lounge

This was another urgent area to be done as this is where most of our down time would be spent. Pretty hard to relax in a room that had been painted fire engine red, well, not quite but pretty close.

Surprisingly it only took a couple of coats of undercoat to get rid of the red and the walls sat undercoat white for quite some time while it took forever to decide on what colour we were putting through the house. This was done during a really cold snap of weather so it was wonderful to be able to have the fire, the temptation to just sit in front of the fire was huge and there were some days not an awful lot got done and time was closing in on moving in day so we had to try and be a bit more disciplined.

5 more mins won't hurt...

.....and you know, I am starting to grow fond of these white walls, do you think we need to paint them? LOL!

In the end we did paint them and the lounge is almost finished, I (as Brent apparently doesn't do painting) just have to do the skirting in the tv corner...was gonna do that today, but.....well....it was windy so it didn't happen!

However, this is close to the end result...

and just for fun.....flashback!

ahhh haha....how straight is that hair!!

All well and good but we hadn't at this point worked out how we were going to give Rokky free access into the house, what seems a simple task was in fact quite complex as the way the house sits on the section it in effect has 2 front doors, the complicated part came in trying to section off a front and back. The front area we would like to keep as a turn around area for the cars and the back door faces the wrong way to fence off between the porch and the garage. The solution we came up with was to put the dog door coming out of the lounge wall in the corner, this meant a little deck had to be built just for Rokky! It was heartbreaking to have a hole punched through the wall when I thought I had finished in the loung but one must do what one must do to please the dog! And yep....still not quite finished but it does the job....another one for the "round to it" pile.

It took a few practice runs with Rokky, but really he only had to be shoved through a few times, the problem is when all the other doors are open he is confused as to what he is supposed to do! Anyhow he has settled in nicely and will always be content as long as he is around us. Not alot bothers this little fella.

Taa daa....

Bathroom

There were a number of jobs that were earmarked URGENT and this was one of them. There is no way the girls would step foot in the bathroom in the condition as it was. I have to say though it did look worse than it really was, we fully expected the wall behind the shower to be rotten and it wasn't, however the floor underneath the vanity....was! We started on this before moving out of  Lincoln and Brent pretty much plowed in and started ripping walls out, making the comment...."there's no turning back now".....yup.

 It was decided quite early on that as the bathroom is tiny, like really really tiny, we would rather have a shower in there to replace the bath and also gain a bit of room. We gained a little bit of room, not alot as we also went for a bigger vanity...haha....it is a small bathroom but it had to be sorted and maybe at a later date it might get added on to. The girls are happy with it and if the girls are happy then we are happy :)

It did give us a few headaches to start with, Hayley ran us out of hot water and poor old Brent had to drive Rachelle back to Lincoln Ave so she could finish washing her hair!!! We thought there might have been a problem with the hot water tank, but no, the problem was with Hayley and her enormously loooong showers. As the pipes were the old galvanised ones we changed them at the same time.

Almost complete we finally got round to hanging the bathroom mirror which had been resting on top of the vanity only to have it come crashing down a couple of hours later and smashed to pieces, chipping out a bit of the doorframe on its way down and a little nick out of the porcelain basin......bugger! (actually that was not really the word I used, but you get the idea.) We have yet to get another mirror, but it won't be this side of xmas, a phrase which we are using alot these days.....so the bathroom even though it is the first room to be done has still yet to be signed off officially!

oh...and we had to replace the door, did I mention that all the doors need replacing, so far we have replaced all the room doors, just need to get the wardrobe doors and linen cupboard door. And...I don't know how to turn the photos around so you may have to look at some sideways :)

auction day - 19 June 2010

Worth noting, this is  NOT the day the house sold...oh no....it was never going to be that easy! I have come to believe there is no such thing as a mortgagee auction, it is a tool used to gain interest and the reserve set on the property is hugely unrealistic and the process then takes on a normal sales and purchase negotiating saga. This was the case with us.

Being totally green to house buying we went along and arranged finance for around what the real estage agent thought the property would go for, we were so naive in this that we gave no leeway if bidding were to go higher...haha....hindsight (sigh)....anyhow along to the auction we went, with our limit no higher than what we had organised and as you might guess, the bidding got there within a matter of seconds!!!

