Kinda goes without saying really,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM!
Love ya loads and loads - can't wait until November!

Just in case you missed it the first time!

Ah bless, the kids have a sleep over in Adam's room. Aren't they lovely when they're like this? For the other 23 hours in the day they're a bag of monkeys!!

As a final picture for this post (we're taking Paul away for a couple of nights as it's Father's Day here on Sunday - I'll update some more when we get back).......



WE HAVE BRICKS!! AND DOOR FRAMES!

If they don't start work by Wednesday, I'll send Sam down to site - it's amazing what he can build with lego....... it's NOT that different, surely! Sorry - promise not to call you Shirley anymore! Have a great weekend ;-)

We have a portaloo!!! I am SO excited!!

I shall be popping down every morning from now on with fresh (scented) toilet paper, finest cotton hand towels and Molton Brown handwash! Ours will be the poshest po on the block! I may even get the local Estate Agents round to give us a valuation!

It rains.......... and the slab gets poured!

Of all the days to pick to pour the slab, they chose Saturday and the day it's rained most all week! We drove via the site on our way to the boat show today - not expecting anything to be going on following yesterday's flurry of activity, and there were three guys trying to level off wet concrete in the pouring rain!

This is the base for the house - Aussie equivalent of foundations.

View from the front door (........one day!).

Where the slab drops down will be our en suite. It has to be lower to allow for waterproofing and the thickness of the tiles.

So, we don't expect there to be a huge amount of activity on the site now for a new weeks. What tends to happen is the slab gets poured, then left to settle and dry out for a few days. Then it gets smoothed and buffed with a power mop thingy before another bit of drying out and the brickies arrive. In between this however, the bricks and window frames normally get delivered to site and sit there looking useless for a few weeks.

So that's the excitement on the house - sorry if I bored you with the pictures of wet concrete, but for us, it's kinda exciting! To think that each one of those pipes will be a drain, sink, bath or toilet....... OK! I'm sad!

The boat show was OK. Didn't buy anything (hoorah!). We saw lots of gorgeous boats, but for us to upgrade, we'd probably want one that we could sleep in and because we have an abnormally large family ;-) it would involve another $100,000!!!! So, we shall dream on and save our shipping expeditions to swimming pool companies and landscapers for the time being.

You’ll be pleased to know there are lots of pictures this week – in the way that Sam chooses his library books!! Well, what a week it’s been. We’ve been up….. we’ve been down – and thank heavens it’s Friday!!

Tuesday was D-Day – that’s D for disaster AND Darcie! We went for a haircut as she wanted her hair to look nice for assembly. I thought I’d booked a respectable hairdressers on a friend’s recommendation, but no – it was a franchise of “Sweeney Todds”. She looked in the mirror and told me she looked ‘hideous’. She’s five, for goodness sakes! She also got very upset when the lady had finished and asked why she had made her look ‘like a boy’. My god, it’s short! Like Victoria Wood’s hairstyle during her ‘unflattering’ period. Never mind – I just hope it grows in time for the school photos in three weeks!

The ‘peak of the week’ was Wednesday and Darcie’s Assembly. The whole class did brilliantly! Everyone who wanted a speaking part did it well and nobody got their lines wrong! Darcie was SO excited and even the Principal made a fuss of her afterwards and came into their classroom afterwards to high-five them all! They were the best cheeky monkeys the school had ever seen!

The star says her lines perfectly in front of 200 pairs of eyes!

The monkeys all sit quietly and wait for their cue.....

There had also been some movement on the site today. They had cleared it all and levelled it and the pegs had been re-marked. Not a lot of excitement – it’s like half a day on and four days off, but I’m sure progress will be made slowly.

Before you ask, NO I didn't flatten it with my bum!

Thursday we had some good news about Paul’s medical tests. He went to the Doc’s for a routine blood test and the Receptionist told him that his results were in…… He’d been last week for an ‘all singing, all dancing’ check on his heart. He has always had chest pains and what with one thing and another decided to get it all fully checked out. He opened the envelope fearing the worst, but it was great news! He’s perfectly fine and fully functioning (well, his heart is, anyhow!).

This is Paul's heart! How amazing is this picture!

