Gazebo...

Busy day today....the guys came back to finish off the gravel on the paths and to erect the colourbond fence going around the outside of the spa.

Poor things, the wind today was horrendous..the amount of dust and debris flying around was shocking.  They had moved the empty avairy onto the alfresco so they could pound the gravel down along side the garage, the wind blew it over...i did have some bird cages on the roof of it, one of them broke...

In the middle of this the guy turned up to install the gazebo onto the spa....with the help of the landscapers we managed to get the spa into the right position...over the top of the electrical cable not beside it.
This guy had just as much fun as the others did, the wind kept trying to rip the sides out of his hands...it took him about 3 hours to put it all together...you should see all the dust that covers it, even the inside of the spa is filthy.
The only complaint i have is that he left all the cardboard boxes and bubblewrap and the protection for the glass windows blowing around the yard...all this came in a wooden crate with metal bands around it...and yes, he left that as well......grrrrr

The landscapers finished around 4ish and have done a really good job....yes, we did have to pay for the watering system....$180, but it is money well spent.

We have sent a message to the owner of the concreating company enquiring as to where the guys were to do the nature strip...we now await a response.

bits and pieces for the gazebo, you can see the wooden crate in the background

start of construction

inside the completed gazebo, note the dirty spa

the outside of the gazebo

view of the fencing from the back yard...this is what the dogs will see

all thats missing is the glass fencing at the front and something to cover the slab with

view from the alfresco

from the spa looking back towards the house

along the garage.

What is this green stuff?.......Oh yeah, its called grass....

It's not finished yet, but...WOW!!! my courtyard looks soooooo different, it now is level and at the moment its 75% covered in grass.  Am i one happy camper?....you bet!!
The guys turned up at 8.30 this morning. Started on the edging for the paths, spread the remaining gravel out and then the labourious task of leveling out the courtyard in preperation for the turf.....we are lucky that across the road from us is what eventually will be a park, at the moment it still has a mountain of dirt on it from when they were doing our stage, and we have been told that we are able to use it, so the contractors used this dirt to level out our yard. Then they installed a watering system for us, then laid the top soil and are currently putting the turf on...we have chosen a type of Kikuri (?) to cope with the dogs.  Tomorrow they will be back to finish off the gravel and hopefully install the fence around the back of the spa, thus making the courtyard puppy proof.

Did the driveway guys turn up today....nope! think a phone call will be in order to the boss who is in Sydney.

From this on Wednesday morning

....to this on Thursday afternoon.

Courtyard...

Today, the driveway people were supposed to come back and do the nature strip, they are going to put granitic sand in it in lieu of having lillydale topping, they tell us its a much nicer colour...fine, but, if you are not going to turn up at least ring us!!!  Lets see what tomorrow brings.

Today was also the day when our spa was to be delivered, Tony and I spent nearly half an hour moving everything out of the road of the single garage door so they had a straight run thru to the back yard and onto the slab.....hmmmm....no one thought about the trim on the render...oops....not enough room, so the delivery men ( all 3 of them ) and tony and I had to move everything and i mean everything out of the way from in front of the double doors and make a path thru to the roller door at the back....there was gym equip on the driveway, boxes as well, boxes up against the door into the house, stuff everywhere.  After all that the spa only just fitted thru the roller door.
So we decided to then re-organise the garage, wow, we have alot more space than before, can't wait until we get the sheds up and all the boxes go out...we will definately be able to swing quite a few cats in the garage then :)   (not that i would do that ).

Went into Wallan for lunch before Tony went to work, we got a phone call from the landscaper, the crushed sandstone had arrived in and they were turning up at our house in an hour to start laying it...bloody hell...talk about bolting your food down......we had to hurray back cos we hadn't finished moving all the boxes in the garage yet....did all that and they turned up.....so now we have crushed sandstone down the side of the garage and the start of a path from the garage to the alfresco as well as an area at the back of the garage. Tomorrow they start the prep work for our instant turf.

Who knows, maybe the driveway people will turn up too.......

spa on the right, boxed gazebo on the left...spa cover under the window

this looks so much better...the side fence will go behind the render, at the moment the avairy is an animal blockade

back of the garage.

