Weekend report!!

I've spoken with our SS today and he told me that:

• The tiling should have been finished on the weekend
• The painter should have finished on the weekend
• The carpet was due to be laid today

He's not certain that any of it has been done yet but I've got an appointment to meet him on-site on Thursday so I will find out then. Still no word on when we're looking at handover (our SS is a man of few words), but given that the carpet is going in today and they keep telling us that carpets will be last, we can't be far off.

Our weekend was also a productive one - we only hope that they were as productive over at the house.

We managed to achieve a couple of things...

1. We purchased fabric for the remaining curtains. We've chosen a reddish fabric that is the same type as the green one that we have for the kitchen/living room. It's called Tobasco and is an dusty-orangey-red (not as bright as it looks in the photos - although that's the colour I would have preferred). This will also be made into Roman blinds.... soon I hope! I still have to remember the tape-measure for Thursday's meeting so that I can measure up and get started!



2. I did some reading on how to make the Roman blinds and now have a fair idea of how they're made/assessbled and am not at all scared by them anymore. My only real concerns are a) that I have enough fabric and b) that I get the rod pockets straight so that they don't look "home made".

3. We decided on a landscaping plan - and we both agree on it! This is pretty exciting as all along it seems that we've had different ideas/thoughts about what would work and what we prefer. Somehow we've managed to incorporate both of our 'wants' in a way that works both for the house and for us!! I can't wait to see it come together now! 3

We've decided on Conifers in the front yard with a couple of hardier maples for the autumn colour (and to meet the developers guidelines). We're going to put pencil pines out the back around the fence-line and we'll have a native garden outside the loungeroom window. There will also be a paved patio with a pergola. Now we just need to work out what this is all going to cost and which bits we can do ourselves and which bits we'll contract out...

4. We started buying plants... I've been reluctant to buy any plants until we knew what it was that we were going to do - I didn't want to end up with plants that didn't work with our final plan. Not that we're going to buy too many more before we move or get the keys but...

I took a drive up to the Dandenongs to visit the conifer gardens and seeing that I'd made the trip, decided to buy a few. I was a bit reluctant about conifers until I visited this nursery - it is amazing. If you think that conifers are just pencil pines and book leaf pines, take a look at this place and you'll discover that there's so much more to it!!!



Whilst up there I also found a nursery that had a heap of specials on the natives that I love and so had to buy a few of them too. Now we just need to hope that we're not too far off on hand-over.

We also found the maple that we want at a nursery in Geelong and will get that when we have the house - we'll need to hire a ute or truck for that one and so we only want to move it once!

Here's our collection of plants so far - there are also a few that we bought a while back along with a couple that we've rescued from the bargain sections...