Just to give you a quick idea of how much our friends helped us out in the yard over the course of a single day one weekend prior to us moving in- a before and after shot.
As it turned out, we never did get the bathroom done prior to moving in. For such a teeny-tiny bathroom (roughly 4-5sqm, not the 6 we'd originally thought), it is going to be very, very expensive. Partly due to the fact that the walls are made of asbestos, but also due to the fact that we'll need roughly 5 different flavours of tradie (builder/plumber/tiler/waterproofer/electrician) to complete the job, all wanting their cut (and knowing we need them more than they need us...). We're still going to have it done, but we're going to be very sore in the hip pocket afterwards... and given all the other things that have needed doing to this house that have wound up costing more than anticipated (e.g. termite control- budget $2000, reality $4700!!!) we aren't exactly rushing headlong into it.
Meanwhile, here are some pictures of the stuff we have had done or done ourselves... And when I say 'ourselves' I mean mostly Gam. Chances are I was comatose in bed or on a beanbag at the time any actual work was being done (we do have a couch now but I have yet to sleep on it!).
Moving some chairs and bikes over in 'Veronica' before we moved in.
This was taken on the Saturday of the week we settled- the day Gam and I first sold our soul to Bunnings and bought some nice garden tools- the little bits of shrubby weeds are just the 'test patch' we did before we put in our best effort the next day... Little did we know at the time that when budgeting for buying a house you should create an entire 'Bunnings Budget'- to date we've spent almost as much at Bunnings as we've spent furnishing the interior of the house...
I made sure we also bought safety equipment. Gam would seriously use a chainsaw bare-faced and bare-footed if I didn't nag him into using safety gear! The gloves- invaluable, it has turned out- were mostly for protection against prickles and ants.
The results of our first weekend's hard work in the backyard. It's hard to believe now, but initially we thought that most of the work to be done on this house would be in the horrendously weedy and overgrown backyard. Boy were we naive.
The small piles of brush from the miserly couple of metres we managed to clear between us. Gam worked on clearing the area at the back fence (just to the right of the bamboo in the photo), while I worked on the area to the left seen in the previous photo.
Gam's cleared area- he managed to uncover a portion of the back fence!
My cleared area... I was so proud! We now have a compost/mulch heap located just behind that peach tree.
The results of our first weekend's hard yakka laying scattered on the lawn (if it really deserves to be called a lawn).
One of many resident bluetongue lizards. This one lives in a hole just to the right of where he is located in the picture, between the wooden retaining wall and the remains of the old concrete retaining wall. I figured s/he would enjoy some pear.
I was right. The yard is so barren I bet s/he hadn't had anything as nice as a pear core in a long time.
Super cute. Even a big stripey skink came along and tucked into the pear core not long afterward.
Speaking of cute, our little friends were still in residence (and are to this day).
Our first glimpse of a cute little face!
And an adorable pink nose... awww. Despite the bad press possums get, our two are lovely. They've probably tramped across the roof at night (noisy!) on average once a week since we moved in, but have really been no trouble at all. Well, except for some possum pee of indeterminate origin on one of the balcony railings that Gam accidentally put his hand in just recently, but there's no saying that one of our possums is guilty of that particular misdemeanour...
And this picture was taken the second weekend after settlement, when our friends Erin & Luke, Victor & Amelia and Danny & Jaye turned up to lend a hand in the yard.
That was the weekend we realised there was actually a house located at the rear of our property... Up til then it was easy to believe it was all a jungle of weeds and bamboo!
And once the large number of cubic metres of weeds was cleared away with our friends' help, the full horror of our fence was unveiled...
Sigh... more money to spend!!! This one could actually be quite costly because the yard of the house it borders is actually quite a lot lower (there's a retaining wall on their side) and there may be structural issues complicating any replacement of the fence. Frankly, I'm scared to find out, but I've promised my mum I'll get quotes (she's terrified that her beloved grandchild-to-be will toddle off and go plummeting over the edge).
