Now doing all these so retrospectively but thought it worthwhile for us to review exactly what can be done in a month! It feels so slow when you are doing or having things done but looking back there was a fair amount of progress in the month of August.
We had handover on June 2nd, and all these photos below and details are from August so really 2-3 months in at that stage. (Eeek has it been that long!! it's November when I write this and it scares me... ok ok so there is a lot going on!)
Onto the photos for the pic piggies!
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| Lampshade as I was sick of looking at this... |
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| The ugly 'hat' that is on all the lights by default. Better than just a plain batten but not by much! |
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| Tada! A quick fix solution. |
I know we could have gotten something more suitable but I'm happy with this for now. Saves me from having to look at that ugly fitting... at least in the bedroom. The rest of the house still has the battens...
We bought a lovely railway style clock - designed for outdoors! - for the hallway area. We had to go to a specific Bunnings as not all Bunnings stocked them. But we had seen it there before handover and it wasn't the right time to buy it. And then of course we couldn't find it again. This one was from the Alexandria store.
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| Railway clock installed (excuse the mess of towels which are there for the dogs. |
The other exciting thing that happened in August is that we got our driveway. The difference it made was HUGE. It meant a lot less sand in the house and just made the place a lot more pleasant.
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| prep work |
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| cute little Bobcat! |
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| I was happy to leave the house with the anticipation that things would be so much better soon! |
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| The next day the formwork started. Love the drainage grate! |
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| Sloped formwork... |
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| Before the concrete pour |
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| And After! (with some special photo bomb visitors) |
The bin is in the way to make sure people didn't 'accidently' drive onto the driveway.
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| What a view from our doorstep! |
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| And the lovely drain in front of the garage |
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| A nice clean photo of the driveway after being poured |
We also set up some of the odd furniture we have as well as some lovely furniture which friends of ours gave to us!
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| Cubes from G&J act as divider |
We also got a few more light fittings!
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| Station lights for the courtyard |
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| Pottery barn inspired pendant lights for the ktichen |
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| Courtyard lights |
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| Different angles of the Pottery Barn inspired lights |
The lights were purchased for around $50 per light fitting from Aliexpress. They work well and didn't seem problematic to install. You'll see the lights are fitted in the photo with the vintage style lights which were 9W LEDs... but they were too glarey and the globes got moved to be in the outdoor station lights instead. We installed LED globes from IKEA instead for the kitchen pendants which were the pearl translucent style ones which weren't as glarey.
Lights at night for the front of the house... we just went undereave LED downlights. We got our downlights from Schnapp.com.au and they seem to be fine!
And to test things out we had a downpour that overflowed all the gutters. Got us worried until we realised this was a rare occasion with this much rain and that it is acceptable.
I also did some IKEA furniture putting together. Whilst looking for a shoe rack to go into the cupboards (cloak cupboard and the bedroom WIR) I came across the Lack TV bench. At $20 it works well (and is cheaper!) than a lot of the shoe rack options.
IKEA also yielded some lovely pots (found in the kitchen section) for mini herb gardens... I like the whole black and white theme so these pots work well. In general I think green plants with white pots look the goods!
In order to keep the dogs from 'climbing' the mountain of bricks which were left in the courtyard and whilst we're trying things out we laid out some bricks in the courtyard. This pattern was a bit brain straining to put down but we did some of it in this herringbone pattern:
Really still love the courtyard... in the photo below you can see the pile of bricks reducing in size. I think I took this photo though as my dog is sitting on a chair...
And we started to put my standing desk together in the study. Yes again using IKEA bits. The benchtop still needs to be taller but we'll put a 6cm timber frame between the cupboard and benchtop to get the height I need.
OK that was August. I'll be doing a Sept and Oct post soon too. Another similar one with a dump of photos and then some commentary.
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