I'm really enjoying the longer drive to work. I love being able to drive on roads that have more than 60km speed limits. It's actually only added ten to fifteen minutes to my drive since there is less traffic. Daniel's still adjusting and trying to work out the best route, it seems like avoiding Hale street at all costs is the best bet at this stage.
We've been trying to get used to coming home and staying home. We've always been spoiled in that we lived very close to shopping centres, takeaway and all forms of services. We are trying to keep our trips 'into town' to a minimum and grouping tasks together a lot more. It was not uncommon for me to pop into Woolies 3 or 4 times a week when we lived at Mitchelton or Enoggera. We've also started keeping a petrol canister filled as backup since we run out of petrol faster than we used to.
We had a bigger fridge delivered last week, so it's going to make the task of doing a weekly (or less hopefully) grocery shop much simpler. We've been living out of a 3/4 sized fridge for the last few years, it's teeny tiny but it's served us well. We are absolutely loving the fridge. It has everything so much colder than we are used to, and it's shiny silverness fits in so well in the kitchen.
Here's the before and after:
We finally built our bed on the weekend after sleeping on the mattress for 2 weeks. It was kind of nice sleeping on the floor, but it was time to become civilised again.
We've got a list about a mile long of things to do. We've started looking at different aggregate colour options for our driveway. Most people out here seem to have bitumen driveways, but we just aren't most people. Hopefully in the next month or two Daniel's brother will come to stay with us and he will concrete our driveway, porch and patio. The driveway and porch will be exposed aggregate The patio will be plain concrete because we might eventually either tile it or add decking.
We also need to get the bobcat guy back to do some leveling and spread some top soil around. It's probably going to be the best option for us to do a retaining wall down one side of the house because the cut for the house was just so deep. Once we do all of this we can at least get started on creating some sort of lawn. Ultimately we would like to lay some turf around the immediate area, but it might be a while before we can do that.
As well as the outside of the house we have a lot of plans inside too. We are starting to get a few companies out to do quotes for blinds, curtains and shutters. We'll be looking into getting shutters put into the cut out between the activity room and living room as well as the bay window in our room. It would be really good to get a quote for the folding doors between the media and study too, but for now it's just going to stay as one big room.
One thing's for sure, nothing makes you feel more like rushing out and buying massive amounts of furniture than moving into a big house. The living and dining room is feeling very empty at the moment, and it will be for quite a while. I keep having to remind myself that the plan is to live here for a long time, so it doesn't matter if it takes us a while to find our feet and do everything the way we want to. Until then, we are absolutely loving hanging out in the media room on the new couch. We are super glad we got data cabling put in everywhere. We are loving the heat of the kitchen. We love actually having spare spots in the kitchen cupboards. We love the giant bathtub. We love the colour we chose for the walls, it's exactly what we wanted. We love that we finally did it. We finally have a house!
Everyone's been asking for more pictures, but to be honest things aren't very well setup yet. So here's some pictures of the chaos.
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| Living room, it's now empty and awaiting a new set of couches. |
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| Mid unpacking, let's not lie or pretend that it really looks any cleaner or more organised right now. |
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| 3 boxes filled to the brim with couch |
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| I don't have a picture of ours yet, but we have the black version of this in the media room, we've got it all pushed together like a giant bed. Love! |
It's all coming together Lauren! It is so nice to finally be in your house isn't it!! Interesting isn't it how your food habits change, we were living in Hamilton and there was a woolies at the end of the street and Coles 2 streets over and a heap of restaurants, it would be nothing for us to eat out once or twice a week and I would go to Coles nearly every day or every second day as I could never decide in the morning what I might feel like eating that night. Even though there is a shopping centre 2 minutes down the road now we are much more organized these days, and I'm loving it! Your new fridge looks awesome!! very jealous! Thanks for posting the photos, it's always tough when things aren't as you would like them to be. The couch looks really compfy!
ReplyDeleteThanks Mel! It's hard to believe we are really at this point, even after a few weeks in the house.
DeleteI think we still have a long way to go with changing our grocery and dinner habits. It's midweek and we've already run out of food. Woops!
It'll be a while before everything looks how we want it to, but we're on our way.
The couch is amazing, I love it. It was our answer to the media couches with the drink holders, we weren't too keen on them and this seemed like a better option. My niece and nephew loved it, they were climbing all over it immediately!