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Walked out the front this morning to see a bold little Kookaburra just hanging out in one of the trees in our front yard. He was quite content to have his picture taken.

In the recent weekends, the Rural Fire Service have been doing quite a bit of hazard reduction around our area.

This weekend, there was quite a bit of work up in the Crosslands and Galston area. And the wind was blowing in just the right direction to cover Hornsby and Wahroonga this morning as I headed up to Hornsby to get my haircut. But it wasn’t too bad at home.

But we headed round to Cathy & Grant’s place in Normanhurst for lunch this arvo, and the smoke got quite thick as the arvo wore on, and ash started falling too. I certainly wasn’t enjoying it – and Howie enjoyed bagging me out about it too. And now back at home, the smoke has blanketed Westleigh pretty badly too. I think it’s even seeped into the clothes that have been out on the line.

This is mostly a new experience for me. Living in Toongabbie for the majority of my life was awesome, but it was never near any bush. So bushfire smoke and ash was few and far between. And while I adore living here now and being so close to bush, I’m definitely not enjoying the smoke that comes with it.

I just hope all this hazard reduction means that there won’t be any fires near our house – that would be worse.

Dad came over this morning, bright and early at 8:30. We enjoyed a nice plunger coffee together while wandering around outside the house talking about various things that would be good to fix or change… And I enjoyed pointing out all the oddities of this house to him. One thing we did discover (which I hadn’t noticed before now) is the gigantic oil tank on the side of the house (the opposite side to the carport). After putting 2 and 2 together, I worked out that it was the tank for what must’ve been an old oil heater that was in the lounge room. (Looking closely on the lounge wall, you can see a patched up square on the floor, plus an unused “chimney” of sorts on the outside wall.) Very interesting! But also exceedingly annoying because it’s still half full of oil, and it really should be drained before it rusts through and starts leaking.

Anyway, we got started on installing the TV antenna – for some reason, this house never appears to have had one! The cable has had to run down the outside of the front wall, but having found some leftover paint in the shed for the house colour, I’ll just paint over it to blend it in. We also talked about and worked on some of the side lighting of the house where our outdoor setting is. For some reason, the cheapo Bunnings light that I bought had died a couple of weeks ago – but it somehow resurrected itself when Dad was here. Annoying. So we wired that up better than I had, and put some of those nice “cool-white” energy saver lamps in all the outdoor lights. I love the light those bulbs create.

The main light that I bought that sits over the BBQ and table is still just running on an extension cord and to a powerpoint, so we worked out a plan of attack for sometime in the very near future to install a second light, and then connect both of them up to a switch on the side of the carport for an ultimate outdoor lighting set up :)

Happy boy I am.

And all done with time to spare before the V8s begin in the NT this afternoon. Ahhh.

Last night was a good time of hanging out with bible study people. Ben was round in the late arvo to put a bunch of wood, heat beads and metho into the spit roast and get a decent fire going, and then after a little while, the spinning meat went on to cook.

We took it off about 2 and a half hours later, being sure that the two chickens and kilo or so of lamb would be done. The lamb was great; the chickens were barely even warm. So strange. But I guess the coals just weren’t hot enough. Still, after some discecting of the chickens and some quick grilling on the BBQ, we had a bit of a laugh and enjoyed some good meats, along with some awesome other foods.

But I swear that even now, 24 hours later, I can still smell the smoke from the spit on me. It’s awesome, don’t get me wrong… but I just wonder if I’m crazy or not.

Tomorrow marks 3 weeks of being a Westleigh resident – woo! And hopefully on the weekend, we’ll celebrate by going out to Mulgrave to a furniture warehouse to buy a gorgeous 8 seater dining table and new coffee table; both in the same stain of wood. The dining table will live in our back room, turning that into a nice formal dining area. And I will be excited about a coffee table with drawers under it to stash all the junk in meaning that the top will stay clean! That’s the theory anyway.

And sometime soon I’ll need to get the outdoor setting down off the grass – it’s been in two straight weeks of rain, so I think it’s had enough now. I just need to wait for it to dry completely so I can clean it and then oil it. That will be a fun weekend of work!

