Wednesday 26 July 2017

Week 2: Wednesday 19 July - water tank

Storms & rain over the weekend of 15 & 16 July made for a muddy & treacherous building site.  Not easily daunted, the intrepid painters put in a few hours on the fences regardless.  Mud makes for heavy boots!
 




More fence works to be done, but a good interim step

The water tank was due in on Monday 17/9, but had to be delayed a couple of days as the site was inaccessible.  However, a bit of winter sunshine dried it out enough, & after a huge pile of white clay was removed the 22,000 litre tank was installed. 


View from our neighbour's balcony, digging the tank hole
 
One heck of a water tank
 
 
 

Week 1: Wednesday 12 July - retaining walls

Next step... retaining walls.

Josh from Enigma Outdoors is helping us with the landscaping.  Because of its gentle slope, we've had to cut into the back corner of our black about a metre.  All along the northern & western fences, we're putting a retaining wall about 1 metre in from the fence line.  Eventually, it will be our productive garden.... with some colour too.  Perhaps bougainvillea?


Wednesday 19 July 2017

Week 1: Monday 10 July 2017 - Breaking Ground

It starts!

Pad excavated.... mesh retaining fence in place.... roll on handover day!

Weekend prior to breaking ground

WEEKEND of 8 & 9 JULY 2017

Its been 8 months in the planning from moving out of Coorparoo to breaking ground at Redland Bay.

Building a home is not for the faint-hearted, and after all the effort involved in making Orion St look its best to be sold, I'm not sure I can muster the energy required for building.  House plans have been revised over & over; wish-lists trimmed; quotes and budgets and contracts studied & sweated over.  And finally a start date - Monday 10 July 2017


Ray taking the Victa for a walk. (Note all the different styles of fence.)
 
Though we've visited our patch of dirt many times for mowing purposes, the weekend before start date had us working together on long-term preparations.  That felt so good.

First, to tackle the existing fences!  As the last home to build on our side of the street, we have fences of all types, size & heights facing our block.  One day they won't be visible, as we plan vegetation will hide most of them; but in the meantime, we plan on making it somewhat uniform back there.  Advice is to go dark to make the fences disappear, so that's what we're doing.



Western fence - before & after Gerni
 
After painting

The western fence was bare Besser blocks.  With power provided by John, our lovely neighbour, Ray gernied it clean on Saturday & on Sunday we painted in Dulux "Monument".  The plan is to paint the rendered fence on the northern border the same, & install a Monument colorbond panel fence in front of the other timber/panelled fences in the back corner. 

Then we can start working on greening it up. 

Sunday 16 July 2017

Selling up & finding a place for our forever home

Good bye Coorparoo.... anticipation of a new home in Redlands... and in the interim, we relish the opportunity to stay at Erin & Chris's home in Camp Hill.

From this:
 

The decision to sell up the too big, high-set home with pool in Coorparoo was easy.  Getting it ready to sell wasn't.  But after much toil, sweat & tears, and help from many family & friends - in particular Erin & Chris - it went onto the market on 1 October 2016 and was under contract astonishing quickly.  We spent our last night at Orion St on 14 November with settlement of the sale on 16 November. 


















We stumbled upon our future home-site at Redland Bay by accident.  Its purchase seemed to be serendipitous....as if it was always meant to be.



What we will wake up to in the future.... minus the Heisig sign, plus a lovely garden (we hope)!