Almost a year after I've moved inty my house, I've finally found the time and willingness to prepare a couple of images.

That's the actual set of keys; most belong to window-locks and are duplicates anyway (and Aussie construction being flimsy, are no match for a determined intruder).

The moving process. Need I say more than that I don't like moving?

The state on the very first evening: the living room filled with stuff, Conny needing to be brought to TKD training, and me being dead tired (as the stuff is heavy and the house is about 35m from the garage). The second image is what became Conny's room, the last my bedroom.

I've got no girlfriend but I've got books to keep me company. This is before the renovation work started.

A Kookaburra just outside the living room window. Noisy buggers, but beautiful.

The house from the wilderness hill (looking due West): the windows belong to the living room, the kitchen is behind the laundry hoist, bath and toilet are on the left where the pergola is and the main bedroom is where the jungle creeped onto the roof. The smaller part beyond the jungle belongs to the neighbor, and the dirt pile is gone by now, too. The last picture shows the living room window, the main entrance, Conny's room with the blue curtains and my office with the yellow curtains. The footpath (now properly done up) leads to the garage.

The laundry is big enough for a makeshift server cabinet, the bathroom was serviceable (though I'm thinking of redoing that extensively in the future) but uninspiring and more so due to the barracks-style lighting.
Note the fugly lights in the living room, the kitchen and everywhere else; the ugly cream colour of the walls doesn't show on the photos, and the carpet was way worse in reality, too.

Then a gardener took care of the jungle; cost me some bucks but it was worth the effort: hey, there's light in the bedroom!
The middle picture shows the kitchen window nicely.

And then we (Conny and I) started working. First the office: minus carpet, plus filler, plus paint for everything: walls and ceiling, door and windowframes (yuck), doors themselves, cupboard frame...I don't mind wall painting but working with enamel sucks plenty.

Wittgenstein schau oba.

Almost trusting the delivery date for the floor boards (laminate pseudo-timber), we continued with ripping Conny's room apart.
Carpeting in Oz: thin wooden strips with nails poking up are nailed directly into the concrete (wince), spongy underlays are plopped onto the concrete and all this is covered with carpet. Skirting boards are nailed into the walls (wince). That's it, and it's fucking ugly to look at and to work with.

Splitch-splotch.

Some outside work had to be done, too: the pergola posts needed to be raised to keep the termites out, and that required some creative use of post raisers and a flex. The chemical termite barrier needed redoing, too, and for that I ripped all the pavers out one day, and put them back in three days later - not really a lot of fun.

But, like every good Aussie, I've got me a barbie! (and a bit of other outdoors furniture.) The inaugural use of the BBQ was when &rw and his GF visited.

Other things also visit very often: that lizard has been around the house for ages; once I almost whippersnipper'd it in the high grass before it scampered away. The frog on the kitchen window just showed up one evening; the gecko on the toilet door seems to be a more or less frequent visitor.

The final phase can begin! The flooring boards are here, only a mere two months late...That load was horrible for both the car (it sagged pretty badly on the way back from the store) and my back (carrying the packs from the garage to the house). And everything coincided exactly with Sandra arriving for a couple of months of vacation.

First the office room, then Conny's room and then the World! (manic laughter)
Of course all the stuff has to be shifted around again to make room for working on the other rooms.

At least that kind of laminate was of the "klick"-type so no glueing was required and work proceeded reasonably fast. The incongruous beige lump of hardware on the last picture is the LaserJet 4MP I picked up at an auction that day for au$11.

Doing the hallway was...interesting, with all the weird shapes to cut the boards into.

Ok, time to move all this...into that.

This time painting the frames after doing the floor, due to time constraints. My timing pissed off Sandra to no end.

And finally the bedroom. Once more moving things out of the way, ripping out the carpet, painting everything and finally the flooring boards. But hey, it looks good afterwards so I'm happy. The potty and the kitchen got their walls and ceilings painted, as did the bathroom. Oh, and all the bloody window frames, too, but I've still got the main entry door to paint...sigh.

At some point I set up the servers in the laundry more nicely...well, somewhat more nicely. Notice the round cable cutout and the rounded corners: if I do things, I try to do them nicely. (Occasionally I don't start doing them for ages, though.)

And I borrowed Anitta's sewing machine to adapt curtains for the kitchen window. Eventually I did even get the seams going in straight lines! ;-)

More billy's for the office and the living rooms, nice new lighting for the bathroom and the kitchen, and for the living room/entry area I adapted an IKEA system to provide this post-based rack.

The current "final" state. Next thing on the todo list: completely replacing the kitchen.