Make no haste

The last few weeks have been incredibly disheartening, mainly due to making our biggest mistake on the build. To top it off, Mother Nature decided that the spring rains can finally wreak its havoc, and it’s been a bleak weekend. We’re not entirely discouraged though, it is 13 months (to the day) since the slab pour and we are so close to moving in!

Ironic that we couldn’t lay the foundations due to the rain last year, and now we can’t move in due to the rain this year. I now understand why the Grand Design peeps always say “It was the worst rain that <insert place> has seen in blah blah years!” I think there is an owner-building demigod who likes to play cruel tricksies on us. Enough of the gibber, so where are we now?

Tiling

You might be wondering what we’ve been doing since we received the CofO. Well, we went on a much needed holiday, and then it has been an endless adventure torture of tiling and other small jobs. All the tiling is now complete, including:

• grouting the fireplace hearth, crazy paving tiles and kitchen splashback
• laying and grouting the main living area and bedroom tiles

It is the bedroom tiles where we made our biggest blunder. A piece of advice: do not grout sandstone tiles in a hurry. We didn’t take our time cleaning off the grout from those pesky porous tiles, so of course had to pay the price. In an attempt to move in ASAP, we delayed ourselves even further. It took us around 40 hours to grind/shave the dried grout off the tiles, clean up the mess and reseal them. ‘Make no haste’ is the lesson we learnt, and we vowed to never speak of the ‘g’ word ever again.

It sounds anticlimactic that this was our biggest mistake during the build; not too sorry however as the house is not crumbling down, there are no leaks and the foundation is solid. I think we (and the house) will survive. A big pat onto Matty’s shoulders and the engineers’ :)

Main living area with unsealed slate tiles

Kitchen fit out nearly complete, those colourful tiles were used to replace a cracked beige tile. We didn’t have any spare one of those of course, doh!

Fireplace grande, crazy paving feature wall and hearth grouted

Sandstone tiles in the bedrooms, cleaning the grout off these were a glimpse of hell

Main bedroom WIR tiles

Second bedroom WIR tiles

Bookshelf spine cut out and aircon connected, though we doubt the aircon will ever get used

Are we there yet?

No dear, not quite! We are so close, all we need to do is a massive clean and move in. We’ve decided to live out of boxes and suitcases in Cooinda’s Nest till Matty makes the walk in robe shelves and our bed frame. There’s still some work to do outside, like painting the fascia boards and eaves, varnishing the window frames… but that doesn’t stop us from living in there. Odd jobs inside will keep us busy after we move in as well, but the house is habitable so we’re not fussed.

Here’s hoping that this is the second last post so the spam can finally end! Last post will be after we move in, which could be next weekend, or close to…