Someone said to me a little while ago, “you don’t have weekends anymore – you just have time away from the office to maintain your house.”

It’s been two weeks since we moved in. We met one of our next-door neighbours within a few days after her cute little Jack Russell Terrier decided to come visiting. But the other side neighbours are on a bit of an angle, and are actually on the next street, so it’s hard to see them if we both happen to be out the front at the same time.

But yesterday, as I searched for any garden taps in our yard (as it turns out, there is only two, and both live right down the front – annoying!), I saw our neighbour out the front, and waved, and went over to say hi. He’s a pretty tops guy who definitely loves to chat. He’s probably in his 50s or 60s, but the cool thing was that he was one of the first people in the street, and so knows a whole lot of history about our street!

He explained that our steet (and the few surrounding) were the first part of Westleigh that was built in the early 70s. He pointed out some houses that still had the original owners in them, and could even show me the houses in the street that were built by certain architects/builders. Very cool. I found out that we’re only the third owners of our house, which is super cool, and that it seems we’re starting the next generation of families in the street, as most of the original owners were like him who brought up their kids in the street, and they’ve now moved on and out of the area.

It was pretty awesome just chatting with him (and his wife later on) for a good hour or so about the street and how friendly and quiet it was. And just hearing about all the different families. And even finding a couple of small world stories too.

I know my friends are getting sick of hearing it, but I really do love our street and our new house :)

Another weekend has arrived. The second weekend in our new place… and enough is unpacked that there’s all little jobs here and there to do around the house.

Our awesome wooden outdoor setting needed to be assembled. It needs to be soaked with water so it can ‘bleed’, and then be oiled. So I thought seeing as there was a lot of rain, let’s let nature do it. So this morning in a break between showers, I got out there and assembled the four chairs. And then then sun came out. Super annoying. BOM says there should be a shower or two today – I just how those 2 showers haven’t already been this morning… that would suck.

We’re heading off to Ikea shortly to find a small set of drawers to live in our built-in wardrobe. Don’t know what it is with us, but our places don’t have drawers! In Normanhurst, there was none in the kitchen. In Westleigh, none in the bedrooms.

And apparently, there’s a full band version of Rock Band for the Wii out at Hervey Norman Belrose for just $149. Wonder if Debbie will let me get it…

Settlement happened this afternoon at about 2:10pm. And we now officially own our house!

Or rather, the bank does. And in 20 years or so, we will. But we get to live in it til then.

And tonight, we took our first walk around the streets. With moving into a much quieter area, we decided it would be good to start walking regularly and getting a bit fit. And so we started walking around the Westleigh streets tonight. So quiet and peaceful. I loved it. Can’t believe I actually liked exercise.

I thought I’d get into this homeowner thing and start being handy around the house this evening. First project was to disable our annoying alarm system. It’s mains powered, but has a battery backup. And if the mains power is cut, or the powerpoint gets turned off, it goes off. Annoying. And the battery backup is seemingly dead, and so the alarm system whinges about that every hour, on the hour. Doubly annoying. And we really don’t think we’ll use an alarm system, so I thought I’d be all masculine and sort it out once and for all. My thoughts: surely changing the battery backup is just opening the front casing and swapping it over. Except rather than swapping, I’ll just remove the battery. And then I’ll turn the mains power off, and it won’t be able to do anything! And I’ll have fixed it!

Problem was the bugger had a sensor on the front casing, so as soon as I unscrewed it and opened it, the alarm went off. Very noisily. Alarm 1, James 0. Is there no way to disable this stupid thing without paying someone to come out and do it?!

Working from home tomorrow as I wait for some dude to rock up and see if our washing machine is fixable or if it’s time for a new one, and how much all that will cost so I can claim it on the removal insurance. And I’ll also be heading over to Normanhurst for the final inspection of that house, and handing them the keys back.

Bye bye Normanhurst. Hello Westleigh.

Hooray for waking up in our new house for the first full day of being here! It does suck a little that it’s not technically ours until Monday, but phft, details. We’re in!

The move had its moments yesterday: the removalists were a pair of chauvinistic jerks, and they broke a fence at our old place to get the washing machine out, which they broke anyway. But in the end, all our stuff is here, and now we just need to work out where we want it to go.

