This morning I was woken up to the sound of birds chirping outside my house. This in itself is not all that unusual..  and thankfully much less annoying than the twice daily dog “orgy” that seems to take place in my street (it’s really a sound to behold)..

Anyway, aside from the birds chirping, I could hear the distinct sound of a bird fluttering around.. and it sounded really close but I could not for the life of me work out where it was coming from.  Flutter flutter flutter ….silence..  Flutter flutter flutter ….silence..  – you get the picture..

Was it jumping around on the roof? If so it would move on soon enough..

Had it somehow gotten INTO the roof and was fluttering around trying to get out? I sincerely hoped not as I didn’t really fancy trying to get up into the roof to deal with it.

With all these thoughts going through my head, I got up and went into the front yard to investigate… I was met by an unexpected sight.. It was a bird.. but it was INSIDE our house (loungeroom to be precise) trying to get out.

It might seem natural enough to conclude that the bird had flown in through an open window and got stuck inside.. In this case you’d most likely be right.. We had some work done on our house yesterday which may have involved the external doors being open for a while… and there was the window I had left open for a few hours during the day.. OK, so we have no mystery on that front..   The curious thing about this visit from our feathered friend is that it must have gotten in some time yesterday, remained silent the entire evening while we were at home and watching telly… and only really kicked up a stink in the morning when it decided it was time to move on.. Is it possible that the bird was in the loungeroom with us all that time and we didn’t notice??? I know NCIS can drag you in, but really..

So how did it all end? I opened the window.. it flew away.. (apologies for the anti-climax) leaving behind all manner of souveniers on the window sill for me to clean up and remember it by.. “I’ve got the bird cacca blues…”

Our house in Footscray has a new roof.. we knew when we bought the place that it would need to be done.

Here’s the before and after…. oooh aaah…. I think it looks great…

Actually, our place is a hive of activity at the moment. It’s getting a full paint job and all manner of funky handyman-type things. I can’t wait until I can see it in the flesh… (It’s looking like that won’t be until late January at the earliest… )

I have borrowed a digital camera from work over the weekend. So I’ve decided to take a shot of our house. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet – check it out.

Well we are now officially moved into our new house. – The move was for me a long and painful affair – am still sore 3 days on. If it had not been for the herculean effort of Daniel and particularly James I fear that we would still be moving stuff today. It rained pretty much the whole time we were moving – and as fate would have it the sun came out first thing Monday morning. Weather bastards.

I have always seen myself as the handyman antichrist – but I’m surprised to see myself drilling, screwing (yeah yeah haha) and hammering things here and there. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement in terms of my technique (entendre city here) – but I’m getting there.

How does it feel to be moved in? GREAT! I love the house, it has a nice feel to it. We’ve had an assortment of tradespeople through over the past week sorting out various bits and pieces. The highlight/most frightening moment was when the electrician told me that we did have a safety switch, but nothing had been wired into it – a real disaster waiting to happen there. We are haemmorhaging money as a result of getting all these tradies in, but the results are most pleasing. Am looking forward to having the TV and internet hooked up in a weeks time. BOY am I looking forward to that…

Today I went to our new house for the first time since we bought it. Eric and Sophie wanted to have a look.

The “SOLD” sticker had been stuck onto the Real Estate board. It was such a great feeling – seeing that sticker meant quite a lot to me – it kinda made the whole thing real. I took a photo of it for posterity.

Currently there is an ugly Telstra substation directly across the road from our house.. We were horrified when we first saw it and thought “well we’re not buying THIS house” It’s funny how a lot of houses look great in the ad but some feature external to the house (council rubbish truck depot/huge factory/major highway.. etc) kills the deal in an instant. Fortunately the place is up for sale and has had it’s zoning changed from “ugly government industrial building” to “Residential 1″ – this is great as it means that we’re buying our house while the street still has this huge ugly building in it, and hopefully by the time we get back from Europe – the street will have a few attractive new dwellings in it. You’d think that this can only be good for our property’s value in the long run.

A friend of mine works for a property development company which is thinking of buying the land and turn it into houses/villa units..etc. Small world isn’t it? I guess if they do buy it I will have all the inside goss as to what is going to be built there.