It was a Good Friday

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Blossom made hot cross buns for the first time today. She doesn't like currants so she substituted dried apricots.

It think they tasted better than the currant version and had three.

Renovation update

The kitchen area is now gutted.

The bathroom floor is gone. We weren't quite expecting that.

View through the kitchen to the family room and the new opening which will have double full light glass sliding doors.

And here is another lovely surprise. It was a miracle that our other bathroom hadn't fallen through to the kitchen. There was no wall holding it up. This room has now been completely gutted with floor and ceiling removed and this wall needs to be replaced.

Really there is very little of our house unscathed at the moment.

Do you want to hear about our lovely neighbour? She's gone quiet in the last week but over the last month has been going overboard calling the council. The council have been around three times with complaints that the builders start too early. This is the classic Sydney complaint. Builders can't start noisy machinery before 7am. My neighbour was calling council if the builders walked onto site before 7am. One time the council decided they needed to do something so they told the builder that they needed an extra permit for the cement pour. Cost of this permit? $2000.

Sadly, talking to friends and work colleagues it appears that we are getting off lightly in the neighbour department. A brief survey of experiences reveals that everyone has one difficult neighbour during renovations. One friend had a neighbour who was so incensed with their (approved) building works that he would go behind the workmen with a shovel scraping off cement render from their fence as the builder was applying it. A work colleague (from the UK) said one of his neighbours would fire his shotgun into the air when he was unhappy with anything - trying to intimidate the builders.

We have friends who are about to do a complete knock-down/re-build and they have 13 neighbours due to their unusual block design. Heaven help them I say.

Why are we so uptight about change? If you live in a good council area with the proper approval processes renovations should result in better surroundings, not worse. Really some people just need to get a life.

For clarity: pictorial evidence of how petty my neighbour is

If you've been following so far, in a case of the straw that broke the camel's back my neighbour finally pushed me over the edge when she rang to complain that I'd removed a 'screening plant' from our side of the boundary without telling her.

If you look in the above picture to the far left you will see a strappy-leafed ginger plant. Ignore the lilly pillies - they are still there.

We removed the ginger plant to make way for the camellias we need to transplant. The neighbour rang to complain. I used my most fierce growl.at.the.children.voice to make her go away.

This is the spot now. Planted out with two beautiful camellias. Cripes I hope they take.


My latest thought is to get that lovely blue shadecloth that builders wrap around building sites and spread it the entire length of our boundary in a 6ft high fence. I'm mature like that.

Warning: Neighbour bites

There is a lot of excavation work happening at our house. Who knew that excavating a courtyard could produce MOUNTAINS of dirt?! Most of the dirt is being re-directed around our yard to even it out.

Along with the excavation a few of our plants need to be relocated away from the building works. We have potted up three camellias and a couple of roses. Today I went to site to direct where to re-plant the camellias (and hope they survive the upheaval). We decided to remove a Ginger plant from near our boundary to insert the camellias as we are slowly building a Camellia hedge which should look fabulous when in flower.

Guess who is freaking out about the ginger plant being removed?

Street cancer strikes again.

This plant was just below shoulder height at its tallest and about 1.5 metres diameter. It was one plant in from our boundary and about to be replaced by the camellias above. Street cancer does the following:

1. Stands at the boundary shouting at the person who is digging out the plant - "You can't do that, I'm calling the council". Apparently being quite abrasive.
2. Then calls me to say "You should've told me if you were removing that screening plant".
3. She told me she had sent a voicemail and an email on the subject.

I may have lost my temper a little. She has form in attempting to intimidate workers at my place and she has been actively dissing our proposed works to all and sundry so I was not in the mood for conciliation.

I told her that I can remove plants on my property as I wish and without interference from her. Further I told her that if she took the time to call the site manager per our agreed process she would've found out that the plant would be replaced by mature camellias. She started with "but but but..." at which point I said "No, this time you will listen to me. I am disappointed that the only time you call me is to complain about inane issues that don't concern you."

At this point she hung up.

I checked my phone for voicemail and emails. None to be found. I feel good that I've stood up to her. Let's see if her husband calls. I hope he does because Firegazer will have fun with that one.

She freaks out about us removing 'screening plants' from our side of the fence. Guess how many 'screening plants' she has planted? None. Not a single plant.

The woman is completely unhinged.

Edited 7 october: I spoke with the site manager today. Apparently she also sent Workcover around this week. What a complete nutter.

How much do you think it would cost to remove asbestos panels from a shed?

Old shed with asbestos panels.

Going...

Going...

Gone!

$5,000

Owch.