If you havn't read The Lockdown Series yet, I suggest you do to get up to speed, but for now heres a quick synopsis of where we are and why we are here.
Just before COVID hit, we sold our house. We had the bright idea of buying a dilapidated beach shack on a good sized plot of land, 200 metres from the beach. The plan was to live in said shack, AKA The Shit Shack, for approximately one year while we build a new house on the front of the property. We then knock down The Shit Shack, have an enormous garden for my feral children and we all live happily ever after.
What could possible go wrong? Well a worldwide pandemic for one.
So I wrote The Lockdown Series to diarise our exploits during home isolation in a tiny shitty house with no heating, no air con, no insulation, damp rotten ceilings, mouldy carpet, a bathroom smaller than my wardrobe at the last house (this is not an exaggeration) windows that you can feel the breeze through and at the time of moving in, no kitchen.
As at June 2020, Australia is no longer in lockdown and for now we are pretty much back to normal. So it seems now is time for a new series of posts which will hopefully chart the build of the new house and all the inevitable fuck ups along the way.
Things have moved on with the new house since I finished the Lockdown Series but not in any outwardly noticeable way. We finalized the floor plan (added a few things, took a few things away), we've chosen the kitchen, the style of bathrooms, the tiles, the work surfaces and internal doors. We've added multiple additional lights, plug sockets, TV aerial points, lots of internet type stuff that went way over my head, we choose the roof colour, external wall colour, chose a blue front door and heaps of other things that I cant remember right now but were pretty boring.
But even with all that now in place, we are still several months off even breaking ground. Once we we have signed off on all these changes in the next week or two, the plans then go to the local counsel for approval and for that we've been told 6 weeks at best and 12 weeks at worst.
So based on those estimates, we arnt even looking at things getting underway until approximately September/October and with a moving in date of sometime around this time next year. This means the "one year maximum" that we were hoping for in The Shit Shack is now not even our minimum sentence we will serve here.
That's at least another 12 months of cooking on travel hot plates that we have to get out from under the bench top each time we want to use them, 12 months of not being able to have the heating on at the same time as the tumble dryer or hair dryer or kettle because the electrics cut out, 12 months of no dishwasher and a sink only a fraction bigger than a dinner plate, 12 months of one person having to use the outside toilet if two people need to go at once or someone (usually Alice) needs an urgent shit and someone else is trying to shower. And its 12 months of the walls being so thin and the house so small that we can actually talk to each other from any point in the house without moving. Then we have an impending summer to think about, which is almost consistently in the mid 30's and will no doubt hit the low 40's on several occasions, with no air con and fly screens that are full of holes.
But the at this stage we still don't hate it. Its an inconvenience and we moan and trip over each other and our stuff is shoved in corners and in boxes but so far its not too bad. In fact the money we are saving by not running a pool and having a much smaller mortgage (for now) is actually making us kind on inclined to not rush things. If we can just stay here long enough to save some money and not kill each other in the process, it will of provided us with some really unexpected benefits.
So thats where are at. Nothing humorous or exciting at this stage and updates will probably be a bit thin on the ground until we get things underway, but we are coping, the roof is holding up, we are learning to sleep fully clothed and I'm just trying to think of it as some never ending camping holiday that one day I will hopefully look back on with a tiny bit of fondness but never ever want to repeat as long as I live.