Mail's "Recycling rebate under fire as cost of alcohol to rise" article is pathetically attempting to provoke].

Checking in

Oh wow. Two more weeks without a post. What a disgrace. I even have a half-finished one somewhere that I should probably put up before it becomes irrelevant!

Anyway, a small update:



I have no idea how small, I forgot to ask. I don't even know if they measure how long the baby is at this stage (18 weeks). Anyway, we confirmed 'it' is a 'he', as expected based off what we saw at the 13w scan. Gam Jr it is :)

We also have a house, and many photos of the house, but I have been too busy/lazy/tired to put them up. We had fun last weekend, which was the first of many on which we will attempt to tackle the massive noxious weed problem that the previous owners have left us with... all except one truly massive 10-15m high noxious weed (chinese elm/celtis), which we will leave to a professional. Also had a plumber out today to give us a quote on having the bathroom renovated- the need for which will be revealed in the photos soon to be posted. God knows whether we can actually afford it, but that's the main thing determining how soon we can move in. It's such a nice house though... nothing fancy (first home buyers can't afford fancy) but it's in a nice neighbourhood and it's just nice to spend time there... even if we can't live there yet. It even comes with possums (not in the roof, thankfully).

The media's war on Iran, terror.

Very interesting, this item from the Associated Press that I found on the New York Times website. I saw the headline above and thought "Funny, it wouldn't have been a headline like that if it had occurred in a Western country". So I read the article. Five senior Iranian military figures were killed along with fifteen other people in a terrorist attack carried out by a suicide bomber. Except it wasn't a terrorist attack, apparently. Not once do any of the words 'terror', 'terrorist' or 'terrorism' appear in the entire article. The group thought most likely to be responsible is a 'militant group', not a bunch of terrorists.

It's funny how the language used by the media changes according to who the victim of a particular kind of attack happens to be.

Privacy Act changes allow missed bill payments to tarnish credit records.

From the Courier Mail:

ANYONE missing just one utility bill or credit card repayment could have a black mark lodged on their credit rating under sweeping proposals to give banks carte blanche to view every aspect of our financial affairs.

Under the suggested changes to the Privacy Act announced yesterday, lenders could dig into accounts with other institutions, relationships with utility companies, when accounts are opened and closed, and, crucially, check the repayment history of all accounts going back two years.

Yesterday a little old lady who lived a block or so away from me rang our doorbell- our credit card statements had been placed in her mailbox.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a printed statement for our online savings account with AMP as proof of our savings record so the bank could approve us for finance on our new home. It never arrived- AMP kindly sent me another one without charging the $12 (!) it cost to send the first one. Thankfully that one got to us ok.

We regularly get mail in ours that is addressed to other people who don't even live close to our place- we either put these back in the post or walk to put them in the person's mail box. On more than one occasion I have received a late notice for a bill that went unpaid because it never arrived.

How much of our stuff goes missing because it arrives in someone else's mail and they can't be bothered to re-post or deliver it? I don't blame them, I blame Australia Post, who are doing a bloody awful job. But my credit record shouldn't be tarnished because of someone else's failure to do their job. I shouldn't have to ring utility providers 'just in case' I might have a bill due that has been misdirected by Australia Post, and I certainly shouldn't have a black mark against my name for something that is evidently not my fault. Nor should anyone. I really doubt the new privacy legislation makes any provision for the havoc potentially to be wrought upon peoples' credit records by Australia Post's shithouse service.