Our New House

We moved into our new home this weekend, and it was a really horrible experience, as I expected. We were up til 2am on Friday night still doing some last minute packing, and when I finally got into bed, my entire body was aching, and we hadn't even started moving yet! Saturday, predictably, was painful and drawn-out. At least it was a beautiful day though. When we moved into the apartment 14 months ago, it was pouring down with rain. THAT was a craptastic day, so I do have something to be thankful for this time around. But we finally managed to get everything moved to the house (large items taken by removalists, and small things taken in our 2 cars over several trips back and forth). The apartment is getting professionally cleaned today, and then we hand over the keys, and then we never have to go back there again! Woohoo~!

It isn't that the apartment we'd been living in was that bad - it was actually quite large; brand new with a nice kitchen, large bathrooms, air con & heating etc. But it was dark, unfriendly, and within a massive complex. Our courtyard was overshadowed by the balconies of neighbouring units, and the whole place had a very sterile feel to it. Furthermore, we never bothered furnishing it or making it "homely" because it was always a transitional "temporary" place to stay until we bought our house. And for that reason, we never had friends over, EVER. I've been busting to have a dinner party or house warming, or even a poker night, for so long, and now we can finally do that.

We spent all day on Saturday moving into the house. It's funny how much you don't think about, or just completely miss noticing, when you are inspecting a property to buy, only to be massively surprised when you actually move into the place. This house comes with plenty of surprises. But each one is a little reminder that this is our house, and we can spend the time, energy and money necessary to fix it, if we want to. The truth is, we are tossing up between doing a huge renovation, or just knocking the house down completely and starting from scratch. I don't really want to knock-down and re-build, but it would certainly give us a lot of choice of what to do with the place.

But for now, its a really neat house, with beautiful lush green views out of every window, shiney polished floors, a decent kitchen, and one recently renovated bathroom (although the seperate toilet is a bit of a pain, though that has its advantages too). We're planning to stay in the house as it is (fixing bits and bobs when necessary - e.g. we currently have no water in the kitchen, and we need some hooks in the toilet for towels, and we need some sort of shelving unit in the bathroom for toiletries... things like that), and after about 8 months to 1 year, we will start the renovation (or re-build). I started looking at magazines last night for inspiration (thanks again Cassy for that awesome Real Living subscription - I love it so much, I'm going to renew it), and we're going to start a folder with all our ideas, and get some advice about quotes and designs over the next several months.

But first thing we need to do now that we have our own house, is furnish it with our very own stuff! So excited! We'll have to wait until next weekend to start looking for stuff, because this coming weekend we are off to the Hunter Valley!! Yaay! Here are is a pic I took this morning of the view into our backyard.