My tradie's curse strikes again ...

I just don't seem to have much luck picking tradies to do work at this house. 

The concreters were dodgy as slightly lacking in customer service and work ethics (still waiting for them to come back and seal the coloured concrete "liquid limestone" and we've been here 18 months!)

I think the painters I chose to paint all the areas with high ceilings used water based sealer instead of the oil based sealer I know the walls needed .. but we'll just have to wait and see on that one.

And then there's the landscaper.  He seemed like such a good bloke (and still does) but I think he's just too young/disorganised/lacks time management skills to be in business for himself.  I suppose I should have learned from how long the front yard took to be done but I thought I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and booked him to do the back yard, which he started in November. 

I don't know if he underquoted or was just sick of the job but he just really wasn't interested in finishing it off.  It took us threatening to post nasty things the truth on his facebook page for him to finally come back and finish the job ... in February!  It isn't done to the standard that we would have liked but it is finally done so I'm just going to live with it and see what happens ...

Woohoo .. we have air con!!

Thanks to my darling mum, we now have ducted reverse cycle air conditioning through the whole house.

After a lot of investigation, I gave Peter a couple of different options and togeether we decided on a system that had the ability to set and maintain a different temperature in each room.  It was advetised as having 'no dump zone' which was a big selling point for me as it meant that there wouldn't be a zone that was on constantly even when not required.

The ceiling vents are the same as those used for evaporative air con which surprised me as I thought refrigerative air con needed different outlets.  Turns out it doesn't .. learn something new all the time.

The compressor unit was put outside our ensuite window to avoid any of the other bedrooms having to put up with the noise.  It's not actually very noisy but we weren't sure and thought better safe than listening to the whingeing!

It's been in for a couple of weeks now and it works well.  I'm a bit scared of what the power bills will be like but we'll just have to wait and see.  Can't be worse than the first one ... $900+!!

Overall I'd say we're happy with it as it doesn't matter if it's humid or just hot, unlike evaporative which only works well in hot, dry weather.

One of the only things I'm not happy with is that I like to feel a breeze .. it makes me feel cooler .. and this system doesn't push that much air through to make a breeze.  It just feels cooler in the room which you notice when you first walk in but after a while, I find I have to turn a fan on to get the air circulating.

The other thing is that although the system was advertised as having 'no dump zone', it actually does have one but they have just called it soemthing different .. pressure relief or something like that.  What that means is that the boys's hallway, which never gets hot due to having no direct sunlight and being on the south side of the house, now gets all the 'excess air' produced when the system is trying to cool any other area.  This makes it colder than the rest of the house with the boys' rooms being even colder than they should be. 

I'm going to try to get the dump zone moved to the front hallway, where it would be better placed but I don't know if they can move it that far from the main unit in the ceiling space and then we'd have to patch the ceiling as well.

On the positive side, at least we have air con!!

Our first decorating disaster ...

Even though we have the keys, we decided to do a few things to the house before moving in, like sealing all the concrete floors that aren't going to be tiled, put up curtain rods in every room, put up the sunblock curtains I bought on major sale about a year ago that have been sitting in a removalist box for ages, etc, etc, etc.

I was busily sealing the boys' bedroom floors (to keep the dust down) while Pete was busy putting up curtain rods. Off in my own little world, all of sudden I heard Pete yelling for me. Thinking he had hurt himself, I dropped the roller (into the tray of sealant splashing it everywhere, including all over myself!) and ran for the spare room, expecting blood or broken limbs, only to find him nowhere to be seen and a spray of water the size of Old Faithful spewing from the wall.


Seconds later the fountain of water stopped at which point I realised where Peter was .. out the front turning off the mains. (Thank goodness this house only has a 5 metre driveway and not a 35 metre one like the last house!) Pete came back inside and explained that he been happily drilling holes for the curtain rod brackets when all of a sudden, water just started gushing everywhere .. at full mains pressure! The little tiny 6.5mm wide hole pictured below let enough water into the room to soak the whole floor and the pressure was high enough that it hit the opposite wall 4 metres away.

The opposite wall contains the built-in robe with its lovely fibreboard sliding doors and brand new laminate shelving, all of which was thoroughly soaked. We grabbed a stack of old towels that were already at the house (must have known we'd need them!) and dried things up as best we could. Then we sat down and stressed out about how much it was going to cost to fix.

The remaining water after we mopped up

After whingeing for a while about "what a stupid place to put a water pipe" and "how are we going to fix it?", I thought it was worth a shot to call the builder and ask why there was a water pipe in the wall, right where a normal sane person would drill to install a curtain rod bracket. Surprise, surprise, the woman on the other end of the phone agreed it wasn't the brightest of things to have done and arranged for their plumber to contact us to get it fixed.

The plumber's first question when he phoned was "what have you done to my water pipe?" to which I responded "MY water pipe has a neat little hole in it because YOU put it in a very stupid place and now MY spare room has an indoor fountain that we don't want!" He arranged to come and fix it the next day with no mention of who was paying for it so we decided that we would just wait and see if we ended up with a bill in the mail. (Another example of the new mentality of refusing to get stressed over things we couldn't really control).

And, for those who just have to know these things, the curtain rod bracket still isn't in ...