Over the past two days we’ve had our landscaping package installed. We paid a little bit extra to get them to do the grass in the back yard as well.
Having it installed makes such an immediate and significant effect. It also marks the last of the major items to get the house to that comfortable state. We’ve still got a few things we want to do such as purchasing a shed, getting a side gate installed and installing paving down the side of the house but these can all wait.
Onto the important bit:
With the house jobs dying down (well they are still there I’m just paying less attention to them) I’ve had a chance to start working through the stack.
Assassins Creed 2 was a great play. I know this game doesn’t get a lot of love and really divides its audience, with on of the biggest complaints being repetitive gameplay. It’s a complaint I’ve always understood but I still love the style and story of the game and there is enough progression in the gameplay to keep it interesting. In its second showing, they’ve tried to address these issues with some minigame type encounters. Things like a horse and cart chase and a carnival competition do mix it up. Once again the story was the stand out feature for the game, ending with yet another massive cliffhanger ending. I can’t wait to play number 3 but I hope they don’t put too much focus into introducing multiplayer at the cost of advancing single player.
Dragon Age Origins is yet another great showing from Bioware in the RPG space. If you enjoyed Mass Effect (or didn’t) you’ll probably enjoy this. The freedom and flexibility in how you can play the game is a nice change and the combat system balances complexity and elegance for a great experience. I know many people who weren’t fans of Mass Effect who have now gone back to play it since playing Dragon Age. Mass Effect 2 launches today, with any luck my delivery will rock up before the weekend.
The Chronicles of Riddick – Assault on Dark Athena is the successor to Escape from Butcher Bay on the original Xbox. Butcher Bay was one of the last titles to launch on the Xbox and sadly it demonstrated what a powerful system it was and what it could have been. Sadly for Dark Athena, they haven’t really progressed much from the Xbox game. It’s as though they built it from the Xbox version and then gave it a touch of paint for the 360. That said this game still oozes with atmosphere. If you’re into sci-fi and particularly Riddick you should love this game. The voice acting is fantastic and really helps to build on the visuals and amazing audio. As a bonus, they included a remastered Butcher Bay on the same disc so something for those of you who never played it or want to replay it on the 360.
Up – Yes the one about the house attached to balloons. I’m a sucker for platformers (give me Rayman, Spyro, Banjo Kazooie) and a massive fan of lego games. So when they took the charm of Up and slapped it over the framework for a lego game I couldn’t be happier. It’s simple clean fun and while I’m half way through the game at about 4 hours down I certainly won’t be disappointed when I do finish it. Should you see it for $20 at your local games store and you enjoy any of the lego franchise games, its certainly worth a look.
Darksiders borrows heavily from the Zelda franchise and any of the button mashers (take your pick from God of War, Devil May Cry etc) and pops out this beautiful heavily stylised baby. A lot of people have critiscised just how heavily it borrows (ok steals) from other franchises but that doesn’t change the fact that it is great fun to play. Its like saying that an icecream sandwich is a terrible invention because it steals icecream and biscuits and combines them, it is truly the king of icecreams. The only criticism I can make is that it is a relatively easy game even when played on apocalyptic but its still good for 20-40 hours depending on how much you like to explore.
Super Mario Wii takes us back to the good old days of 2D Mario. While there are only a few new additions to the game play from the good old days of Mario its still great fun to play and an excellent one to play with a friend. Amanda and I are working through it co-operatively where as Dan and Camo are playing in Bastard mode, trying to find the most ways to possibly kill each other before completing the game. If you like old school Mario go buy it, its as simple as that.
With Mass Effect 2 out today, Bioshock 2 on the 9th of February its very much a relief to see Splinter Cell conviction pushed back to April. I’ve set myself an ambitious goal of getting more value out of my PS3 and trying the dark side of gaming. I’m playing Heavenly Sword which isn’t bad but does show itself as a launch title. I’ve always found the six axis function to be gimmicky yet surprisingly this launch title game got it right allowing you to control the flight of an arrow or cannon ball.
