Are we in yet?

The short answer is no.  The long answer is that we've achieved plenty in the couple of weeks since we finally took possession of our new home, but we're still waiting for the concrete driveway to go down so that we can move in.  Anyone who has lived in Melbourne for the last few weeks will be able to attest that the drought is well and truly over (take that global warming!) and the rains have certainly been frequent.  This has unfortunately resulted in our concreter being delayed in other jobs leading up to ours and ours being pushed back.  Fingers crossed the weather holds out for a couple of days so that he can start the job on Friday!!!

But stepping back in time ever so slightly to the night of our settlement.  Some of you who have been paying attention might remember that on the night the keys were handed over, they weren't keyed to our locks.  Thankfully the locksmith was able to fix that by the time I turned up on Tuesday morning with a carload of boxes from our storage unit.  I spent the majority of the week ferrying boxes to the new house and slowly filling the rooms with our collection of possessions that we haven't seen for nearly 12 months.  A little bit of help from Sare and my sister on ANZAC day and a lot of help from my old man on Friday and Saturday (he's the ultimate double threat: owns a ute and knows how to tie a trucker's knot!) we managed to completely clear the unit and moved quite a bit of furniture into the house.  I figure this has saved us a heap of effort when we finally get to moving day, as we'll now only have to worry about relocating from our apartment!

In amongst the moving we achieved, I was even able to arrange for a few tradies to come in and provide some quotes on curtains, blinds and shutters.  To make the place seem a little bit like a home, I even bought a letterbox from Buggins (otherwise known as the place whose name I refuse to utter...) and placed it out the front for our mail to be delivered to.

Of course, as these things have a habit of turning into, not everything was as smooth and easy.  Firstly the antenna installation guy was unable to install our antenna on the Friday as it had been raining all night and the roof was too wet for him to climb up on.  Fair call.  Of course, he wasn't able to come out that afternoon, so arranged to come out on Monday morning instead.  Dad kindly offered to go out and wait for him, as I wasn't going to be able to extend my hols any longer, but the installer never turned up.  The office had made a mistake and scheduled him for the afternoon instead.  No good.  The next arranged time was bucketing rain (are you paying attention Tim Flannery?) and we're now currently awaiting a clear day this weekend with fingers crossed.

The dishwasher was the next drama.  Turned up as promised, installer got straight to work only to later discover that the plumber had installed the cheapest possible tapware under the sink (apparently the premium tapware package only includes that stuff that's visible above a bench!?) and he was going to struggle to install it.  He did offer to come back on the Sunday and give it another go, and credit to him, he was there at 8:00 in the morning to try again.  He managed to install it, but found that he was unable to stop the tap dripping, which required a call to the builder on Monday morning to get fixed.  Easily achieved by Tuesday morning, so I can confirm we do now have a shiny new Asko in the kitchen begging for some dishes.  After having to handwash the damned things for the last twelve months, I'm very excited to start giving it a hammering!!

Our fences are still not up, as I'm waiting for one of our neighbours to sign the quote and return it to my fencer.  How hard could it be?  Apparently if you're a surgeon based in Sydney, it's pretty bloody hard.  I won't be going out of my way to help him out in a hurry in the future, that's for sure.

And the last fun thing going on?  Well, our first piece of mail to our new home was a letter from a solicitor acting on behalf of South East Water warning us that they were going to commence legal action against us to collect on 12 months worth of account charges after numerous attempts to collect them from us.  I could have given them a hint that if they'd actually checked to see if they had the right mailing address for us they would have found that it was an empty block of land without a letterbox (or water supply for that matter!)  A quick phone call has hopefully sorted that out, but there had better not be a default listed on my credit file.  To corrupt the quote from Jules in Pulp Fiction: "I will strike down upon (South East Water) with great vengeance and furious anger" if they have taken that step!

Actually, now that I look at it, most of the issues with the home since settlement have been caused by water in one way or another.  Strange coincidences?

All in all though, things are happening.  Telstra will hopefully connect the phone and internet, the antenna will go in, fences up, concreting down and we'll be moving into our beautiful new home in no time at all!  What's another couple of weeks right???