Moving Date Set!

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We’ve booked tickets for Tamara and Caleb to fly down to Adelaide for about two weeks from December 31 – January 12. While they are down there I will be taking the time to move from our old house to our new one. As well as moving I’ll also be finishing up some of the work that I need to on the house before they get home. Hopefully with them not here I will be able to get a lot more done and it should alleviate some stress.

I’m going to rent a moving truck and a bunch of people from work are going help me with the house move, which will be good. Last time I got help moving though a lot of our furniture ended up getting scratched up, so I will be a bit more picky about who I get to help out this time. Then again, beggars can’t be choosers…

Non-Fitted Fittings

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This is my second post today in my “Renovation Frustrations” category.

My frustration this time is Non-Fitted Fittings.

These are the fittings that the previous owners have placed where they are meant to go, but not actually attached them properly to where they were meant to go. In my case it was the dead bolt on one of the front French doors. While I was attaching some weatherstripping to stop drafts the heads on three of the four screws holding the dead bolt in place actually fell off!

It seems to me that when the previous owners had installed the dead bolts they much have tightened up the screws too much and “almost” broken the heads off. Then when I applied a bit of pressure, they popped off.

So now I need to somehow remove the old screws which are still in the door, minus the heads, and purchase and install some new brass screws. Anyone know the best way to actually remove what’s left of the the screws?

Soft Screws

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As I have been working on the house there are few things that really frustrate me. As such I have added a category called “Renovation Frustrations”. I’ll be writing different things that I find frustrating in doing my renovations in this category.

So the first one is “Soft Screws”.

These are the screws that you get with flat packs or in my case DIY blinds that I was mounting in the front two rooms of our house.

Because I am screwing into actual timber, not plaster or drywall, I have to apply a fair bit of force to get the screws in. I choose to do it by hand because I can usually control the force better that way but even with pre-drilling the holes I STILL managed to strip at least one of the screws that came in the packaging.

I don’t know if anyone else out there has this problem, or if it’s just an Australian thing (I don’t think so though), but let me know in the comments…

Out of the House for Three Weeks!!!

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When we enquired about lifting our old house we were told the we had to be out of the house for 8-hours during the actual lifting, but other than that and a couple of hours here and there we would be fine to keep living in the house. With that in mind we have been planning to lift the house as soon as possible, which looks like mid-March to mid-April.

Last week though we were told that we actually have to be out of the house for three weeks during the lifting! That’s quite a change from the 8-hours that we were told by the company we talked to a few years ago. To top it off our new baby is due to be born on April 14th!

If you check out my previous article, House Lifting and Restumping Schedule, you can see a step by step guide to how the house will be lifted. We will need to be out of the house for steps 8 – 12 (maybe 13), which is about 3 – 4 weeks worth of work. That’s of course if everything goes to plan and there isn’t any adverse weather…