I’ve never played a god of War so I’ll be looking to tackle the trilogy soon, same goes for Metal Gear so MGS4 is also on the list. Uncharted and in particular Uncharted 2 are right up there. Whats disappointing is that Sony’s platinum range sells for $50, surely these titles should be $30 by now.
The floorboarding went particularly well today with the majority of the diffilcult cutting out of the way. It’s not so much that the cuts are hard to do but its really time consuming having to measure everything out and think about how everything will join together.
Getting around the island bench was somewhat of a relief. I started with boards along the lounge/dining side and then moved up both sides, accross the top I put in a row that fortunately lined up with its counterpart on the opposite side. After that it was pretty smooth sailing to get to the all important fridge recess.
With the majority of the kitchen done I moved back to the entry way to make getting the fridge in a little easier. I’m fairly optimistic that we should get everything finished tomorrow, with the hall, pantry, store and utility to go.
Amanda B came around and helped Amanda and her mum unpack the years of kitchwares that Amanda has hoarded away. They washed about 7 sinkfulls of dishes and the cupboards are now packed to the hilt.
I do need to thank everyone who has helped over the past few days. Av and Leah for their help painting, flooring and providing goodie baskets, Jess who also came out to help paint, Amanda’s mum who has been out pretty much every day this week with car loads of boxes and providing help wherever it is needed, and of course Amanda Brumley for her help today.
Tomorrow I get to go and argue with Parry’s carpets over their fairly dodgy sales pitch. We bought a package through them for 73m2 of carpet. By my calculations our floor coverings (excluding the theatre which we paid for seperately) are 72m2 they are claiming its well over to the tune of about $860. They also under quoted us by about 8 packs of floor boards, again another $800. They sold us the boards delivered and then when it came to get them delivered they insisted that they outright don’t do delivery. Finally the cost for getting the boards laid when we signed up was $1000 if we decided we wanted it done or got stuck half way through, its now $1850.
I’m suprised by their lack of foresight in dealing with customers. The only customers they should treat this badly are the ones with one foot in the grave as they probably won’t be a repeat customer (unless they are going for the shag lined coffin). Amanda and I are at the age that we’ll buy carpet/floor covers up to 10 times if not more in our lifetimes. Thats 10 sales over 50 years that Parry’s will likely never see.
Today the battle of the boards continues with us hitting some of the harder parts of the floor. We’ve got some crazy angles and then working around the benches is never easy. Worst of all we’re onto splitting boards. I would kill for a table saw about now I’m going through jigsaw blades by the dozen splitting boards longways.
Anyways some dodgy phone pics for those interested
Today was day 1 of our week of “home improvements” getting the house up to something more livavble. After a bit of a slow start this morning driving to Rockingham Bunnings we got a start on the floorboards.
We made the mistake of buying a non-cloth gaffer tape to stick the black plastic down that acts as a water proof membrane. Even better it was yum cha brand resulting in a tape that was diffilcult to work with and didn’t really fulfil its primary function of sticking to stuff. The cloth stuff despite costing a whole $4.50 a roll is well worth it.
Like they say the first two to three rows took the longest to get down. They aren’t particularly hard to do, just more time consuming. Once you’ve got those rows down you can just lay on row upon row without needing to fiddle with spacings.
We’re hoping to get the rest of the living and hopefully the kitchen done tomorrow. The entryway would be a nice bonus.
On the weekend Amanda and I got an early start digging a target 5 soak wells (from a total 9 required). The 5 we are putting in are basically the front and side and need to go in before the fencing and landscaping is done. The 4 remaining are the rear and neighbour side so they can wait a bit before we get to those. We’re actually looking at a rainwater tank for 2 of the downpipes.
We got to the block at about 7:45 unpacked the car and looked at the services diagram within the metre box. We of course didn’t want to hit any gas, water, phone or worse sewer lines. Once everything was marked off we had manage to knock out two holes in about an hour. Each hole is about 1.4m deep and around 700mm round.