Finally....

Our driveway was offically finished today :)  It has now been sealed!
We elected to go with a 10 year seal...done the cheaper one which has to be done every year...thats a pain in the a....!
So, tomorrow we can drive on it...well acutally we could've done that yesterday but we wanted to wait until it had been sealed.
Also had the plumbers back out, it took them like...2 minutes to fix the button on our loo...how hard was that?  something they obviously couldn't do between PCI and handover.......they also finally fixed the leak at the front taps...everytime they came out to do it, it had rained and they couldn't tell cos of all the water, well today it was fine and the area around the tap was still muddy...turns out the elbow joint on our side was leaking....god  knows how much extra that will cost us in wasted water.
Tomorrow promises to be good.......the spa will arrive.

Next should be the garden bed to the right of the garage, then hopefully the path and lastly the garden area

Finished driveway...

Yesterday they came back and cleaned off the top of the driveway to expose the aggregate underneath....really really love it....they will be back next week to acid wash it and then seal it.
Its a real bummer that the spa slab wasn't done in the agg...now we are trying to find something to put on the plain concrete, at this stage we are going to go for a paving paint until we can think of something better.
We were abit worried that the drive was going to look funny as we squared it off and didn't round it from the crossover but I think that cos we had such a big driveway and it goes so far passed the crossover that it looks okay...your thoughts people?

Washing the top layer off.

We chose a colour called 'Twilight', this had all the colours of the front of the house in it...greys, creams and browns.

Photos....

Friday we thought we would make a start on putting up our photos....
Instead of using picture hooks I've been using the Command Strips...i like them, the only bother is that you have to leave them for an hour before actually hanging the picture/photo up.

In the Entrance way is our Paris collection, well, they are nearly all 'of' and 'from' the Eiffel Tower with a few others thrown in.

In the Master bedroom is a few shots of St Paul de Vence from the Riviera area of France...this was one of my favourite places in France.

The shots in the Ensuite are all water related, whale watching from Coffs Harbour, Fish swimming in the water in Patmos, a small boat also from Patmos and a mooring ring from Rhodes.

This is also in the Ensuite, it is housing at Burano an island off Venice, just love all the colours.

In the Family room is a multi shot of a fountain in Vienna that changed colours.

And lastly we finally got around to putting up Tony's lighthouse pics...these are the only pics in this post that Tony hasn't taken.

Driveway almost finished....

The guys turned up this morning at 7.00am to finish off the prep work for the driveway and spa slab...we weren't too sure what they were going to do about the slab as most of the area was water logged from all the rain we'd had.
It took them about 4 hours to get everything ready for the pour.
OMG the spa area looks alot bigger than I'd remembered.
Tony came home while they were waiting for the truck to come back with the mix for the driveway. He asked me if the slab had the washed agg in it...shruggs shoulders...I dunno, thought it would have cos thats what we ordered....ahh..no...miscommunication...just plain normal concrete in the slab...sigh...that means we will now have to do something with it...
The driveway looks massive and yes it does have the washed agg in it..whew!!....they will be back tomorrow to wash it down and then come back at a later date to put a sealing coat over it....cos of the mix up we are going to get a discount off the sealant.

This is what it looked like this morning

All ready for the concrete

Ta dah....must admit it looks brown in this pic but it will turn out dark grey

front view of the driveway

Spa slab being poured

finished slab

Driveway and others.....

Our fence is finally finished...Yay!!!  Now we are just waiting for the fencer to come back and install the gate down the long side and the side bit on the other side fence between the garage and fence. 

The driveway people came yesterday and started preping the driveway and the slab area....said they should be back tomorrow (which is now today) to do somemore......yep, they turned up at 8.00am, damm it we were still in bed....
But work they did until the rain got too heavy....not sure when they will be back, hope its not tomorrow as we wont be home, and that will mean that they wont have access to the back yard to do the slab work.

Completed fence..you can see the post in the foreground ready for the gate

The prep work they did on the driveway, on the rhs of the pic is where we need to block off the fence, at the moment you can see the avairy (empty) blocking off the yard to keep the dogs and cats in

Shutters....

