Chris's Random Ramblings
Kelly and I have been thinking about moving back to Adelaide some time in the future, and have been looking at houses on the websites for a while. Something that fits in pretty well with what we want came up recently, and we put in an offer which was accepted. The house is in Hectorville, within walking distance of both my parents and brother's house.
We plan on renting out the place for a couple of years, then knock it down and build our dream house before moving back. We've been reading a lot of books on sustainable houses, and hope to get a good solar passive design. I think it should be possible to end up with a house that needs no artificial heating in winter and little cooling in summer. We're off to see an architect who specialises in sustainable house design next week for some advice and feedback on our very rough house design.
Adverts for houses generally have the number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms and maybe the size of the land. In some places in Australia they have energy efficiency ratings. But what they really need is a rating for the fastest broadband connection you could get to the property.
It would be much better than the current method of searching for a house based on the distance from the telephone exchange and websites like adsl2exchanges.com.au .
As it happens a new bed frame arrived about the same time they did. So they got to participate in the assembly. Lucky they were around as it was a little more complex than I had thought. The benefit for them was that this time around they won't have to sleep on the mattress on the floor.
The two big projects for their visit are to put up a garden shed and to build a floor to ceiling bookshelf in my study, turning it into a little library. It doesn't seem to matter how many bookshelves I have, I'm always running out of space. A giant bookshelf running the length of the wall should keep me going for a few more years.
Spent a lot of time Saturday visiting hardware stores to get various bits and pieces. Also went shopping for a new dining table and light fittings for the dining area and my bedroom. Generally speaking I'm too indecisive when shopping by myself and it was good to get some other opinions.
A few hours of gardening later, and my backyard is already looking better. It turns out that a few of the plants that I thought had died during the winter were only pretending. And a few green bits that I thought were weeds are actually the bulbs I had planted in winter, and are just starting to flower. Lucky I've been too lazy to do any weeding lately.
