I realise I've confused many of you with my writing about moving and minimalising, and renovating the new house, and where I'm living right now. I'm confused as heck. My brain is making lists in it's delirious sleep. Yesterday, with Jamie at work, I was trying to co-ordinate when we'd stay at the new house and how to coordinate the kitchen delivery and clean up the old house for yet another viewing. My brain is fried on all sides, charcoaled on many.

So, to be clear, we're living at the old house, after a two week 'holiday' at the new one, camping out on foam mattresses and using a makeshift kitchen, and painting, gardening, and figuring out what the hell we were doing.

We have decided it's too hard to camp out there at the moment, especially as we're at the point where we need to paint the rest of the house and sand the floors.

REWWWWWWWWWWWWIIINND. If you recall, we were arguing about the pine floors. They had a lot of glue on them from the laundry and kitchen, and I wanted hybrid floors throughout for the sound insulation and clean look, as well as the insulative factor. But fuck off to $7000 AUD.

So yep, pine floors it is. Jamie was right. We'll insultate underneath. On Sunday we hire a sander. The clear finish we're painting it cost $700, so that's a saving, right?

That corner Jamie's painting in is where the kitchen is going. We got an IKEA kitchen delivered today. It's sitting in the garage. Now that's going to take some skills to put together - thank god I've got my Jamie and not some other fool. Mind you a rich fool would be useful, as we'd just hire someone to do it. I loved the whole IKEA experience and not just for the hot dogs. Jamie was going to use their online kitchen planner but I talked him into an hour long appointment with an IKEA consultant who was freaking amazing - efficient as fuck! He loved working with us to as we were so decisive, but to be fair, a kitchen is a kitchen. You'll have to wait weeks to see it though - the floor needs to be done first.

I had to laugh about the message we got from IKEA though. As I think about the enormous amount of headfuck this flat pack is going to cause us, the email asked us to have fun. It's hard not to see that as a little sarcastic.

Back to the floor. We have to deal with the abyss this week. The abyss is a not-join where the laundry wall was. Rather glaring. We're going to neaten it up by cutting the ends so it's an even abyss rather than a jagged one, and patch it with a bit of lovely characterful red wood to contrast the pine. If you're going to have a bit of wood going contrary to the line of the floor, you may as well make it stand out as an interesting feature.

Then there is the non IKEA benchtop which we found on Marketplace. The guy did kitchens but also sold benchtops on the side. They're utility grade so not perfect, but we don't like perfect - or choose not to like it, as we can't afford it. But, like the floor, nothing a bit of sanding, filling and varnish won't fix. A hardwood timber benchtop was going to cost us about 3 - 4 grand, and this cost us so far... drum roll please.... $500.

Then there's all the plumbing that needs doing, the electrics of course. Oh and the beam. See the old beam in this photo? We are covering it with what they call a beam wrap, where you 'wrap' the wood in a box made of the wood of your choice. We really wanted hard wood but do you know how hard it is to find decent lengths of hardwood at 5 metres with the width and thickness we wanted? Impossible, unless you wanted to pay an absolute fortune. So we're going with pine and staining it.

We've run out of money now really until we sell the house. We've made good headway so the bathroom, the roof insulation, solar and driveway can wait. Fingers crossed that we can make a little bit of profit on the old place so we can afford it sooner than later. That guy that made the low ball offer came up a 100 k but he's still not hitting hte price range we were asking for which is a bit rude. We'd accept the lowest offer too.

With Love,

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