....cos I haven't posted anything for a very long time. Ahem. I have been busy. The usual excuse I know but there it is.

We have now shifted into our new house! Hooray! We only lost one couch in the move, it decided to fly off the trailer and roll down the road and is now a little too battered to be let into the house. Fortunately a friend who was helping us move was behind the trailer when it all happened and he stopped and hauled the couch off the road. Gah. Anyway the couch has a new home in the garage and if we throw a rug over it no one will ever know that all the corners have been scraped off (except for you guys and you aren't saying - right? right?). Its pair will end up in the library and we will buy a new couch for the living room. So it wasn't so bad in the end.

The house itself is reasonably comfortable but there are a number of little niggly things to be fixed and some much larger issues to be dealt with in the coming weeks. At the top of the niggly list is putting new washers in the washing machine taps. It is not fun to be dealing with a very leaky washing machine late in the evening when you really want to go to bed and there is a spreading pool of water in the laundry. The other niggly thing is the back door, which I can't open without damaging my hands. I think the snib is sticking, or the handle. Not sure how to fix that yet but I think the internets will probably provide some handy hints. Or someone at Bunnings maybe. The bigger things to deal with are the insulation and the kitchen. Our house is absolutely freezing unless you have the gas heater going continuously and that is going to get very expensive. So this weekend we are off to buy bats for the roof. That should help a great deal initially and then later on we will look at pumping insulation into the walls and double glazing the windows. The kitchen is a much bigger problem than I initially thought and we are going to have to get onto renovating it ASAP. We have only been in the house a week and it is already pissing us off. The cupboards are too narrow, the shelves the wrong spacing, the drawers and too shallow, its cramped, ugly and generally annoying. I think we will be getting people out to give us a quote next week.

I know this sounds all a bit negative but we really are happy to be in our new house. We now have space to breathe and we have a library, a craft room and a spare bedroom. The price of getting these things though was a house that needed renovating and once it is done it will be absolutely beautiful.

Anyway thats enough house blather from me. If you want to come and see it yourself the address will be in a friends only post to follow. Or email me for the address.

It looks like we are finally going forward on the purchase of our house! Hooray, hooray, calloo-callay :) We ran into a few problems over the last couple of weeks with the bank holding everything up and being unsure about giving us a loan because Rob is a contractor. However our lovely mortgage broker went and had a meeting with them and convinced the loans manager that we were a good bet and finally on Monday our loan was approved! It is such a good feeling to know that it has all been sorted (knock wood that nothing else will go wrong). We are expecting to sign the exchange papers on Friday and at that point everything is pretty much final and it is just a matter of waiting for settlement to happen. Of course in that time we will be putting our house on the market and of course cooking May Crown, so its not like we won't have lots of things to occupy us.

I have found photos of our hopefully-soon-to-be-new house on the internet. You can see them here: http://www.independent.com.au/property_search.php?d=BELCONNEN&suburb=MELBA&lp=&up=400000&orderby=&sk=0&p=42046

As you will see in the photos the house comes with a lot of its original 1970s features still in place but hopefully not for too long! We are already planning some drastic changes like knocking out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, ripping up the vinyl and polishing the floor boards and putting in a new kitchen. There will also be some little jobs that we will do like new light fixtures, changing handles on doors and cupboards, painting doors and windowsills etc, etc. There is also the vegie garden to be prepared and a new bathroom to think about. I'm thinking that there will be a fair bit of renovating adventures covered here over the next few years, hope that it won't bore you all!

Thanks to everyone for your good wishes over the house, it is starting to sink in that we are actually going to do this:) Anyway this morning we went to the real-estate agents office and put down the please-don't-let-anyone-else-make-offers-on-the-house bond and signed some paperwork. We now have two weeks to come up with the rest of the money or the house goes back on the market. So monday will be sorting out lawyers and finance and hopefully we will get everything done. Once we have the money we exchange contracts and then we are looking to settle towards the end of May. We could settle before then but since we are cooking May Crown on the 12th of May there is absolutely no freaking way that I will consider moving before then.

I have to say that I am so, so glad that we made the offer last night, otherwise we would have lost the house. Anything under $400k is selling like a hotcake here in Canberra, and since the price was just dropped down to $390k this week, there were quite a number of people viewing the house today and a couple of them tried to make offers. Sad for them we had already been accepted, so they have to go on a waiting list. Now we just have to make sure that we get our finance through in time. Once we have that we can start dreaming and planning about all the redecorating we are going to do :)

Rob and I have just made an offer on a house and it has been accepted!!!!!

If it wasn't for the two glasses of wine I have just consumed I think I would be hyperventilating. This is exciting but freaky but very, very exciting. Don't quite know what to do with myself. Anyway the house we are buying is a 4 bedroom, double garage, big back yard with established fruit trees brick house in Melba. Unfortunately there aren't any photos on the internet. The house needs a serious amount of renovation to make it spectacular but it is perfectly liveable as it is right now and should last us for the next 15 years or so.

Okay time to sit in a little daze and see the world spin.