What makes the first two holes even more impressive is that Amanda managed to find the gas main and I managed to find the sewer main. Fortunately at the depth we were at we couldn’t get even the short handled shovel down the hole to dig in and effective manner so we were using buckets to scrape sand out of the bottom so the pipes weren’t at risk of being damaged. As a result of finding these pipes we both had to shift our holes about 30cm, not a big deal but not the best thing when you’ve just dug a little over a metre down.
At this point the day was starting to heat up and we needed more buckets, a stanley knife and sun screen so we put in a call to Av. While I worked on filling the first two holes with gravel, constructing the soak wells and burying them, he and Amanda knocked out another two holes. If ever Av tires of DB Administration he could find a career in soakwell digging or buried treasure hunter, I did after all suggest that there might be doubloons below our property.
Around this time, Jarred also stopped by to lend a hand helping to knock out soak well number 5 and doing the trenches to the downpipes. We ended up finishing around 11:45, 5 soak wells in 4 hours was a pretty decent rate.
Thanks to Av and Jarred for all their help on the day. And don’t worry Leah, we’ll save you at least one.
It has been a few weeks since I last posted and while I want to say not a lot has happened since that would be far from the truth.
Back on the 5th of October we had our PCI meeting. The pictures with this post were taken a little bit before this but the state of the house is pretty much the same.
Our site supervisor Quentin pushed really really hard for a perfect PCI, ultimately I think he was aiming for there to be no second inspection. He even got other site supervisors not assigned to our house to come in and look at it with a fresh set of eyes. On the whole he’s done an awesome job.
We found about 15 items on the day, almost all of them are cosmetic and really had we of just walked throught he house we would never have spotted them. The three “worst” ones were a slightly corroded drawer handle in the kitchen, a wardrobe hanging rail with some rust appearing and some scratches in the glass of the study french doors. None of this would have stopped us from moving in.
Handover is booked for the 16th of October so not long to go now.
Amanda stopped by the house yesterday and found that the mirrors and showerscreens has been fitted throughout the house. Also there are signs that the final electrical and plumbing are nearing completion with powerpoints and downlights being fitted.
Here’s some very random pictures of a few things that have progressed:
Well sort of the countdown to the thing before the final countdown.
We’re booked in for our 1st Practical Completion Inspection (PCI) on October 5th. That’s only 11 days, or 280 hours, or 16857 minutes, or 1011420 seconds from now.
At this stage there are going to be a couple of things that we need the builder to fix up. That said by the time we raise them they’ve usually already fixed them so we might be pleasantly surprised come October 5th. Worst case scenario they have 10 days to fix anything that we report which gives us a handover date of October 19th at the latest.
To give you an idea of the magnitude of this historic event here are a few things that have been fortunate enough to share the date October 5:
- Portugal overthrows its monarchy and declares itself a republic.
- The first episode of the famous comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired on BBC.
- The first official version of the Linux kernel, version 0.02, is released.
- We welcomed to this Earth Bob Geldof, Clive Barker, Bernie Mac, Guy Pearce, Grant Hill and Kate Winslet
- We farewelled Dr. William H. Dobelle
Given that these events will forever be in our PCI meeting’s shadow I felt it was worth letting them share the limelight today.
Just a quick update. This week has been fairly quiet with lots of little odds and ends being finished off. As far as we can tell the only things left now are:
- Paving
- Shower Screens, Mirrors and Sliding Doors for the bedrooms (all through the same company)
- Final plumbing/electrical (if any)
- Final paint coats
Earlier in the week we noticed that the builder had painted what we now know to be the barge the wrong colour. Unfortunately while we discussed at great length with our pre-start consultant the colours we wanted our flaring hand gestures were not enough. Fortunately she did remember the conversation and agreed that it should be changed.
I’ve included photos of the appropriately coloured barge as well as our front door.
shay | 
02 2nd, 2010| 