May

During lockdown, we got another cat! Her name is Mama. When she turned up at her carer's, she gave birth a to litter of kittens. She is a lovely cat, very friendly.

It took a fair while like a week for these two to become comfortable. At first Mama was hissing a bit. Sumi was ok. Then they started chasing each other around. Mama started tackling Sumi. Now it seems they chase each other back and forth. I think they're buddies but with cats it's hard to tell.

They were still uncomfortable at this stage. Sumi was always curious enough to sniff while Mama was busy.

Happy Mother's Day! Breakfast in bed.

Happy birthday to our Louis! The birthday cake looks like sushi. It is smarties, icing and some straps of licorice.

And then I said...

Marie and her sisters. Nice to catch up. They had some good laughs.

Measuring up to get the front tiled. Note the tree in the front got chopped out. We get a tonne more sunlight now. Hopefully we got some plants in by the time you read this.

School photos; the cousins all together.

Ollie and Sumi in the sunshine.

More complaints: the door handle fell off to the WC downstairs.

The gyprock on the floor from the lock.

The bathroom door locks both fell out quickly; they were only screwed into the gyprock. What the hell kind of builder does this? There's solid wood behind.

Sumi snuggles between us. Mama is a bit jealous I think but she is welcome if she'd like to jump up.

Sadly Parramatta Road is back to "normal"; choked with traffic. It positively stinks now when you go close to this road.

Sumi and Penny

Looks like she's settling in. This post is just a cat fest, with 2 shots of Penny the dog.

Everyone's pretty excited about the cat.

Drinking elegantly; seems she refuses to drink from a bowl.

Convenient spot on the doors looking across the back yard.

Penny the wonder dog, not really a doge, super fast too, as fast as Ollie can run. He's a Cavoodle - King Charles Spaniel/Poodle.

Penny - looks like a Teddy bear.

The odd shot out - sushi, Lou's fave, home made is v v good.

Cat sleeps on our bed. She comes gets up to us at 5am and wakes us up, asking Marie for breakfast, and to be let out for a pee. She's too royal to use the kitty litter box. She prefers the garden.

She doesn't like being picked up much so the boys have to admire from a distance.

The back yard for now; with some more pots in there.

The Libertons playing Zombicide; it's a catchy game.

More complaints

Skip this if you'd prefer.

On the left, we have the neighbours roof. The gutter falls *towards* the downpipe. The roof feeds into the gutter. The gutter is lower, so that any overflow goes away from the eaves.

 And now ours, the fall is wrong, the gutter is above the roof so any blockage feeds the water into the home. Nice work from our builders. We just had a fix, and the fall might be right but it's still sitting high.

Minor complaint, the floorboard offcuts we asked to keep were strewn around in the roof, along with anything else. Me and Marie cleaned it up.

Another bad surprise on the 14th, right in the middle of lockdown. No surprises the builder refused to come out as he said it was not possible.

The outside of the wall is about 50cms under soil that drains next door's back yard, but no waterproofing was applied. The moisture is spreading slowly. This is a shockingly shoddy piece of work.

March

We got some dirt and some lawn! 3 tonnes of dirt precisely. So we shovelled 3 tonnes a wheelbarrow at a time from the side street, down the lane and into ours.

Voila the result! Laid by ourselves.

We didn't read the instructions to flatten the soil right down, so now it's settled and lumpy. A bit more soil and a roller will fix it.

More good times of summer.

And then the Corona virus hit. All the real idiots of the world cleared the place out of toilet paper. It wasn't like they would stop making it.

I personally figured I could wet some cloth and use that.

Some guy in Adelaide even bought about $10,000 worth, plus sanitiser, then tried to return it once he figured he couldn't sell it once the shelves got restocked. The supermarket wouldn't give them a refund for their $10K.

Stuff like flour, eggs, milk, all in short supply. You could only buy two fake milks at a time. They had to ration the things to stop selfish aholes stockpiling. Wonder what they did with it all in the end.

This image was sent to friends to say where you could get decent supplies of fruit, vegetables, and dried beans (good for apocalypses).

Everyone had to stay in their homes, work from home. The skies were blue; there were very few cars on the road. Marie couldn't even visit her mum.

While we were in lock down, we adopted a cat! Her name is Sumi, which means "elegant" in Japanese. She is elegant, and very playful. She follows Marie around like a dog. Shes' a great cat.

She loves heights: it was her safe place at the last home; she could get away from the little kids this way.

Feb pt 2

Good times with the cousins.

The old Hilux was taking forever to sell. Every couple of weeks I'd drop the price by a thousand. At some time around here the Coronavirus hit, really taking the steam out of car sales. 

We got rid of the draws separately, then the canopy, then the car went at last about another month on. 

We got Louis a phone; he'd been wanting one for some time...

Ollie just before the year 7 camp...

Later on, more good times. Can't remember how we ended up with the Libertons, the cousins, Porter and Declan. Plenty of noise. Summer is tops.

Home blues

Final inspection was the 18th and we moved in the 21st. Then on the 9th of Feb, we had a big storm. 

I noticed a black spot in the corner that I didn't see before. Then as I stared couple of drops came down from the ceiling. Then the damp grew along the edge.

Next thing we noticed water on Ollie's floor. Soon the wall started sagging and rippling, dripping more water.

 After going downstairs, water was falling there too. We started to panic. Walking into Louis's room, there was water on the floor from the window, and water started dripping from the ceiling. We rang Lee to say the whole place is leaking in. As per always, it just went to voice mail.

You can see the wet seeping into the towel on the floor. I got up there in the rain and started cleaning out whichever gutters I could, including next door.

The roof guy banged on our door first thing Monday morning. He called Lee to say that his boys didn't do any of the finishing on the windows. One of their guys came some later day and did the caulking on the windows.

Lee came to inspect and starting talking about splitting the bill for Lou's ceiling as it wasn't part of the job. But Marie pointed out that we'd explicitly asked them to inspect the roof to be it was all tight.

It's only because they screwed up the windows that we noticed the rest of the problems. The gutter here is sitting out so it doesn't catch most of the water. I tried screwing it back in but the wood back is totally rotten.

Oh, and the new gutter we paid $5,000 for falls away from the down pipe. So the water is directed towards the dead end. This is why it spilled over into the bathroom.

Some sensational Casa Fabrica work here. Duct tape was used as a fixing for the gutter. As a result it fell down, spilling water into our roof drain. The roof guy tells me nearly the entire time of the build it's been laying down like this, spilling the water in.

Using duct tape as a building material is really aweful but not actually the worst thing they've done.

Lack of care: 40-50 tile spacers were disposed of in the sink. The toilet gurgles indicating a serious blockage. It's June right now and still has not been fixed.

This is how this looks at handover.

Backyard's looking good.

The windows at this point in time are hard to close and nearly impossible to lock. The force needed ended up popping this. Replacing the windows was a bad move. We've been complaining about it for ages.

I'm slowly starting to like the place.