Well its almost over.
We are only 6 days from flying out. As of 4Pm AEST I will officially be a Sydney resident. To be quite honest getting to Sydney has been the hard part, actually being in Sydney and having to find a place to live/work etc is going to be the easy bit. We have both been working enormously hard to get ready to move. If all we had to do was move our stuff to Sydney we would have been easily done in a week or so. However because we own our own house and we are planning on renting it out we have to finish the 2 major projects we started on the house before Jicki was offered the job in Sydney.
Suddenly instead of having 6 months to finish these projects we have only had 6 weeks. On top of both of those we discovered the fence was rotten down one side and large sections had to be replaced. So over the last few weeks we have:
Lifted 2000 bricks from the walkway at the back of our house. Leveled off the walkway so that it makes 3 steps down, dug-in and edged with railway sleepers, dug out several cubic meters of clay. Laid Scoria and sand to provide a bedding, relaid all the bricks.
Dug out 5 fence posts which were rotten, replaced the posts with new uprights, concreted them all in, replaced 10 meters of fence boards which were rotten. Relaid all the earth and planted new flowers.
Completely stripped the all the paint from the wood in the front entrance way. This is 100 years of multiple layers of mostly lead based paint on 4 door frames, kick plates and front door. If you are ever looking to restore wood in a home I can heartily recommend Coopers Wood Restoration System. Well worth the phone call and our entrance looks absolutely fantastic. Its still hard work to do the stripping but you will come up with a finish that will blow you away and best of all, no sanding.
Cleaned all the walls, repainted, removed the doors and had them dipped, we were going to hand strip them as well but we simply ran out of time. To do a decent job is about 6-8 hours per side and we just didn't have the spare time unfortunately. Its taken me about another 2 hours to do a really bad job fixing all the damage to the doors from the strippers. I have to oil and hang the doors and replace the locks that were removed tonight.
Cleaned, de-moulded and painted the front steps.
Organized to actually have our stuff shipped to Sydney. Gave away LOTS of stuff to friends, family and in some cases passing strangers. Sold my Motorcycle (Sob) and did lots of research on living in NSW, figured out how to pay our mortgage from another country (sort of), organized a rental agent to manage and rent our place, quit my job and after nearly 8 years that was a very hard thing to do, made sure I have some form of contact number or email address for all my friends and family, tidied all the gardens, fixed and sold my PC, went on a 4 day holiday, spent a weekend in Sydney on a research trip, thanks to Kez for driving us around all day!, researched the next bike I will buy in Sydney, unless I can get a full license, if so I will buy this beast, oh and we are both still working full time.
So its been a hell of a couple of weeks I can tell you.
What I am looking forward to is being in the same time zone as the rest of Southern Armada. Being able to log on and join up into groups, being able to go along to SA drinks in Sydney. I'm looking forward to a new Job, new things to learn. I really wanted to try and stay within APN as I have very much enjoyed my time here but APN don't have any technical services in Sydney, they are all based north of Brisbane. I interviewed for a job yesterday that I really really want. Its interesting and would give me a very good foothold into a section of the IT industry that I have long held an interest in.
Ah well, the night we get to Sydney we are going to go out to Dinner and get very drunk!.
So farewell to New Zealand for the next couple of years and Hello to Sydney!
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