house – Page 2 – Wölfblag

Kitchen and kitchenless

23 September 20163 February 2018virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

We’re getting a new kitchen, and today the tradies came around to rip the old one out. Naturally we had to take some before and after photos (well, I suppose more “during” since the “after” will be the finished new kitchen).

The original kitchen seems to have been done as cheaply as possible. Nothing quite fit properly and there were several places where there was just a piece of particle board to fill a gap between a cupboard and the wall. The oven is new because the glass door on the old one (a Bunnings “Homebrand”-equivalent that was here when we bought the place) exploded all over the floor and Kristina last year. The fridge is also staying because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. I bought it over eight years ago and it’s never given us the slightest bit of trouble.

And then there’s now the total lack of kitchen! The space actually feels smaller without the kitchen in it.

Everything except the benchtops are being put in next week, as the they have to wait on the carpentry to be done so they can be properly measured and ordered.

Home improvement: Curtain Edition

27 March 201622 July 2017virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

We put up new curtains—and a new curtain rod—on the door leading out to the patio today, and it looks so much more cozy in here now (previously the window had on it the same horrible blue/grey straight-out-of-an-office vertical blinds that are still on the front window).

Kristina commented that it’s the first place she’s lived in that feels like an adult house, and it’s true… when renting you’re really just temporarily occupying someone else’s place for a period of time, whereas now we’re actually able to put our own mark on things and do what we want and it’s pretty great.

New roof

30 August 201522 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

We discovered earlier in the year that the roof on our house was fucked. We’d started to get leaks in the kitchen and dining area, had a guy come out to fix them, and it turned out that the tiles themselves were completely brittle and were cracking just from being walked on. D: The guy who came out said he’d never seen anything like it, and he guessed that it’d been a bad batch of tiles right from the beginning.

We ended up getting an entirely new metal roof, in dark grey, and it’s SO NICE. They put a layer of 50mm thick insulation directly underneath the metal so it’s not a standard “The rain comes and you can’t hear yourself think”-type of metal roof. I’m quite interested to see how much of a difference it makes in summer. It’s also steel rather than tin. It took four days and cost just shy of $14k, but there wasn’t really much of a choice. 🙁 At least the weather was nice while it was being done, anyway!

I took a couple of photos while it was being done.

And then the finished product!

We also went to Featherdale Wildlife Park for kungfupolarbear‘s birthday last week, to take photos and generally visit the animals which was pretty great as always.

New windows!

1 June 201522 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

No, not that Windows.

The windows in our house are very thin glass so the place gets really cold in winter, which is also not helped by the big front window being drafty. We decided to go all-out and get double-glazed windows. kungfupolarbear did a bunch of research and found a place called Christoffel that does both the manufacturing and installation.

Because double-glazed windows are $$$ we’re just doing them a couple of windows at a time. The guy came this morning to do the bedroom and bathroom, and my god they’re solid. The frames are pretty sizeable, and it’s incredible just how much noise is blocked out. Next up is going to be the big front window, and we’re going to work our way around the house bit by bit. \o/

We also made the front of the house, outside, look quite a bit nicer back in April as well, with some additional plants. The trees on either side of the window were $30 for the both of them, including the pot and everything, from a garage sale a couple of suburbs over!

Defeated

14 December 201422 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

Remember our path?

We admitted defeat today and pulled it all up. Despite there being a weed mat underneath it, and having sprayed the fuck out of it with a vinegar and salt solution (we didn’t want to use hardcore weed killers because Beanie putters around in the backyard and occasionally eats grass), it kept getting overrun with grass, and it was a giant pain in the goddamn arse to pull up. Especially since it’d just spring right back through in another spot.

R.I.P. path, 5th August 2013 – 14th December 2014. Heh.

In amongst all that, I also mowed the front and back lawn, did the whippersnippering, sealed up a hole in a roof tile, and cleaned the hot plate from the barbecue.

