Updates

A lot has been happening lately.

1. We picked our bricks. We wanted to go with a lighter colour, partly for aesthetics and party for environmental and energy concerns. We selected PGH Cement as the base brick colour. We also have a veranda and portico at the front of the house which is ordinarily rendered and then painted. We decided we didn't want to render... to be honest it didn't seem worth the extra $17,000 it was going to cost. But we also didn't relish having to repaint every 5 years. We've been noticing a lot of rendered houses with streams of dried dirt from years of dust and then rivulets formed by the occasional rain. Whereas I think my parents' brick house has been pressure cleaned once in almost 25 years and still looks great.

So we decided to just use a different colour brick for the portico to provide a contrast. We selected PGH Greenway. I say "selected" rather than "agreed" because after three visits to Schofields, we still couldn't agree on a colour. In the end, I was worn down by the fact that we had to make a decision and we didn't seem to be making any progress. Ghost loves it. I.... don't.

2. We received our plans from Masterton last week. Yay!! Only a few minor changes here and there. We're really happy with them and can't wait to get started. We're meeting with Eileen at Masterton tomorrow to go through the changes so hopefully it won't be too much longer after that that we can agree on the final plans and go to council.

3. Eileen recommended Ryan to do our landscape plan and he has been absolutley awesome!! We spoke over the phone about what we intended to do with the yard and I emailed him a very rough draft of our version and what he came back with was fantastic. He really knows what he's doing and we're so happy with the outcome. A bit concerned about what the actual costs of the landscaping will be but we'll come to that when we have to.

We've also decided to do a Colorbond fence around the perimiter. Not sure how our neighbours will react. At the moment we have an old paling fence which is falling apart. It has, at various stages over the last ten years, fallen down almost flat on all three sides. Thanks to the work of Ghost and my father in constantly hammering supporting poles and the like in, it's still standing. If we get any pushback from the neighbours, we might just have to remove our supporting poles. ;)