Carpet Installed/Furniture Delivered

What a whirlwind the last few days have been/

We started our move on Thursday night and it feels like we havent stopped since then. Most of Thursday night/Friday was spent assembling our flatpack furniture from IKEA, including the realisation at 12.30am that we hadn't picked up the mid-beam for our Malm bed resulting in us sleeping on the floor of the home theatre.

Carpet was completed on Thursday and is looking & feeling amazing.

 Carpet colour next to our Malm bedside table

Not a great pic, but these two Malm drawers took friggen ages to assemble and weighed a tonne!

Our lounges arrived from Freedom :D This is one of them - the Signature lounge in Napa Cement. Yes I'm aware there are a zillion pillows but I am trying to decide which pillows should go on which lounge

Starting to look more like a home. Only one bar stool as Freedom had to order the others in. A word of warning if you get a light colour - we have had some colour transfer already from dark pants/jeans :(

Now scoping out a dining table setting as our current setup involves either 1) standing around the kitchen island or 2) fold up chairs and a camp table perched on the flattened cardboard box that our mattress came in. The budget is getting stretched pretty thin though and I know landscaping should really be our next priority.

Very happy with the house so far but realising what an absolute nightmare it is to keep clean without any grass or driveway. We've got sheets up on the windows until our plantation shutters arrive, which will be 6-8 weeks. Props to Mick & Ritchie @ Shade Elegance who have been incredibly reasonable and flexible so far!

Still waiting for MJH to replace our glass stacker door along with a final brick clean which were both raised at PCI. Noticed that someone has swiped our nice stainless steel plug for the bathtub also (yes I have looked in every cupboard in the house and it is nowhere to be seen! At PCI it was next to the bathtub, booo).
 

Appliances Installed

We were lucky enough to sign our MJH contract when there were a few offers on - one of them was the free upgrade to Smeg appliances. Had our rangehood, oven, stovetop and dishwasher installed today. We also got a microwave however will be selling this off as we purchased a convection microwave from Good Guys.

I haven't been in love with our splashback but the colours seem to blend much nicer now that appliances are in.

The appliances look lovely as well, particularly the wide oven. The dishwasher is a bit plasticky though - I had expected it to be all stainless steel.

Despite covering the floor I noticed some light scratches in our bamboo this afternoon following appliance installation :( Disappointing but unavoidable I guess. It's not very noticeable but annoying as we've had our floor for two whole days.

I also spent this morning painting the skirting around the fridge recess only as Good Guys will be installing this tomorrow. It was about 5 pieces of timber that I needed to paint and it took me hours, and now I'm covered in paint. I now have much more respect for our painter - getting paint even is HARD!

My achievement for the day. I think I spent a solid hour just marking out the skirting with masking tape, and the paint STILL leaked through. I then had to tidy it all up with turps, ughhh. Not looking forward to doing the rest of the house! 

My painting was really crummy as well - patches everywhere

Bamboo Installed

Our bamboo floor was installed today through Harvey Norman - the colour is Red Strand. Our layer Spiro did a fantastic job and I would highly recommend him if you're in the Sydney area.

Apologies for the mess as the floor needs a good clean - I don't happen to own a mop or broom yet!

We need to install the skirting ourselves which I am absolutely dreading, ughh :(

Really pleased with how the floor has turned out and it's amazing how much of a difference it makes to the feel of the house. Feels much more like a home rather than a construction site

Keys

On Thursday 24th April 2014 we officially got our keys

Bamboo is being laid tomorrow and then carpet on Thursday. Appliances from MJH are arriving Tuesday and installed Wednesday. Whitegoods from Good Guys will be arriving Thursday.

Cannot wait to assemble all our IKEA furniture (i LOVE flat pack stuff) and have my fingers crossed that our Freedom lounges will arrive in the next couple of weeks.

Shade Elegance are coming in sometime this week to measure up our plantation shutters.

Can't believe our house journey is pretty much over. We have had a truly amazing experience with MJH and are very pleased with the house they have delivered.

PCI

PCI was today and it went really smoothly!

Met up with our new SS Shane who was absolutely lovely. He ran through the paperwork first (warranties, care guides etc.) and then we went for a look through the house.

Fortunately only the following will be required:
- Door handles to wardrobes
- Repair of water meter to front of house (neighbour's builders have runover the entire thing, flattened it into the ground and now it has been leaking water everywhere, wahhh)
- Repair of sewer pipe at rear of house (neighbour's builder have also managed to run over this)
- Replacement of glass stacker door in great room (glass panes were replaced after it fell down however the metal has scuff marks all over it)

We are due to get keys on Thursday (24/04/2014) which fits in perfectly with our floor installation (scheduled for Monday 28/04/2014).

Shane also gave us our McDonald Jones gift which contains towels, soap, soap dispenser and a toilet brush ...all in white :)

Also got this to fill in........no idea what we're going to do!

Small Update

Not much happening these days as we draw closer to handover. PCI was initially planned for tomorrow (15 April) however we still haven't heard anything from our new SS. Really hoping it happens this week so we can still look at getting keys this month. I'm wary of handover dates given all the public holidays in April. Flooring is tentatively booked for 28th April but I think we may need to push this back

Painter was back today doing touch ups and finally got to go inside the house. I've been peeking through the windows and noticed blue tape everywhere, however today all the tape was gone so I think the gyprocker etc. had been in also

Something odd that I noticed - none of our wardrobe doors have handles? Every other handle in the house has been installed but nothing for our wardrobes.

Towel racks and toilet roll holders are in at least :D

Towel racks, yay

Last few weekends have been spent researching appliances - I think we may have two big purchases sorted!

Security Fence Removed

No exact dates yet for handover as yet. There have been whispers of April 15 for PCI but nothing set in concrete.