To all of those who accused him of being a heartless bas*ard, here's the proof that he actually has one! Funny looking, isn't it? Clever how they get the images though - looks like they've wrenched it from his chest and then shoved it back in again - in reality, he just went through a mini-MRI type machine that whizzed round him. You had to be careful about any metal objects though - apparently if you had any type of metal plpates or screws within your body, they were liable to be whipped out by the magnets! How would that work with a woman with a coil - one minute it was in, the next stuck to an MRI machine - not a good look!

Work has been a bit pants this week and a big deal we were told was ours has fallen at the final fence, however, health is far more important than anything as trivial as the business or where we end up living at the end of the day! You can’t live ANYWHERE if you’re dead, can you? That made no sense whatsoever, but I know what I meant!

Friday they really did get a move on with the site. We now know the name of our site manager and we have the client liaison contact now, so hopefully things will start to pan out. The slab should be going down on Wednesday (give or take 72 hours!!!) and now we have footings (of sorts!). The quote came through for the swimming pool – too expensive to start, but we paced it out on the site today and it’s massive (probably too big, I think – although Paul thinks a pool is preferable to grass as it doesn’t need mowing!). We’ll have to see about the pool….. time and budgets will tell. We also went to see about getting some prices for window treatments and finally got the carpet samples we’ve chased four times!

We have concrete..... we have pipes sticking up..... we have a rates bill for $540!!

It’s been a funny old week what with one thing and another. It’s been lovely to hear from a few mates back in England though, so thank you for making the effort ;-)

Will keep you all updated and post anything hugely exciting – right now after the week we’ve had, I’m going for a lie down in a darkened room with a VERY large gin and tonic!! See you when I sober up..... if that ever happens!

This is a very exciting post - in more ways than one!

This week we should have movement on the house! There are still a few loose ends to tie up with the builders, but this Wednesday, they are due to go to site and re-peg. Then Friday they are due to carry out site works (running the plumbing lines etc, I suppose) then next Wednesday (16th – also Darcie’s class assembly day), they are due to pour the slab!!!!

The Delaney Family on the site of their 'house' It'll be interesting to see how much the kids have grown by the time the house is finished and we can move in!

A final view from the back of our garden looking towards the golf course.

They don’t have foundations like the UK. The whole house is built on a concrete slab. All will become clear once we post the pictures (clear as mud!). This last week we have ordered and paid a deposit for the floor tiles in the house – this is because we want them to match what is going in the en-suite and if we don’t order them at the same time that the builder will, we’ll be unable to match them in 18 month’s time – also theoretically, they should be cheaper too! We have also done the same with the carpet. Ridiculous really when you consider that we haven’t even got any foundations, but we’ve paid a deposit on carpet! Everything is going through such price hikes at the moment, if we can pay a 10% deposit to secure the price, it’s worth doing.

Can you see something?

That's better - looks like a digger to me!!

We went back to see the guy at the show home today that we dealt with when choosing the house and he said the price rises are amazing. Last month alone, one model increased by $40,000!! They up the specification of the house by $20,000 and then increase the price by $40k, so you feel like you’re getting something ‘extra’. Hummmmm! Glad we ordered ours when we did. He also said (on a VERY positive note), that the current build time seems to have dropped to 15 months – rather than the predicted 18! Fifteen months would be excellent and mean we would be in for November 2007, which is well under the two year ‘signing contract to moving in’ time frame we were originally quoted. Fingers crossed, eh? We’re just going to pickle the tradesmen to get them to want to work on our site; the slab goes down – we do a beer run for the lads. The brickies come in – we do a beer run for the lads…. get the picture? If it costs us a few hundred dollars but gets the tradies doing little extras for us, or working weekends, it’ll all be worth it.

I’m going to have to start a separate section of the blog for ‘house updates’ I think. I appreciate for anyone else, twenty photos of our drainage system from every angle may begin to grow tiresome, so I might see if I can restrict it to its own section! I think we’ve got so caught up with the house that we don’t realise how big it’s going to be. It’s not until things like the man in the carpet shop tells us that he could get his whole house in our bedroom and kitchen that it hits home that this is going to be one big house! Paul reckons our old house would fit into it about 3 times!!! Wow! Bring it on!

