House Clip Show: Five years!
As mentioned in the previous episode, there would likely not be very many big-ticket items ticked off this year. I did manage to fill the hole in where the doorbell/intercom was, and just this week we replaced the exhaust fans in both bathrooms as one had packed up irreparably.
The front lawn still looks like a disaster, taking longer than expected to recover from the biological wasteland that was gravel on top of plastic sheeting. If you’re down the street looking at it, it appears to be a lawn, but when you’re up close it’s still very patchy, and the NBN trench line is still plainly visible despite a couple of attempts at overseeding. Sabriena decided to switch from the Ryegrass combo we had good luck with in the back of the back yard to Kikuyu, which is locally divisive but I actually quite like it as you need stuff-all water for it to stay green, but it’s slow going. We do have a rather nice crop of clover in one portion too, which the bees enjoy.
Unfortunately the Pittosporum and the Yucca on the south side of the front yard will have to come out, but as yet that hasn’t happened and I’m not excited at the prospect of digging out a significant stump or two near our gas line, so I just try not to look at them. We did buy a bird bath for the back yard, but irritatingly the local magpie clan continue to prefer the dish under the tap instead, and I still haven’t put a camera out on it.
Sabriena painted the back toilet - she opted for “watermelon pink”. We weren’t sure about it, I figured it would look like an old lady’s house, but it actually came out okay and is a fun little splash of colour for an otherwise tremendously serious room.
It’s not really house-related, but I’m stretching here… I mounted an external GPS antenna under the TV antenna and our time server performance improved dramatically. I also got rid of the giant Telstra desk I had and put a wrap-around countertop in my office which also isn’t quite finished yet. Furthermore, I put two small shelves on the rear wall, which has me thinking that I may end up putting the closet doors back on and using the closet for hidden storage instead of a display? Undecided yet. A blog entry was forthcoming on my office but I’m still not quite happy with it enough to show it yet.
Finances: We’ve stuck pretty well to the plan, assuming the house value has not moved we now own approximately 57% of it, and if by some miracle we can continue doing exactly what we’ve been doing we have about 6 years left to pay. Each extra month we manage to pay more than the minimum pushes the stick forward on the nosedive of the graph that makes me very happy to see.
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