Best Laid Plans… Leah & Brendan‘s House & Wedding Weblog.

Apologies for the lack of updates, but not much has been happening out at our new house for the past few weeks so we haven’t been overly motivated to write a new entry.

I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos from the past 4 weeks or so. They’re a bit out of order because our camera is worse at remembering the date than I am.

We visited Featherbrook as usual on Saturday and were thrilled to find a team of tilers hard at work. I was excited just expecting to glimpse the cabinets though locked doors, so to have the house open and by the grace of the tilers somewhat accessible was a pleasant surprise. The tiles are looking great - it’s such a relief to see the colours and styles we chose based on small, disjointed samples coming together so well.

We also took a stroll down to the oval to check on progress. They’ve well an truly started laying the turf now, it looks about a third of the way covered. Ruby might be able to put the new grass to the test by next weekend!

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Last week, during our weekly sojourn out west we were extremely delighted to discover fresh paint adorning the interior and exterior of our budding home.

Leah was out there today and reports that the cabinet makers have been hard at work installing our kitchen, laundry and possibly bathrooms (can’t see though the frosted glass).  We’ll take a trip out with the camera tomorrow and snap some shots if we can get in.

I decided that it would be a wise investment to run some data cable and speaker wire while it was easy before the walls went in. Unfortunately, with the whole wedding thang’ we were only able to get out there on the Saturday which meant, of course, we were to slow to beat the plasterers and had to do things the hard way.

In good news though, my house is now “smart wired” or something - a buzz term sure to fetch an extra few grand at auction, assuming people are still using CAT5e if and when we move on.

We’ve been to busy to post till now, but Leah and I were Married last week on Sunday 15th at Kangaroo Grounds. We have every intention to live happily ever after.

Reserved for wedding photos - coming soon!

For now, 100 or so of Andrews best work can be viewed on his website.

So its one month (4 weeks) to the day we get married. Sarah and I spent the weekend in Adelaide with Dan and Helena, organising some wedding dress details, and getting all excited about multiple babies growing in Helena’s midsection! Twins! They were even kind enough to let Sarah and I sit in on their ultrasound - amazing stuff!

On the way home from the airport, B and I decided to show Sarah our house, and check to see if any progress had been made since the discovery of the mortar mix-up. And there has! The bricks for the rest of the house are going up (the brickies were even there at the time, on a Sunday?!), some bracing has been put in place in order to tear down the garage bricks to replace those with the correct mortar, insulation is in the wall cavities, windows and doors (glass are fitted) and piping for water and possibly gas has been installed. The gutters and roof tiles are there, ready to be fitted too!

So we haven’t updated in a bit, and quite a lot has been happening. So here are the last 6 weeks or so in a nutshell.

We trekked down to Phillip Island for the Pyramid Rock Festival over New Years. Dragged (quite willingly!) Eli and Jenny with us. Things that happened: 1- We all had a ball! 2- on day 2 of the festival Brendan fractured his sternum in the moshpit whie Mammal were playing. 3- Brendan pretended it didn’t hurt ‘too much’ so we stayed, without finding out it was actually broken. 4- Made friends with the guys in the tents next to us (so Brendan could use their make-shift urinal, and to facilitate the meeting of Jenny and Justin. 5- wore lots of glow sticks and drank lots of alcohol to bring in the new year. 6- drove home feeling a little sorry for ourselves (sunburn and hangovers) on new years day, and had our first shower in 4 days: best feeling ever.

10 days after the festival, we finally took Brendan ot the Docs, had some x-rays and discovered the reason he was still in so much pain. He’s recovering, but still can’t do much while trying to let it heal. He’s getting quite frustrated with it since he’s so active these days.

Our house building was on hold over the break so the builders could have a break too. Last week however, work started up again, so we went to check out how it was all going. Lo and behold we arrived to find our first building mishap. The colour we chose for the mortar in the brickwork was wrong. We had gone to pains to make sure they didn’t get this wrong, even driving 50kms to get photos of another house to give to the builder to demonstrate what we wanted, plus having the colour selections contract re-written to include a note: mortar yellow/sand colour not grey…. its grey. This message hadn’t made it to the brickie unfortunately. The builder was pretty good about it, gave us a couple of options; to dye the mortar and give us a guarantee on it, to etch out a section and put the right colour mortar in, or to tear it down and start over. So down will come our lovely garage (not really happy with the patch up options) and hopefully they’ll get cracking on building one in the right colour for us soon! There are heaps of houses going up in the estate already - but still on both sides of us are empty blocks. Lets hope they start building soon, so we don’t have to put up with builders next door for years to come!

The wedding plans are getting there - who would have thought there were so many things to organise!!?? We’ve both got so much on at the moment that its hard to focus on any one thing, but at least everything is moving forward Can’t wait to see how it all comes together in the end!

I’m working on some new results at the moment, now about halfway through the PhD (maybe…) trying to get a paper together (due on the day of the wedding just to make things even more hectic!) for a conference in France. Its a big one, only happens once every 5 years, and all the big guys in my field will be there - fingers crossed my paper gets finished in time and accepted!

So that wasn’t so quick.. but you get the picture - lots is happening!

Finally! The weather is actually acting its season and turned up the heat. Lets hope it’s a sign of things to come for all us Summer lovers.

Leah went past Featherbrook last week and discovered a frame had been erected on our slab. Keen to get out and see it for myself, we invited friends to come join us in Point Cook and christen the beginning of our homes construction with a couple of beers in the pleasant afternoon sun.  Dave and Keith came out to visit (and barely got lost on the way!) along with Milesy and Ruby.

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