17/11/2004 - The guys started today (Brian and Noa actually popped over on the Tuesday to drop off tools and do a bit of a setup).
The front door + bi-folds for the deck were delivered around lunchtime and I just had to duck off home for lunch and have a look see. Was greeted by a hole in the front of the house and the ever cheery face of Noah tidying things up ready to pop the door in. (I got to get me one of those cool reciprocating power saws!).
Doug from Carters was also there going over the pre-nail plans with Brian. So I signed those off while I was home.
A few hours after getting back to work Amanda messaged me the photo of our new front door.

Amanda was also super busy organizing the gear for the ensuite and had the door hardware and much of the tap ware and showers sorted out in a frenzied afternoon of web browsing and phone calls. We're going with:

• Gainsborough Trilock Series door hardware
• Methven Futura Tapware and their SatinJet Showerheads

I also got a reply back from the guys from Hotwire about the mirror demisters so I called the North Shore rep Mark and it just so happened he was on the way to Birkenhead when I called so, about an hour after my call he dropped off the mirror demisters to the house! [Now THAT is service]

18/11/2004 - The guys carried on with the front door installation today and moved on through to the ensuite where they raised the ceiling.

As you can probably see from the pic, we've taken the ceiling height back up to the full height of the stud which (I hope) should give us a more airy feel to what is a fairly small ensuite, as well as giving the steam somewhere to go before we suck it out via the extraction fan.

The best thing about todays proceedings was that they were all over when I came back after spending 3 hours at the dentist getting 3 of my wisdom teeth pulled. It was to be all 4 but unfortunately the poor dentist had to spend about 1.5 hours on the third tooth and ran out of time to do the last - which kinda sucked as I'll have to go back for another shot, but on the up-side, it's a top one so it'll rip out pretty easily and I won't be laid out feeling as grotty as I do at the moment while I write these updates.

19/11/2004 - Doug drops off showers, Rob recuperating, the guys start later as have earlier appointment, and they nog up the office for gib fixing. The ensuite continues to take shape, a flooring decision is made [tile] for wet areas, the kitchen lady arrives and we discuss options. The weekend plans are set over a Friday beer and (fortunately for a crook Rob), they only involve the removal of the front steps.

20/11/2004 - What a day... the boys were being complete monkeys this morning but fortunately, we (mostly) managed to settle them down before dropping them off to Hadleys friend Liams place to play for a couple of hours.
Amanda and I then went shopping for a new barbecue (as my one is a bit... well stuffed would be a polite way of putting it) and we need something a bit bigger for our new deck. For any of you readers who've come to one of my (famous?) barbecues, you'll know that we have a tricky time cooking everything on the 3 burners on the old barbecue. Aaaaanyway, we headed to Harvey Normans to check out a rather nice 6 burner BBQ and without even trying we were offered quite a nice discount. We also need a replacement fridge for our new kitchen as, even with 4 of us, we're pushing the limits of our existing fridge so once the boys hit their teenage years, we're definitely going to be caught short so we've got a larger space built into the plans to accommodate a fridge of teenage storage capabilty.

We also briefly dropped into Tile New Zealand and took home a couple of sample tiles, we're not decided on what we want yet - but will continue the search tomorrow.
On the way back we got a call from some people down the road, Kali had got out so we had to pickup the boys, then collect Kali and pickup a nice new sledgehammer to smash up the front steps (after lunch of course).
It was a full-family effort with me doing the heavy smashing and levering the bits apart, Amanda breaking up the other bits and directing the boys, who were in charge of putting the pieces into the wheelbarrows and emptying them again once we'd wheeled it around to the back of the garage.

21/11/2004 - Well, we measured up the plans this morning and found that some of the appliances we were looking at will go pretty much anywhere, so thus they've become a non-issue in terms of planning layouts and therefore we've struck them off the list and will re-visit it later when we have a better idea of the budget at the end of the project.
We also measured up (kinda) the area required for the tiles and, after yesterdays visit to Tile New Zealand, we wanted to have a look around at some other places.
The planning to remove ceilings and rest up from yesterdays efforts never eventuated, we started off by heading out to the local Harvey Normans and doing a bit of a shop.
At the Tile Warehouse in Albany we also found some wooden overlay which, in Macrocapa, looks fairly similar to our existing Kauri floors.