Houses currently owned: still two Snail’s pace renovations Wine-soaked celebration Ted’s okay. Better than okay, as it happens
Monday, July 12, 2004
No luck at this weekend’s open house – but then again, nobody stole anything this time around, so I guess things could be worse. It’s starting to get demoralising, though, having to give up most of our Saturdays cleaning up the house and garden, just to have people race from room to room for a couple of minutes, compliment us on the tidiness or the colour scheme or the backyard or whatever, and leave.
Since the change in ACT legislation requires that vendors have to organise their own building and pest inspections, which are valid for three months, we’ve decided that we might as well keep trying to sell until the end of September, and in the meantime keep renovating the new house. If we haven’t had a result by then, we have a couple of choices – rent out the old house (bad because there are no tax benefits), rent out the new house (which means shifting Fiona’s brother out and having tenants potentially trash the work we’ve already done, but tax-wise a sound idea) or just huddle in a corner with one huge mortgage and no extra cash coming in (not really an option). None of these options is particularly compelling…
As opposed to those ones you see on TV, our renovation of the two upstairs rooms is proceeding at a less than blitzy rate. Yesterday we managed to more or less finish the preparations (in the process discovering that even strict adherence to the “measure twice, cut once” principle still can’t eliminate the possibility of dumbarsed carpentry errors), except for some patching work that we’ll probably knock off tonight. Then it’s all go for everybody’s favourite bit – the painting. Anyway, we’ll have the first two rooms – and the first indication of whether our colour scheme is going to work out – done pretty soon.
Had a quiet little do for Jimbo’s 30th over at Ian and Sonnie’s place on Saturday night. Or at least, most of us had a quiet time. Norbet the Deaf Staffy, on the other hand, demonstrated extremes of confusion and agitation at all the guests, resulting in much psychotic behaviour, several expulsion outside and, in the end, my getting drenched in a very nice 2002 Brown Brothers merlot. But apart from that, we had a fun night, and Ginge and Son gave us each a voucher for a massage for our birthdays. I think we’ll probably use them the day after our first full painting session.
With magicdog vs. Tokyo not updated for several weeks, we’d been beginning to wonder whether Ted had fallen foul of a dodgy karaoke session or something. But no, there’s an email in my inbox this morning, the contents of which I am dying to divulge (but won’t because presumably at some point he will mention it in his own weblog), which confirms he’s both alive and internet-able. Still jobless and functionally illiterate in his adopted country, sad to say, but definitely in one piece.
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