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Tuesday 26 April 2011

25 weeks

There it is - baby girl's residence at 25 weeks. Only about 14 weeks to go ... the big growing weeks. As Cuinn would say - Oh dear, dear, dear, bummer.

Man (pay people to remove knackered revolting thing and install new lovely thing to) make fire

The fireplace that was. It felt extremely good to see that revolting thing demolished. What makes me scratch my head though is that we (and by 'we' I mean the husband and the neighbour) managed to drop a massive concrete chimney pretty much straight onto wooden floors and it didn't damage them any more than what they already were. Makes you wonder what on earth the previous owners did to their floors.

Cheerfully, the husband even gave me a teeny wee mallet (I wasn't allowed the 12 pound sledgehammer - knocked up and all that. Plus, even with the mallet I nearly took myself out when the first one bounced off a stud) to make the first hole in the wall. Turns out you can take out a fair amount of agression with a teeny wee mallet.


Hee hee.


The hole in the second floor - still there incidentally because we want to see whether we need to put in a heat transfer system once winter sets in.



The neighour on the roof. The husband was hiding downstairs somewhere refusing to go up there for love nor money.





Handily, the kid is tall enough to stand in the cubby under the stairs, so we hand him the wood, and he stacks it. I say 'stack' loosely, but it saves me crawling under there, it's keeps him busy for 5 minutes and he thinks he's awesome so it's a win-win.




Monday 25 April 2011

The thing about buying a dump (with good bones)

On the bright side, everything you do is really satisfying because it makes such a big difference to the dump-ness, but holy crap, if you don't blog for three months, it turns out you can't just turn up and throw a few pictures up to show how things are going. I actually need to go back through about a thousand (if I was exaggerating any I'd've said 55 million. I'm not exaggerating on the thousand) pictures to get the before and afters. Oops.

It's a funny house - there's an enormous amount of work to be done and it feels like we haven't even made a dent, yet we can feel it changing around us with everything we do. Some days we look out the windows and it seems that we haven't gotten anywhere and won't for forever, but other days we look at a list we wrote (down the wall in the lounge) when we moved in of everything we want to do to this place and see how much of it has been crossed off, and then we feel really pleased with ourselves. And really tired and a bit broke.

It's been a busy six months and we've done loads but I think perhaps we have to admit too that although we had an out-loud 3 to 5 year time frame for getting things done when we moved in, we probably quietly thought we'd be sorted in about 1 to 2 and there's no way we're going to be sorted in 1 to 2. No. Way. We'll blame baby girl for that - in true little ginger style, she turned things on their head mightily because she changed the order that things would get done, different things had to go at the top of the list, and took me out of the equation completely for the heavy work around the section.

Another head-scratching aspect to it is that the house seems to keep changing its mind about what it wants done which means taking extra time to just wait and see which is completely weird. We'll have a plan, and then suddenly it's just not right and the right thing will either be there, or we'll have to sit tight for longer to see what's what. We ended up with a fireplace instead of a heat pump that way, and ditched plans to carpet downstairs as well. We'd intended to cut the points off the top of the fence and cap it, but suddenly the fence just wants painting and for us to keep that part of the property's history as it is. Six months of intending to lay a new driveway has suddenly become probably laying those pavers that grass grows through for a second parking space. It's definitely us and the house working together, but I can't quite decide who's got the upper hand.

There has also been interesting weirdness (depending on how easy you are to creep out). We've got a really old safe in the garage that wants to be cracked, that has been here for who knows how long. It's probably empty, but we can pretend it's full of gold bars in the meantime. It makes us cheerful to think so. It was tucked right away under a workbench at the back of the garage. Hopefully it's gold bars in there anyway, and not a body because the husband dug a trench out to the garage when we were doing the rewire and dug up a couple of fake headstones of all things. At least, I hope they were fake. We couldn't decide what to do with them - put them on Trademe or keep them to threaten the kids with when they get older. They're currently still sitting outside looking slightly creepy and making the occasional visitor look twice. It did look quite funny at the time when the husband was busy digging his trench with 2 headstones sitting to one side.

I even found a cavity under the floor boards in one of the wardrobes - not a very effective hiding place since it was apparently used and the previous owners didn't clean for an estimated 15 years judging by the state of the place. The wardrobe was a centimetre thick in dirt and dust, except for one clean floor board. Didn't take a genius to work out what that was all about.

On the baby front, we're doing really well. She's definitely a she (I'm still amazed beyond belief that my obstetrician was able to tell that with reasonable confidence at only about 11 weeks pregnant), and she also seems to be a quiet wee soul. I usually hear from her every day, but sometimes all she'll say is a quick hi and that's about it, and she's only started moving noticeably in the last 2 - 3 weeks. The husband can feel her move, but she's so quiet about it, it's all a bit long-winded for everyone if he tries to see what she's up to. Here's hoping she's like that when she's born, hey? At this stage she's measuring being due around 7 - 11 August, so we're expecting her delivery by c-section probably in the first days of August, as long as she doesn't try anything funny herself. I'm hoping she won't, but she's at least part ginger and gingers are tricky. I wouldn't be too concerned if my obstetrician wasn't going to be in Switzerland until the end of July, but he is, so you can see why I'd quite like her to just hang out in there as long as possible. That and you know, we're a bit wise to what it's like having a newborn in the house now, so ... ahhh ... no need for anyone to rush.

The other little ginger is completely mad, but loving life and giving us plenty of laughs. He seems huge - his feet for example are half as long as the husband's size 14/15 jobbies and he's about half as tall too, so I think we all know how that's going to turn out. There will be pictures. Lots of pictures. Little monster.

As soon as I sort them and make a really big list.