Wow...my shutters have been installed...well except for the bathroom ones.....they are soooooo awesome, the colour match with the walls is spot on...
They really change the appearence of our bedroom...I can't tell you how good it is to have a shower and know that you are safe from prying eyes.....when having a shower you can see out the study window and you can also see the front door, now the shutters stop the line of sight from the front door, at least we already had blinds up on the study window.
As for the bathroom shutters...I wanted sliding ones, so Kell could get to her window to open it....when the installer came on Thursday he was very pissed off when he found out that it was a sliding set up...apparently the lady from the blind / curtain place had rung him about them and he had told her not to do sliding in the bathroom next to the bath as water gets in underneath the plinth board and rusts the screws and makes it look ugly etc....hmmmm I says to him, she didn't tell me any of that, so we talked about it and decided to get new shutters made on a bi-fold system making them sit above the line of the bath with a boxed in area underneath it to make it look neat..........only trouble is I (or should i say Kelly) now have to wait 6-8weeks for them to be made.

Kelly now has her wardrobe installed...yay, the painter came in on Wednesday to paint over the replastered areas on both Kells and the craft room robes.
More dramas with the silly things....firstly as i have said, i ordered shelves for the end section instead of a full hanging section.....in both the craft room and our WIR I had measured the spaces incorrectly, Tony remeasured all the robes when we started to install them, Kells was the only one i got right...or so we thought...I had it down as 1.8m...Tony measured it at 1.8m, so why did i get them made at 1.9m?.....Tony went back in and remeasured on Wednesday night...darn thing was 2m internally...goofed by a long way.....thankfully all was not lost...we used the shelf from the robe that we had kept when Porter Davis ripped out their installation.  Have ordered a hanging bar and supports off the internet so they will match the half hanging section on the opposite end.

Finally got my wall scones changed over at Beacon...they are slightly darker in colour than the first lot we had, now they dont look too bad and match in slightly better with the ceiling light.

Starting to put pics up around the walls, hopefully we can get this done during the week as Tony is working nights on Mon & Tues then has 5 days off.

All in all the house is slowly coming together, now we need to go to  my mums and pick up the gigantic mirror for the dining room.

Ensuite shutter, this one opens towards the loo

Ensuite again, these ones are fixed.

Master bedroom / Study ones, these open up...see below...

opened shutters..not sure how often they will be shut tho

Tradies....

Had a busy day today...people everywhere, and thankfully not all at the same time.

Plumber came to look at the taps at the front of the house....they have been leaking ever since the bobcat sorta ran over them while doing a yard clean....they only needed to be tightened, thankfully the leak was on Yarra Valley waters side and not ours.
The guy fron the heating place turned up with an extension for the first of the heating ducts....it was too close to the unit so when the heating was turned on, the noise coming out of the vent sounded like a 747 landing, now, it is so quiet...much better :)
Also the electricians turned up to fix the plug for the stove....it had a normal plug, which when plugged into the socket didn't allow me to shut the pot drawer...so for the three weeks we've been in the house the pots have been sitting in their packing box still....this wasn't much of a drama as i still can't use the 4 outer burners on the stove, our SS tells us he has contacted Blanco and they are going to make some more feet for the stove, ones that will bring it upto the right height so we can then use the stovetop with out fear of damaging the reconstituted stone benchtop.

Also the installer from Decorator Curtains and Blinds returned today to finish installing the blinds...so now the dining room has its top blind, the rumpus room now has the header and channels for the roller blind and the craft room has a bracket that actually is the right length....i also got him to adjust the curtains and roman blinds in the lounge and to adjust the curtains in the master bedroom.  Overall they are now looking good, can't wait until next Thursday as thats when my plantation shutters are being installed.

The painters from PD were supposed to turn up today to paint the internals of the wardrobes, but nothing happened there, it would have been quicker if we had painted them ourselves...Kelly is desperately waiting for them to paint so we can install her wardrobe so she can put her clothes away instead of having them all over the furniture in her rooms.

Tony also got around to installing the light fixture in the craft room....I so love this fitting, so much that i bought it with me from Moonee Ponds when we shifted.

Light fitting in craft room

roller blind in dining room, this matches the panel glide on the sliding door