It was surreal sleeping in such a quiet house last night. You could hear all the little creaks and noises from everywhere in the house so clearly. Incredible after sleeping beside Pennant Hills Rd for 6 months. And this morning, as we sit here sipping coffee and eating cheese & bacon bread rolls that Chuckie brought us for breakfast, I can hear kids playing in my street! So very awesome, and just what I want in my street.

I’m gonna love this place.

I love all its quirks, and all the little things that I’m looking forward to fixing. I love its wooden floors. I love its floor-to-ceiling windows. I love its massive fridge, and beautifully new kitchen. And I love that it’s ours!

House moving begins in just 36 hours or so! It’s incredibly exciting, but gosh I’m over it all. I look around the house and see all the boxes everywhere, but also see the loads and loads of stuff that isn’t in a box.

And I also see everything in our place and realise that in 36 hours, we have to start moving it 5km down the road, where it will hopefully stay for 20 or 30 years. Daunting.

But it is über exciting to know that we will own a house on Monday, and that it is a house we both very much love! And that it’s in a quiet street, so we can just have people over whenever without worrying about parking! And I can finally have a nice outdoor area in which to BBQ! And I can have a shed!

And we won’t have a landlord. Ever. Again.

We signed the last bit of paperwork a couple of weeks ago now, and pretty much haven’t spoken to our mortgage broker, solicitor, or anyone about the house stuff since. We’ve all just been sitting back waiting for settlement to roll around. And the only worry of Debbie and me was that we needed to start packing.

And we did. Most of the weekend. The house looks empty, and messy, with boxes absolutely everywhere! But it feels good to have most things packed now. There’s just bits and pieces that need to be packed up as the week goes on. And we were both excitedly just waiting for Friday to roll around so we could start moving!

And then I got a call from our solicitor this morning…

The vendor (seller)’s solicitor needs to delay settlement until next Monday. They apparently didn’t book it with their bank early enough, and their bank needs 7 days notice to arrange settlement. So we have done everything 100% correct, and everyone on our side (including ANZ) is ready to go… even early! And a huge oversight on their side has stuffed things up big time.

I made it known to our solicitor how inconvenient this was, and that it not only caused us grief with moving removalists, and changing dates of leave with both our workplaces, but that it also leaves a very narrow window for being out of our rental property. She went back to the other solicitor, but the Monday date stays and there’s nothing that can be done about it. I mean, we’ve been told we can issue them with a notice to complete, but if they don’t meet that, all we can do is take them to court and try and get some compensation – more effort than it’s worth.

So I’ve got our solicitor pushing them very hard to get early entry to the property as compensation for stuffing us around. If that happens, we’ll still be able to move in on the Friday… we just won’t be able to put any holes in the walls, or repaint any pink walls until Monday. And the other solicitor is still being really slow and non-responsive about getting that happening. So now we’re patiently waiting…

Just goes to show that you definitely need to expect the unexpected in a mortgage/house purchase… even when everything has been so perfect for 5 and a half out of the six weeks!

My one happiness of today has been that there is a cafe in Parramatta that uses Campos beans! Finally. I think I might go have a second coffee of the day to relieve my nerves/frustration/stress…

edit: So eventually the seller’s solicitor decided to return some phone calls, and we’re able to get early occupancy of our house. We should pick up the keys on Friday morning! Settlement will still be Monday afternoon, but at least we can still move in on time and have the weekend to settle down. But my goodness, the last 30 hours have just slightly exhausted us.

Latest in the house saga (well, not really a saga as such)… all the paperwork is done! Excellent :) We went to visit our conveyancor on Thursday night to do the first home stamp duty exemption form. It was very painless, and done in 10 minutes. And that marked the last bit of signing and sending and certifying that needed to be done.

So now all that is left is to get our internet moved, electricity hooked up, and then pack. And then move! Quite exciting. But I really would just like to be moving in the next few days so we could be done with it. I’m so anxious about it all!

This weekend has been a pretty good one. Hanging out with the Howies yesterday, and then Debs and I headed out to Dee Why for brunch with Lachie this morning. And this arvo I’ve actually finally made a move on packing. Not exactly packing… but sorting through some crap in our study/music room and trying to cut down the junk that I haven’t even touched since moving to Normanhurst.