We were so pumped and shattered at the same time, there really was only one other serious bidder and us, the other guy bailed out before us and as the property didn't hit reserve we got the first opportunity to put in the first offer.....omg.....what to do?!?!?!? I believe it was at this point we felt things slipping away, we had already topped our top offer and didn't realise at the time we had a bit of flexability to go higher so we put our offer in just above what our top bid was, purely because we felt we had to do something. We left feeling really rotten, at this point we hadn't even told the kids what we were doing in case it fell over as it appeared to be doing. The agent then took the offer back to the trust, which took days to come back and reject it and again asking for the reserve price. We checked in again the mortgage guy who then confirmed we could go quite a bit higher, so another offer was put in, again, nowhere near their reserve, days go by and that offer was rejected but they came down 5 grand which the agent said was unusual that early in negotiations. Starting to feel quite good at this point until......we are told there is another offer on the table, and now have to sign a multi offer form and up our offer......this is all starting to get a bit yuck by now so up the offer we did, getting close to what we can go to, in fact we only had one more offer up our sleeve, days and days went by without hearing anything, house is slipping away, not gonna happen, get over it and get on with it we are thinking.....but out of the blue the phone call comes saying offer was accepted and what happened after that I really can't remember, things just started moving at a rapid pace and life was never the same again!

Telling the kids was fun, they have only ever lived in the Park Ave area, so moving down to Taita was going to change a few things, mostly they would now have to bus to school. Rachelle had been to the open home with us so knew the house and what condition it was in. We waited til dinnertime and slowly tried to introduce the subject. Brent, bless him just blurted out "Your mother has some news" GOOD ONE DAD!         

So I calmly try to announce that there is indeed some good news and it involves another shift, their eyes rolled back into their heads and the moaning started, I pointed out that it was good because we were actually buying the place and not another rental, they are starting to look more excited, at this point I am trying to find the words to soften the blow of Taita and they are not coming so I just simply say "it's the house I grew up in" I really don't think I need to tell you Rachelle's reaction :) However, after some discussion (?) they did come to see that this was overall better for all of us and that they now have a better inheritance from us than they would have had if we had not done this at all. Sometimes you just have to speak their language and in this case it was how many clothes they could buy when we are gone!

We have recently since found out that our offer was only $1000 higher than the other and that his wife had told him to put the offer in for the amount we did.......that poor poor man.....wife is pretty miffed apparently...oh well.

So there you have it, auction day June 19, settlement on house 16 July. People tell us that this is very fast in regards to house buying, well all I know is it sure didn't feel like that!

photos - pre auction day

this is what we are working with.....

How it all began.....

Me, David and a friend

It all started during a lunch break sitting in the cafeteria at work. Just sitting reading the Hutt News and flicking through the pages at a rapid pace, as you do when on limited time. Just about at the end of the paper and I spot what looked to be a familiar house in the realty section. On closer inspection it is indeed the house we grew up and it was up for mortgagee sale. What a hoot, and it had some photos of the inside as well, not alot appears to have changed since we moved out 30 odd years ago, talk about de ja vu....so funny. It sat with me all day with thought inside my head about the potential a place like that had for the right buyers, never for one moment believing this was where we heading!

When I got home I checked out good old Trade Me and there it was with even more photos! Straight away I emailed my family the link and thought how they would get a chuckle out of it too. Coincidentally there was an open home planned for the week my sister would be home from Australia but as we had another family gathering planned for that day she contacted the agent and arranged a private viewing earlier in the week.
What a surreal feeling, walking up the rickity old driveway that my Dad and our neighbour between them (and a few flagons of beer) layed down over a period of time, You could tell how many beers they had by the quality of each patch of concrete....haha.....Then walking through the gate and face on with the hub of our childhood, it had been painted on the outside and a garage put up, but other than that it was like being transported back in time.

Walking inside was just so funny, however it felt so much smaller, I guess as kids everything seemed much larger than it was, the entire house was painted in the same colour, including in some cases the ceilings. Every wall had been kicked in or had some kind of damage to it, this house had been dealt some rough treatment but had stood the test of time but a bit of patching here and there wouldn't go amiss!
Tour of house completed and appropriate documentation recieved, my sister posing as a potential buyer just to get a foot in the door!  The real estate agent had given what his ball park figure was that he thought the house would go for and we left laughing over so many memories. My only thoughts at the time were "somebody is going to get a really good bargain if it goes for what they think it will"

Churning the house around in my head it just wouldn't go away, it really really unsettled me that someone was going to get our house and I started wondering if this was a good idea coming through at all. I tried to put it out of my head and returned home to carry on as normal, Brent was now home from work and we were just talking about random things and of course I mentioned we had been to see the house, told him it was really run down but had great potential. Totally to my surprise he commented that it would be a great house to sink your teeth into......that was all it took and it rolled forward at lightening speed from there!

                          
      

      Dad and Pete Wood - responsible for that driveway!