We’ve got a busy couple of weeks coming up. We’ve got a lunch meeting in Perth on Wednesday with the guy from ADT (sorry Addy – off to day care!). Then the end of the week should be a hive of activity on the plot. Paul’s got a medical appointment on Thursday, so me and Mr Cheese will go into Perth with him for that. Next week is Darcie’s long awaited class assembly. They have been practicising for weeks and have made Monkey masks and maracas shaped like coconuts (they are amazing! They’ve papier mached balls with bits of pasta in, so they make a lovely noise when you shake them, then they have painted them brown and rolled them in brown sawdust, so they REALLY look like coconuts!). They are also going to be sporting monkey tails. I can’t wait to see them. It’s very daunting for them though to be standing in front of four year groups, introducing the Principal and singing and dancing. We’ll see how they all get on.

Last Friday Darcie’s class had a party and invited all the parents to attend. This was because we’d reached the letter ‘P’ in the alphabet, and P was for PARTY! It was cute and we all took along some food and shared it with the kids. They all wore party clothes and spent the whole afternoon playing in the playground as a treat!

We’ve still got lots on our plates with getting another bank account organised with another bank so that we are able to take credit cards. Once again, the Australians seemed to take a very simple task and escalate it into a mammoth job, which takes days to resolve and more people end up getting involved than the entire cast of Ben Hur! Never mind, eh? To be as laid back as the Aussies……. will we ever get there I wonder? They just accept bad service as the norm and appear grateful!

Sam had his annual ‘Lapathon’ at school today. This is to raise funds for the school, by sponsoring the kids to do laps of the Oval (or school field). He was limited to ten laps (thankfully!), otherwise, I think he’d still be there going round and round in a bid to raise more funds for the school and to simultaneously bankrupt Paul and I! Not too difficult as task as Sam seems already to be well on the way to mastering that one!!!

Darcie has another birthday party to attend on Friday, so she’s been with me today to the shop to choose pressie, card and wrapping paper. It’s Ashley’s party, so she wanted to get him something ‘special’ ???

Sam’s starting his birthday countdown soon. He doesn’t really believe in the Birthday Fairy and is convinced that it’s me doing all the donkey work; however, just to hedge his bets, he’s still prepared to have his opinions changed! On his list for this year is a battery for his PSP (he fried the last one!), a new PSP game, a mobile phone, an electric guitar (although I have it on good authority that the birthday fairies wings may not be strong enough to carry this one and she may leave it for Santa to deliver with the use of his sleigh!), a few books and some colouring pencils. On the whole, not a BAD list, considering Sam has usually spent £500 with one page of the Argos catalogue! The trampoline has been a huge hit again and every day the kids enjoy playing on it. I looked out the window one day whilst Sam and Darcie were at school and Adam had pulled his ride-on bike up to the edge of the bounce-aline (as he calls it) and hoisted himself up and was bouncing happily away wearing a t-shirt, a pair of wellies and an exposed bottom – potty training, don’t you know! He was as happy as larry with the wind blowing round his nether regions. I however, got slightly concerned with a circling gang of cockatoos and ushered him back inside quickly. Could have looked like a juicy lunch from a distance and I would like grandchildren one day!

I think that’s all our news for the moment, apart from to say that

MUMS BOOKED HER FLIGHT FOR XMAS!!!

Not that I’m excited or anything!! We haven’t told the kids yet, although I’ve got a feeling I won’t be able to keep it a secret until November, but I’ll give it a damn good go, just to see the looks on their faces. Darcie was speaking to Mum on the phone the other night and asked her when she was coming over? Mum said she would once it started to get a little bit warmer. Darcie went on to tell her in great detail about flying via Hong Kong with Cathay Macific (as she calls them) and warned Mum to take someone with her if she needed the toilet as the loos on a plane are very noisy and scary. ‘You won’t actually get sucked out of the plane’ Darcie told Mum, ‘but it’s very scary, so get one of the Air Hostages to hold your hand!’ Can you imagine???? Probably best not to! As I said before, it’s a very scary place in between Darcie’s ears!

Goodbye xx