::faceplant::

One year to the day

28 May 201422 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

One year to the day since we moved into our house! It astonishes me that it’s gone by that quickly, it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s been a year.

This is the first place I’ll have lived in for more than a year since moving out of my parents’ place back in 2007. …actually that’s not quite true, now that I think about it. I was in the unit in Dee Why for probably 18 months or so, but that record will soon be eclipsed.

And kungfupolarbear informs me that this will be the first place she’s lived in for more than a year since 2002!

Eeeee!

Productivity!

26 May 201422 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

We had quite the productive weekend this weekend!

This is how the front garden looked back in December.

The two ground-cover plants in the front there ended up being a bit ugly, and the left-most one had all but died. I pulled them out, put a weed mat down (including cutting out slits to go around the daisies’ stems), and finally put to use the enormous bag of mulch we’d bought a number of months ago.

I am exceedingly pleased with my efforts. We also put up a shelf in the office to put all of kungfupolarbear‘s stuffed animals on, as they’d previously been sitting in amongst the books on the bookshelves. It looks rather snazzy.

Being able to just decide to do this stuff is SO GOOD!

Finally

18 May 201422 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

We bought a desk last weekend, and it was delivered on Friday. It’s gone into the back room, along with the chair we bought at the same time, and I FINALLY have a place to both paint my miniatures and to leave them out rather than having to pack them away. I’m unreasonably happy about that, as I’ve not had such a thing since I moved out of mum and dad’s house seven years ago!

I still have a few unfinished Imperial Guard but my current project is the Skaven side of the Warhammer starter game (the other side is the High Elves). They’re all glued together and base-coated, and I’ve just started to do the skin tones on the rank and file troops.

\o/

In other news, kungfupolarbear is going back to the US in July to visit her family, and wanted to get a camera that was good but smaller than our 7D+35mm combo. We’d been wondering what to get ourselves as a 5th wedding anniversary present, and I had the brilliant idea to get a Fuji X100S! It’s small and extremely well regarded, and should be arriving tomorrow! Very excite.

Sigh

9 December 20132 November 2019virtualwolfLiveJournal1 Comment

So Lily’s mother is now moving to Lismore. For those not familiar with Australian geography, it’s about a nine hour drive north of Sydney. I’m guessing they’ll be coming back down for school holidays (I haven’t asked yet as I don’t want to open that can of worms). I’m not particularly concerned though, as it’s all but guaranteed that they’ll be back permanently within a few months. The same thing happened when they moved out to Wagga Wagga a couple of years ago.

In better news, we had a company come out to finally get all the crap out of the back room (all the detritus from converting the garage back into an actual garage), so it’s actually usable as a normal room now! At the moment it’s just storage but we’re going to go look for a desk this weekend. Once that’s done, I will actually be able to paint my miniatures again!

We’re also going to invest in a treadmill, and a good one at that. Both of us want to get fitter, but kungfupolarbear can’t go walking outside if it’s smokey or polleny due to her asthma. We found one that we really like at Rebel Sport but it’s about 20cm too big for the space we had in mind, argh. We’re still deciding what we want to do there.

DIY, and some not so DIY

5 August 201322 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournal1 Comment

No posts for the last month, mostly because there’s not been anything of note happening. Yesterday, though… phew!

So, the path to the back room was pretty bloody awful.

kungfupolarbear had found a photo of a nice path design, so we decided to go to Bunnings and get the supplies for it. Long story short, about five hours and many sore muscles later, we have a new path!

As per pretty much everything so far, it took more work than expected.

And today we had an electrician come to replace the god-awful ceiling lights that were in the lounge room and kitchen, and to wire up some ethernet for us too. It’s so nice being able to put our own little touches on things now!

In other news, our annual bonus ended up being 12.5%! \o/ Of course, 45.6 cents in the dollar of that went to tax, but that was still a nice chunk of change. So I’ve ordered a NinjaBlock. Should be fun to play around with.