Progress

Well, if you read the last post, you heard that we mowed the grass at our new house for the first time this past weekend. Before we could mow, we had to assemble the lawnmower--which we did in the living room with not one tool.

Here's a picture of Paul--which you really need a soundbyte to fully appreciate--you would have thought it was a new Ferrari with the revving noises he was making, as he pretended to contain it's fury in the living room...


And here's a picture of me mowing the front garden [yard]. It's really just a small patch of grass--currently with an evergreen bush of some sort in the middle of it.
That will be dug up this weekend to [hopefully] make way for a Rose Bush from Paul's mom's garden and some lavender.



Yes, that orange cord over my shoulder is my technique for avoiding mowing back over the power cord! :)
I was very relieved to finally get the yard cut. I was sure that by neglecting it for a few weeks that we'd start off on the wrong foot with the neighbours. So far, no complaints! But, in fairness, we've only met one neighbour. We're not in Texas--so far, no welcome wagon...

The back garden [yard] is monumentally bigger than the front, so that actually took us a little bit of time to complete.

We may have already upset the eco-system of our back garden [yard], as Paul mowed over a frog near the greenhouse at back of the garden. Thankfully, he wasn't chopped into little froggy pieces or officially dead at the scene--from what I could tell, just a bit nicked on one of his little legs. I'll have to give you an update later--fingers crossed that he wasn't fatally wounded. I guess I'll find out tomorrow when I got back over there!
...In Paul's defense, the little hopper must not be too sharp to begin with, if he didn't move as the large noisy mower came near him. Maybe frogs are deaf? "Write your opinion on the back of a £20 note and mail it to me"...Prize for the first person to write a blog comment that tells what the phrase in quotes is a reference to...

Later.

The Destruction Begins

By the time we got all of the wallpaper down that we were going to strip, it was time for the experts to come in. Here's a picture of Paul standing in the room that used to be the kitchen. The builders [construction workers] have stripped out the bathroom and kitchen fixtures down to the bare walls and pipes. They've also started ripping up the patio paving stones and concrete underlay with a jackhammer. It's all very exciting!

We had our first official construction meeting on Friday morning where we answered final questions like, how large a patio door do we want? and if the ceiling is this high, is that OK? We still have a long way to go, but we're definitely off and running.

Inspired by the progress on the house, on Saturday, we bought the tiles for the floor and wall in the bathroom. We'd looked a few places and came across some that were more than suitable--and on sale! Sadly, they didn't have enough of the floor tiles for us to do the kitchen and the bathroom in the same tiles, but, oh well.

Eager to get them back to the house, we loaded up the Golf and managed not to tear out the suspension of the car on the way home...

Not to be outdone inside the house, we assembled and inaugurated the lawnmower and strimmer [weed eater]. Unlike my last lawnmower/weed-eater, these are electric. So you must take extra care to make sure you don't cut the power cord as you mow/weed-eat. We'll see how long it takes me to have to replace the cord...but at least I don't have to transport petrol [gasoline] in my car! Tradeoffs, I guess.

The yard work was completed just in the nick of time, too. Sunday and Monday were rainy days!

Here is another picture of the "progress" of the patio. It needed to be taken up because it was causing damp in the walls of the dining room and kitchen across the back of the house [UK house technology]. It will be re-laid at a level to avoid more damp, but still give us a nice patio for BBQs!



I must give a shout out to my blog goddess, Hachie Gal--who gave me a crash course in how to add more pictures and a blog counter--to see how many people visit the blog! You are my Hero!

The Joy of Home Ownership

It's official. Paul and I are homeowners [again]. We've been living as renters for over 3 years now, and it sure has been convenient to ring the landlord when something isn't quite right at the house. Not that we've had too many issue to call the landlord about...but, you get the idea.

We haven't moved in yet--that will be another 6 weeks or so--after we knock down a wall, rebuild the kitchen and the bathroom and all the demolition that that entails. We don't do anything the simple way!

It only took us 3 days to experience the full joy of homeownership.

Incident #1: Cyn gets a little too brutal with that pesky lock on the back door and the key breaks off in the lock. Result: We can't get into our own garage from the house. Oops! Resolution: Paul drilled out the lock and was able to unlock it! Whew!

Incident #2: After 2 days of flushing toilets, filling buckets and generally "normal" use of the taps [faucets].. the water stops coming out of the taps when you turn them on.. Hmmm...A brief conversation with the former homeowner helps us discover that we have created an air lock in the water system. It's a fairly complicated system, by Texas standards--but we'll be simplifying that with the upcoming alterations to the house. Resolution: Purchase one standard issue garden hose [more on that later], attach one end to the outdoor tap [faucet], take the other end up into the loft [attic] and put it in the "out" pipes in the cold water tank. Turn on the outside tap, and it flushes out the air lock...Viola!

So, now that we have running water again and can actually open the door to the garage, all is well at the new house.

In addition to fixing the things that we managed to break ourselves, we are trying to remove some of the decorating ideas of the former owners [more on what we've found in a later post]. We've been busily stripping wallpaper from almost every room in preparation for putting our own design stamp on the place. We've also been preparing for when the builders descend on the place to tear it up and put it back together.

So, as a colleague so eloquently put it, you cannot have creation without destruction. So, that's what we're doing, creating our new home.

And we hope to fill it with friends and family and laughter as soon as we can!

We look forward to scheduling your visit...and in this place, there's room for you to bring the kids!

Here are a few pictures of our weekend, picnicing in the yard and stripping wallpaper!