Oh man. What a productive weekend!

We did some shopping yesterday prior to going over to gypocalypse‘s place and then the Bavarian for dinner. Sadly we had to leave at about 9:30 since I was starting work at 5am today (yes, it’s bullshit. Fortunately they’re going to be changing it, but apparently it’s taking a while for some reason). At least I was working from home anyway.

Also, I didn’t actually do too much working as such. 😛 It was pretty quiet so I spent the time tweaking my Magic decks and ordered some new cards (I’m currently completely obsessed with the Innistrad block of cards — think really grim dark gothic horror. So awesome).

At the start of the shift I was definitely thinking I’d need to take a nap after I’d finished, but apparently I got a second wind (and possibly third and fourth). We went to Bunnings, bought a nice powerful drill (we’d tried with our little one and it just didn’t have enough grunt to drill the screws into the wood) and some other bits and pieces, then wall-mounted the dryer and then proceeded to re-mount the cupboard that we’d taken off the wall in order to put the dryer on it. I actually ended up using several pieces of wood left over from when we turned the garage back from an office into a garage (they’re still sitting in what is going to become the games room, since the council won’t take building waste as part of the regular clean-ups).

kungfupolarbear was busy as well, she helped with the manoeuvring of the dryer up onto the mount, made an EPIC amount of gumbo, a slow-cooked beef stew, and also tidied up the hedge out the front.

It’s now 10:19pm and I have absolutely no idea how I’m still awake. I have tomorrow off due to working today, so I plan on playing video games mostly. 😛

Also, I decided to buy the books that Game of Thrones is based off (A Song of Fire and Ice), mostly because I can’t be bothered watching it and I prefer reading. HOLY SHIT IT’S SO GOOD! Wow. I’ve been reading it on the train to and from work, which is a good two hours solid of reading per day, so I’m ploughing through the first book. Man. I’m vaguely annoyed that I’d never read them up until now!

…I should probably stop typing and go to bed now.

PS: Have I mentioned how much I love our new house? Because it’s really really a lot. Just being able to do all these things to it as we want. So good!

We had our housewarming today, and it was fantastic. It wasn’t huge, there were nine of us all together, but it was just so nice being able to actually have people over again. We had a barbecue for lunch then played about three hours of Cards Against Humanity, everyone was impressed with the house, and we got $150 worth of Bunnings gift cards as housewarming gifts!

YOU GUYS, WE CAN ACTUALLY INVITE PEOPLE OVER TO OUR HOUSE. It’s so good! 😀

We went out to get some stuff at the shops, came back to the house and as I was opening up the garage I realised the air had that wonderful earthy smell you only get out in the country. It’s absolutely glorious here, still totally quiet at night, and the air is crisp and clean.

We’re making pretty good progress towards getting everything unpacked, and it actually looks like a house that we live in, as opposed to a house filled with boxes and crap.

Eeeee!

We’re all moved in! \o/

We moved on Tuesday last week (the 28th), and it was surprisingly pain-free. The removalists we used were a pair of exceedingly Kiwi guys, who were “choice”, “broo”, and “cuz”-ing all over the place, it was hilarious. They’d done moves from our building before and knew how utterly absurd the layout was, and the removalist company suggested we get a guy in a ute as well so we could just load up the ute and ferry it out to the truck.

All three guys were really nice, and we got the moving-out part done in only three and a half hours. The moving in at the other end was obvious even faster, because they pulled right up into the driveway and just went straight in.

We’ve not unpacked everything yet, but we’re getting there. The house is great, and the whole area is dead quiet at night, and even during the day there’s not much noise. It hasn’t sunken in yet that this is our house, and that we don’t have to move again in a year or whatever. Not sure when exactly that’s going to hit, heh.

Unfortunately we’re still having to deal with the old real estate, bunch of arseholes that they are, as we’re waiting for them to pull their damn finger out and do the final inspection so we can get our bond back.

We’ve already done some stuff to the house… the garage had been converted into an office, so with the help of my parents and some power tools, we demolished the false wall (after having had to get a friend who is an electrician in to disconnect all the power from it) and pulled up the carpet and converted it back into a garage. The wall had been massively over-engineered, there were far too many screws and bits in for what it was.

The previous owners don’t seem to have taken too much care with some of the plumbing, and there were some leaks under the sink in both the kitchen and the bathroom which I’ve managed to fix with some teflon tape. There’s a structure out the back that we’re going to use as a games room, where I’ll be able to actually have space to lay out my miniatures to paint them, but currently it’s filled with the detritus from the false wall in the garage.

We’ve also spent a horrifying amount of money at both Bunnings and Ikea, but at least it’s a once-off thing and the stuff we bought will last us for years.

So in short, YAY HOUSE!

The settlement is booked for this Wednesday at 3pm! \o/

The bank continued their streak of being bloody useless, this time they managed to misread the title transfer document that had been sent. One of the seller’s names is “Louise”, and the bank came back saying that they’d need a new document because they thought it’d be written “Louisc”. It looks like what had happened was that they didn’t actually bother to view the PDF at full-size, because both kungfupolarbear and our mortgage broker zoomed it into 100% and it clearly said “Louise”. Unbelievable.

ANYWAY. That’s all past us now! We’re going to pick up the keys on Saturday and go over there and generally inspect things. The previous owner had converted the garage into an office and had put carpet and false walls up and such. That would have been fine and we’d have been able to pull it all down ourselves except that it turns out the false wall that was put up in behind of the garage door actually has a bunch of power points on the other side of it, so we’re going to need to get an electrician in to disconnect all that first.

In the grand scheme of things it’s really not a major bother though.

\o/

So we’ve now paid the stamp duty (all $16,435 of it, ouch) and pretty much everything is all set for the final settlement, which is on Monday the 13th of this month.

YOU GUYS, WE’RE GOING TO OWN OUR OWN HOUSE!

I can’t emphasise how much we’re looking forward to NOT LIVING IN THIS GODDAMN AREA ANYMORE, holy shit. We’re booked in with the removalists for the 28th of this month, which is a Tuesday. kungfupolarbear is taking the 27th, 28th, and 29th off work, and I’m taking the whole week off, mostly because I have a heap of annual leave and hey, why not!

The move from here is going to be horrible, given how incredibly idiotically it’s laid out, but it ought to be far faster at the other end. We’re planning on giving this current place only the most cursory of cleans because fuck the current real estate, and whatever we get back from our bond we’ll just take as a bonus.

To sum up: EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!