Almost a month on, and things are finally starting to come together. The lawn is taking nicely, the driveway is looking good, and the fence is doing its job of keeping the dog in the backyard. Even inside, the house is starting to feel like a home – and it better! The last four weekends have been nothing but back-breaking work. The final tally (at least thus far) for soil moved is just over 20 tons. Thanks to our neighbours, it wasn’t a completely exhausting task.

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Unpacking is a lot like Christmas – each box you open you find stuff you’ve completely forgotten about. Especially if you build a house and it has all been in storage for months!

We’ve spent the better part of the last few week unpacking the intimidating stacks of boxes in our ‘staging area’, but within the same time period, we’ve done a lot more including:

1. The fence installed
2. Concrete poured for the driveway, walkway, front patio, two backyard patios
3. Shovelling 3 tons of road base for the side of the house (stones and pavers to follow)
4. Moved 20 tons of topsoil and mixing in to the terrible clay soil we’ve got
5. Laying 160 sqm of turf
6. Did I mentioned we moved house?

It’s truly amazing how much more work there is when moving into a new home rather than one that’s been occupied before! You’ve got to think about stuff like the fencing, driveway, mailbox, services (ie. Telstra, Foxtel, etc.) and in our case – turf so the dog doesn’t bring dirt and mud into the house every time he needs to go outside.

In addition to all this, we decided to take carpet and tiling out of contract which meant trying to schedule these guys in as well – all before the furniture even arrived. Phew!

But, we’re in. We are living in our new home that has been a long time coming, and it’s great. Unfortunately with all the activity and the different projects we’ve set upon ourselves, I haven’t even taken my camera out of it’s bag yet, let alone even post for awhile. I do promise to take pictures soon, so stay tuned. We’re still here – and we’ll continue to post about our adventures.

Hope all is well out there in internet-land!