Our nemesis, the celtis- aka chinese elm. And that bamboo. Little did we realise that our real nemesis was the idiots who'd let the celtis (a declared weed) grow so high and so large in the first place. They are responsible for so much more needless crap we've had to deal with that it's frankly hard not to hate them (not the vendors, who were just lazy and apathetic, but the idiotic vandals who owned the place before them... more rants on that later). Anyway, luckily one of our neighbours is not only very nice, he's a qualified aborist!
On this side lives an old (Irish?) guy named Oliver, plus his wife (who we haven't met) and cute dog (an elderly spaniel who makes it his business to 'patrol' the perimeter of their yard, nose to the ground). Oliver seems very nice. He told us that this fence was there when he moved in 30 years ago and that a couple of years ago the owners of our place talked with him about having it replaced. He agreed, but they then changed their minds and planted a row of hibiscus down in the patio area and decided that would do in lieu of a proper fence. No doubt they let the weeds grow up against it for the same reason, the idiots- the weeds were pretty much the only thing holding up the fence.
The incinerator. Hard to recognise this spot from the previous picture that featured the incinerator, taken when the garden was in its original state.
That celtis again. Boy were we ever keen for that to be put to death.
Just one day and our backyard was totally blitzed by our friends... astounding compared with the puny couple of metres Gam and I had managed to clear by ourselves the previous week. Still in awe!
Piles of crap for mulching. Gam hired a largish mulcher and he, Luke and Danny put our previous weekend's effort through the machine, as well as a good chunk of that day's hackings. The mulcher wasn't very good with large quantities of bamboo, though.
We decided to leave the rest and get our arborist neighbour to mulch it in his big truck when we got him to do the tree- he and his boys not only did that once we had them come around shortly after moving in, they picked up even the tiny bits of cuttings and left the yard incredibly neat. If anyone in Brisbane needs a good arborist let us know and we'll happily recommend him! He gave us mates-rates too... as a result the tree lopping and mulching was one of the few things that we came out on under-budget. Bonus!
Gam noticed these stickers in one of the kitchen cupboards...
The day we had the rangehood installed... We'd ripped all the tiles off the splashback. Gam discovered that they were glued on with Liquid Nails and could be prised off (easily) by hand, so it's doubtful they would have lasted long even if we hadn't decided to take them off.
We lived with this for a couple of weeks until we got our funky orange glass splashback installed...
We found a big Bosch fridge for sale at the same price as the white, slightly smaller Fisher Paykel we'd originally put in the budget. Win!
The second doorway from living area to kitchen has since been shrunk by a benchtop thingummy that we bought from the Oxley Secondhand store... to appear in a later photo.
A spindly little rosemary that had survived years of neglect on the back balcony at our unit got a second chance in the terrible excuse for soil (mostly building rubble and dry mulch) in the front garden. It looked pretty good and then completely carked it after a series of baking hot days. We then tried again with the big, robust rosemary from the front balcony of our unit, which lasted only marginally longer in the heat before starting to show symptoms of dying, so we moved it out to a little herb garden Gam created in the shade of the patio area near the kitchen. It recovered pretty quickly, thank goodness, but not before I'd taken some cuttings to sprout as insurance!
Two equally neglected basil plants that we stuck in the front garden (to be fair, we did stick a couple of spadefuls of composted manure in with everything we planted there to help them survive). One died after a couple of weeks, the other is going strong and is now roughly 3 times the size.
This is a good note to finish on, because I am simply too tired to post any more. This is what our water looked like when we moved in! Thanks to the awful corroded galvanised piping. It tasted as bad as it looked, so we resorted to drinking 'plastic water', i.e. buying 10-15L containers of 'spring water'. If anything they were just as bad- the water from those had a strong petrochemical smell from the plastic (like the bottle in the photo) they used to store it. How anyone drinks that crap is beyond me. We decided to try filtering the cruddy house-water instead, and have since had the plumbing replaced so it comes out clear.
More photos to come...
