Tuesday; The weather is gross. The perfect day to be in bed with a good book and lots of tea. Well we are not going to do that. We are going to work and attempt to stay warm. I have tidy up jobs to do and finishing jobs here and there. I want there to be nothing on the floors for the carpet man tomorrow. Glenn the sparky is coming early to finish off the wiring. He said he will be here before the carpet man. Cory is helping get organised today and we are going to have him as much as possible this week. I want to get agents looking through the house this weekend. Later on I window shop for plants in the garden. I don’t want to spend much as I saw the new neighbours pull out most of the their gardens after the lady put them all in to help sell her house haha. You can’t guess what people want. Some may want none and very low maintenance, some may want a cottage secret garden. We have a bit of hail at Till, it is snowing down to 300m, we can certainly feel the bitterness.

Wednesday; Rowan and I are splitting up today. Rowan is meeting the fencing guy and a roading guy in Palmerston. I would have gone but I have too many people coming in the early morning. I get in to Till at 6am and start sweeping the floors and making sure everything is ready for Lance the carpet installer. I have Laura and her husband Alistair coming to help today and I want them cleaning and gardening. I need to go to Mitre10 to pick up the plants but don’t want to leave until the sparky is here. I would hate to miss him and he not get everything done. So I wait and I wait some more. Obviously I am doing stuff. I eventually message him and he won’t be coming until later. Dam I am here way too early. You may remember I wanted to embroid my meat safe doors for the kitchen. Well I am cheating, I don’t have time for a new skill. I purchased some old doily’s from op shops and I will see them on. I sat there and completed that when Laura arrived. I got them on to cleaning while I ended up more coffee maker/supervisor. I did manage to do a few things but it was hard to concentrate when I had to keep the workers like bees. Cory and Rowan arrive just before lunch with some food. We sent Cory to Herbert to load up the trailers and bring in some mulch for the gardens. Alistair planted the plants Cory mulched. We got to the end of the mulch and Alistair said if you get another load that he is happy to get it down. It looked so good we decided to mulch the top part where we put the hay. What a transformation. I spent a little over $100 for the flowers and I managed to save quite a few plants from that garden I ripped back out. Under $500 for the materials. Can’t complain about that!

Lance got all the prep done and the underlay down in three rooms. He even got the living room Axminster mostly in. It really has been a productive day. Long but productive.

I painted the bathroom floor another coat just before we left for the night. Glenn did come and did 2 out of three jobs. I had to call Fred and ask him for a huge favour. He is coming back Friday to install the rangehood. Glenn left his hole saw kit as ours don’t go that big!

Thursday; Today is a lot more relaxed. I have a couple of small touch ups and then I sit down to start outlining the blurb for the house. Our friend Danny is back from Invercargill and he pops in to see the transformation and we end up having lunch out at a local cafe. We were hoping Lance would finish the carpet today but he will be back tomorrow to finish the main bedroom.

Friday; A big day. I worked around Lance and did some more touch up painting. It really is getting to the small annoying jobs. Lance gets the carpets done in time. I get the vacuum out and get them as clean as possible before the carpet cleaner arrives. As this is second hand carpet I wanted to make sure the carpets are in great knick. Cory loads up our trailer and is working on things in the background. We tried to stay out of the way of Lance so he could get on with it. After the carpet cleaner and Cory left we made the decision to unload the trailer at Herbert and come back. We are dumping at Herbert and it really is looking like a pigsty. I hope the neighbours don’t get too annoyed. We head back to Till Street and do a little more work before showering and getting ready for the quiz night. We set the heat pump up and dehumidifiers and fans. I want all this carpet to be dry tomorrow. We are doing a school fundraiser quiz. We did terrible but it was a lot of fun and a good night out. We are shattered when we finally get home at 11pm.

Saturday; An early start, we get to Till St at 6am. Running on very little sleep. Our first appraisal is at 7am, the last is 4.30pm. I left 1.5hr gaps thinking we would have time to stage between agents. Well most took up over an hour. Only one was a quick 20min in and out. We kind of get most of the furniture in but we don’t really have the energy to do much. I could easily nap but with 9 agents coming it just wasn’t going to happen. We did have a window cleaner come which I thought great I don’t have to do anything for the windows. Well they didn’t do a great job so I am redoing a lot of them. More work I don’t want! By the time we got to Herbert I went straight to bed.

Sunday; Cory comes to help out today. Yay. We get a lot done with the staging. Not all of it though. It is 90% there. We plan to be here Tuesday to finish off and get photos etc. I have been so busy but also tired I haven’t really been taking photos of the progress sorry about that!

Monday; I am still calming down. Wow what a crazy day. It is finally here the digger driver is here, a builder is here. Palmerston is finally moving. But of course it doesn’t go as smooth as we thought it would. It was a really stressful day and I am annoyed and frustrated. It all started well. Chris got stuck a few times trying to remove the soil and we ended up calling the local civil contractors for help, Skevingtons. They got us a wheelbarrow on steroids but we are hitting it from someone else in Dunedin, I don’t want to know what that will cost us. We end up with the Skevington crew starting on the driveways and Chris doing the house pads. Murray the builder definitely got me in a fluster and everyone was making it all feel doom and gloom. Our house pads are deeper than expected, we have more top soil than expected. Well not really true, we had the ground tested when we purchased the land and Rowan and I knew it was fairly deep.

What is frustrating is we knew, we told, we asked multiple people and no one could give us a straight answer. Do we go pile foundation or concrete? The unanimous answer was, whatever you like. They cost roughly the same. But no one said to us, if you go with concrete and we have to dig further than “this” to good ground you will need an engineer to design the foundation. So here I am calling as many people as I can for help. I have Dean (the guy we purchased off) who also tests the ground on the phone. I was sending a SOS to every engineer I could find. It honestly was horrific. We got back to Herbert and I was just a big ball of nope. I am done for the day. It doesn’t sound like the end of the world talking to the engineer but I was put on full throttle and now I have burned out.

What was supposed to be an easy fun day watching the ground break ended up being way too overwhelming. On a positive note I did have a fairly good start of the day and by the time I calmed down I was fine. Talk about trying to put out fires. We won’t be at Till tomorrow we will be in Palmerston meeting the engineer.