On Friday our builder, Dan, came back in and finished off the skirting boards and straightened out the sliding door that  leads into the house. He’s going to fit that door with a claw-style latch so we can keep C and bub#2 inside the house.... and limit the noise inside the house when I start cranking Beethoven (or Jamiroquai).

The painter came back in too, and finished off another coat after Jamie the plasterer had sanded off his work on Thursday evening:

Also on Thursday evening we picked C up from daycare and went directly our local Good Guys and purchased a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries 2.6kW split system, which we’re getting installed next week (assuming that the floor to ceiling cupboards are installed by then). The recommended installer lives barely 500m from us.

Joel the electrician is coming back tomorrow to finish off the lights, and relay our phone cable (that’s what the strand f cat5 in the corner is for) so that the socket doesn’t come out of the master bedroom and remove the need to run a cable all the way along the hallway. It’ll make quite a change from what we’ve had to do over the last 10 years!

So we’re nearly, nearly done. Can’t be done soon enough, frankly, but I’m glad we finally got things happening.

After a solid three days of work, the team have got the front window + wall finished, the wiring in place (including repositioning of the phone input so it’s not in our bedroom), and got everything ready for the plasterer to come in and prettify, with the painter and cabinetmaker to follow shortly thereafter. We went off to our local The Good Guys at Oxley (recently reopened after the floods in January) and ordered a 2.6KW Mitsubishi Heavy Industries split system. That should arrive in the next 10 days, and their recommended installer lives a few hundred metres away from us. Sweet!

Some photos of how things look right now:

When we purchased our home, we knew that the previous owners had turned a lot of the second garage space into a room that joined on to the laundry, making up a home-based hair salon:

The door at the rear lead through into the rest of the garage space, but wasted about 1.6m between the wall and the garage door. We, being more focused on getting J pregnant, and then figuring out this parent caper, didn’t do anything about it until November last year when J started ringing around to get quotes from builders. We got three builders out to inspect, but only two quotes… and chose one.

The January 2011 floods put a kink in our plans, but yesterday morning the window was delivered, then in the afternoon the timber, gyprock and linea board was delivered. This morning, bright and early, our builder Dan turned up and started work.

Here are a few photos from day 1:

I was also delighted to find the beginnings of two flowers on my vanilla orchid:

A few mornings ago I noticed that I now had a heap more flowers on the large bush out the front:

I’ve got a few buds starting to appear on the smaller bush just to the right (and out of shot), but its buds are nowhere near as large as those that you see above. I guess that means I’ll have beans growing for quite a long time.

Popped in to Brisbane Appliance Repairs at Moorooka this morning to see about getting the espresso machine fixed up. Sadly, the beast needs a new brew head because the screw hole is buggered. That part is $90, add in labour and we’re at $150. Then adding the cost of a replacement handle (which I managed to break last night :<) at $56 and it’s all rather bleak and frustrating. While I wait for my replacement to arrive (I’ve taken the easy way out and I’m redeeming flybuys points to get a new one), I’ll just have to use a plunger, or my Moka, or get off my behind and ride in to Cup at West End instead.

About two years ago, J’s mum gave me 5 coffee plants. We put two at the front:

and the rest along the side in the back yard. We’re not sure what species they are, but they’ve certainly produced decent coffee up in Gladstone. My long term cunning plan is to replace the mock orange hedge with these coffee plants. I know it will take a while, but we’re not moving!

I was really pleased to notice that the larger of the two has started to show a few flowers:

I’m hopeful that all these buds will turn into flowers too:

They will take quite a while to ripen (seven to nine months in ideal growing regions, according to Wikipedia) so who knows how long they’ll take in Brisbane. Anyway, at least I’ve got something growing. Could be another year before those two plants are big enough to justify chopping out anything else, so that gives me an idea about how long it’ll be before I can replace that mock orange entirely.

For a while now I’ve been meaning to descale my espresso machine and I’ve been faffing around trying to find the Approved(tm) descaler tablets. Sparky’s Small Appliance Repair at Toowong shut down, and their Albion store isn’t open on Fridays or weekends, weirdly. It turns out that you can use a tartaric acid solution, easily created by dumping a heaped tablespoon of cream of tartar into a full water reservoir and stirring.

So this afternoon I finally got around to actually doing the descaling. It seemed to work very well, especially after enough scale was removed from the boiler to make the steam wand go BLAM. Lots of steam came through the wand after that point, and the group head’s flow rate accelerated mightily also.

It was with great, great annoyance then that I found I was unable to re-install the screw which holds the filter cap on the brewing head. No amount of exerting pressure has been sufficient to get the screw to take to the threads in the block, so at this stage I am totally unable to get espresso.

I will have to make some calls in the morning, I guess. Sigh. At least I’ve got a plunger/French press to help tide me over.

Today we finally found out what it was that J suffered from while pregnant with C: Hyper-emesis gravidarum. It’s pretty bloody awful.

There’ll be a followup in a week.

That is all.