And I’ve just put some ricotta in the oven to hopefully bake. We had it on Friday night at Zoë and Tom’s place – just flatten some ricotta on a baking tray, with olive oil and herbs, and then bake for half an hour. It makes for some very yummy stuff on top of biscuits. And seeing as we had a massive brunch… it will make a perfect dinner I think.

I’m not a huge fan of paperwork. But I can stand it.

In vast contrast to her sister, my wife cannot stand paperwork, and finds herself quickly stressed by it all. Which is kinda sucky, because in taking out a mortgage, there is a seeming plethora of it. And just when you think that you’ve got it all pretty much covered, two giant envelopes show up from ANZ with a couple of theses to read through, and about 43 pages to sign.

Let’s not forget that at the same time, Debbie is trying to get her surname officially changed. So that also brings with it its own bundle of paperwork and confusion and government departments.

Oh the joy of it all!

I wrote up a to-do list on Friday evening, because I found myself getting quite worried about all the things that needed doing, and was worrying myself into a frenzy that they wouldn’t get done. But now that I have them on paper, sorted by date they need to be completed by, I feel a bit more in control. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to do… but at least now I can see that I only have to do a certain amount of things this week :)

Oh, and we still have to pack.

3 weeks and 5 days!

Detoured through Westleigh this morning, and got butterflies in my stomach when I saw the ‘Sold’ sign on our new house…

We’ve got four weeks to pack up our whole house and move it 5 minutes down the road… where it will hopefully stay for many, many years.

Anxious, nervous? Yeah.

I’ve been feeling increasingly flawed by God’s choice of grace upon my life.

Things like putting every little detail in place so that we could buy a more perfect house than we could have ever expected. He caused it to happen so that our settlement date was the exact same date as the day our lease ends for rental. He even caused it so that we will be able to more than comfortably afford the mortgage.

Can you see why I can’t help but be humbled by it all?

Who am I?
That the Lord of all the earth,
Would care to know my name,
Would care to feel my hurt.

Why me God? Why should you choose me on your team?
Can you use even me?

I know You gave the world Your only Son,
For us to know Your name,
To live within the Saviour’s love.
He took my place,
Knowing He’d be crucified,
And You loved, You loved a people undeserving!

It was a pretty huge day:

• 3 months of being married
• Exchanged contracts on our new house
• Playjerise’s new album came out and we saw them in concert

So that whole housing thing has decided to move along at warp speed again after slowing down a bit last week.

Where we left off in the last episode: After some back and forth offers and rejections, our final offer was still $15k too short of what they wanted, and that $15k gap was too much for us. So we made the decision to walk away. Beautiful house though it was, we knew there’d be something else out there for us. And that’s where this week’s episode begins…

Yesterday morning, I get a voicemail from the real estate of the property we were keen on, asking me to call her. No details, just call please. So with a free second in the early afternoon in an insanely busy day yesterday, I give Amy a call back. She let me know that after the vendors had found a place they liked and crunched some numbers, they’d worked out they could let the property go for only $5k more than our latest offer. [The waiting game had worked! And quicker than I'd thought!!] I let her know that I’d have to talk to Debbie, and that I’d call her back.

After waiting the next two hours (which felt like an eternity) for Debbie to be done with teaching, check her phone and call me, we thought through some numbers and realised an extra $5k wasn’t too hard for us to do, and so we were very excited that we could ring back and accept their price!

But it’s not over yet. It’s still very nervy. We’re still waiting on ANZ to get back to us with formal pre-approval (ie, someone actually picking up the papers and verifying that everything is a-ok; as opposed to the computer spitting back a response saying that we’re all good). And until that happens, we can’t exchange contracts, or leave a deposit. I’m patiently waiting for our solicitor to call me back to hopefully offer some advice on how we can secure this a bit more. You know, so that I’m not going to be poo-ing my pants with nerves for the next 10 days.

Here’s a picture of [fingers crossed] our soon-to-be new house! Thank you Mr Hooker.

[Thank you too, Mr Hooker, for the image.]