I can't hope to do justice to the excruciating torture that was moving. M. and I made many trips—in convoy—in our cars, hired a van for a day on two separate occasions; and coughed up the best part of $2K to pay four men to spend ten hours moving the books and the furniture.
This ten hour day—sixteen for us—was the main move, and it would have taken a lot longer than ten hours had the removalists not called up a ute to ferry the boxes and furniture up the drive from the monster truck that they had been forced to park on the road (the strapping young removalists took one look at the drive and nearly fainted).
Two weeks later (our first night sleeping here was the 20th—Day 23) we have unpacked most of the boxes and have arranged most of the furniture. We also have phone, internet and TV.
Telstra & Co. did not actually show when they said they would—shocking, I know—at which point I realised they had no idea what they were doing, and I could not believe anything they said they were going to do. So I gave up on them, and all things telecommunicational.
To my surprise, everything was connected last Friday—no photos of the closed highway, alas. We were not given a phone to connect, so I connected my old one. On Saturday night we had our second big storm** and in the morning the phone stopped working. So, after six weeks of waiting, we had the phone on for just over 24 hours!
Another three days later a technician came out and declared the old phone dead. Who killed it? No idea, though I suspect they took one look at the Optus logo and sabotaged it. M. thinks I am paranoid. Whatever. I fished a funky phone out of a bin at work and connected it last night and hey-presto! We are connected to the world again.
Today we spent another small fortune having a new power-board installed, with circuit-breakers and so on. Beautiful. And safe. Our intrepid electrician made it up the drive with a little more grace than last time. He even offered to return to do more work for us once the roof is fixed …
The roof. *sigh* We were told it was cactus. In fact, the bank didn't want us to buy this house because the roof was described in a building report as needing replacing. It took us the entire settlement period to persuade them they were wrong, that it didn't need replacing before we moved in. Well, um, they might have been right.
The first descent storm (it has been raining for the last forty days and forty nights) sent sheets of water washing over the gutters and all over the stuff that was sheltering under the eves and under the back verandah—stuff we needed to get into, but couldn't get into, the house.
With the down-pipe cleared, the guttering doesn't leak anywhere near as much, but it ain't water-tight out the back. And crawling around on the roof, meant I got a good look at it, and it is awful: dented everywhere, patched and glued, it should leak like a sieve!
And today I got to clear the gutters at the front. The guttering is fine, but the roof has bowed up, two or three inches clear of the rafters, high enough that you can see right in under the roof, see the rotting insulation and the electrical wiring. High enough that I can't hose the gutters clean after brushing them.
It will certainly not last another winter. I just hope that it lasts the summer and that it doesn't mean we have to wait until the summer of 2011/12 to enclose the car-port.
Speaking of which: the first step in getting the car-port enclosed was trying to establish what sort of cement slab is in it, so we can work out if it will support brick walls etc. To that end I ordered copies of the original plans from council, which arrived shortly after we moved in. What a revelation! I will save the plans for a separate post but one fact needs to be mentioned: the date. I was told when I ordered the plans that this place was built in 1975.
It seems that this is wrong. The plans are dated 16 July 1969. Of course, even if the house were approved and built without delay, the house would not have been completed until early 1970—so it is still Our Seventies House but, it is only just a seventies house. M. thinks that it is possible that it was not built until 1975 … but I think that the 1975 date must refer to something else. I will do some digging and find out.
**The storm brought down two very large branches from our gum trees. One of them—about ten to fifteen meters in length—fell about twenty or thirty meters onto the street number and the drive. The boards and poles were completely destroyed and the drive was blocked. Another branch, long dead, and not quite as large, missed the house by about three meters at the back. I punished this branch by chopping it up and burning it!
Bad branch!!
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