A Quick Update

The silly season has drawn to a close now, or at least I'm hoping it has. The eldest son is still on holidays so his unique style of play still reverberates around the house, and they are all expecting visitors out later today, so it's not exactly going to be peaceful, but my holidays are over so things are returning to normal.

The Christmas period has been quiet in terms of progress with the new land, the council shut down so the changes we need to get through were stalled, and therefore everything else was as well. Hopefully they have returned to work now, and things will once again start moving along. There are under three months to go until we need to settle, and a lot needs to happen in that time. Realistically it shouldn't take too long to get it all done, but as always it depends on events occurring in a certain order, so trouble with any one of them puts a stop on the whole process.

My FIL has kindly offered to take his bulldozer out to the land and level the house site for us, which will be a substantial cost saving. Other than leveling the site we need to put in some erosion control, and build the entrance to council standards. I can have the entrance and erosion control done in a weekend, my FIL reckons the leveling will take the same. The trouble is we need to have the house site moved before we can proceed with that work, and the construction certificate issued. Moving the house site is our current stumbling block, but should be resolved this week (fingers crossed).

The Flood Street Farmlet has not been entirely neglected over this time, even though the focus of the blogging has been on the new land. The vegetables are growing very well, corn is starting to form cobs, we've been eating cucumbers, zucchinis and beans for some time now, and our late planted tomatoes are getting close to ripening. The potatoes are looking a little wilted, we've not had any rain for some time now, and we've returned to the usual struggle of trying to water everything within a short enough span to allow it enough moisture to survive. We're expecting around 37 degrees today, the hottest this summer, so things have been pleasantly mild to slightly too hot, which is great. Hopefully today is not going to be a change in regime, but rather a momentary aberration.

I was able to put part of my holidays to constructive use, the rotting front porch has been replaced with a nice new decking, and a bit of extra support added to stop it wobbling like a trampoline. I'll still need to paint all of the eaves and touch up other areas, but overall the outside is getting close to a "ready to sell" state. This leaves us considering what to do with the "lovely" carpet in the lounge room. Do we rip it up and go timber floor, replace it, or leave it for the next folks to change to their heart's desire? We realise there is too much to do to get the house into a state where it would be perfect, but our feeling is that the next owners will not be happy with that either, and will want to alter it to suit their own tastes, so we would be effectively wasting money to do too much. I guess the motto is something along the lines of just enough so that it doesn't look too awful :)