A Cautionary Tale Involving Floors

Here, children, is a cautionary tale for those considering depending upon Fowles for their carpet or flooring.

This morning I’m sitting in our lovely new house, alone, fuming away. As I have just twittered – there’s no rage like impotent rage. The reason I’m alone is that Rae has taken the kids out for the day. The reason she has taken them out for the day is because they aren’t meant to be around the house today and the reason for that is that our carpet should be being laid today.

You will not the use of the word ‘should’.

Rewind a little, just under two weeks ago when we got the house. Rae spent half a day sitting in here waiting for our hard flooring to arrive. Despite several phone calls it was almost one o’clock before we found out that the layer simply hadn’t turned up and wasn’t answering their phone. I’m still waiting for Fowles to return my calls from that day. So a one day job turned in to me sitting here for two three-quarter days over the weekend to get the floor laid so we could move in.

Then there was the promised phone call. We were promised a phone call on the Tuesday before Christmas to remind us to pay for the carpet (that isn’t being laid today). With packing and Christmas we didn’t realise until Wednesday that the call never came. Never mind, we’ll ring them, as we’d been told they were open every day except for the public holidays. HAH! No answer on Christmas eve, no answer on the 27th, no answer on the 28th, no answer at 8:20am on the 29th – despite the answering machine telling me every time they were open from 8:00am to 5:00pm. We packed up the kids and went in to see what was going on. “Oh, yeah, we took the days off.”. Arggghhhhhh – what’s the point of having an answering machine and not using it properly? Why not put change of hours on your web site? Why not tell your customers the right information? I’m also still waiting for the return phone calls from the messages I left.

So, after making sure all the rooms were clear this morning and organising for the kids to be out and daring to dream we may actually get to sleep in our new bedroom tonight, or maybe watch some television in our new theatre room, my heart sank when, at 9:30 and with no sign of the 8:00-8:30 arrival of the carpet layers, the phone rang.

Yes. It was Fowles. Yes there was a problem. Their carpet layer had ‘hurt his wrist’. I had to let him ramble as the steam slowly leaked from ears. They were trying to find someone else to do it today, “but, you know, at this time of the year…”. I think they must have read between the lines of my silence. Apparently we are ‘garaunteed’ the carpet will be here, first thing tomorrow.

I’ll be waiting, my bet is my phone will ring at 8:30 am…

We’re In

Hello all, after a year and a bit of buying, building, planning, saving and begging we’re in. We spent our first night in Our Home last night and, save for idiot neighbours (sigh) who thought revving a bike at midnight and yelling over it was a fun thing to do, it was absolute bliss.

The cats are here, Bella is stressed and is hiding in some shelving but Tom is already making ‘let me out’ noises. We’ve decided our first purchase will be fly wire screens for the back sliding doors, it’s tough not having fresh air coming in but everything in good time.

Updates will be late for a while thanks to lack of wired internet, this wireless is great but is incredibly expensive for the download/up limits applied. I’m just praying we will be the first people ever not to be disappointed by Telstra. I’ll be twittering (awmalloy at twitter.com) using dial2do.com if you want to follow house updates. I’ll miss reading my blogs too, I hope Google Reader can cope with the numbers of unread items i’ll be reaching.

Finally a massive thank you to fantastic family and friends who braved the heat yesterday to help us move, we all came out a lot lighter at the end of the day and hopefully everyone is not feeling as stiff as I am. Thank you , thank you and thank you again.

Almost There

We’re approaching total exhaustion after two days of non-stop packing with a Christmas break in the middle. We’re about 95% done, but the remaining 5% is stuff lying around that seems to take the longest to finish. We’ve decided to leave the bed up for tonight to try and get a better sleep, that will be dismantled tomorrow. Rob The Wonder Brother In Law not only cleaned up the back yard/dirt pile at the new place today he then came around and whipper-snippered the edges of the gardens in to shape. All that and he’s backing up to help move tomorrow.

It’s back to the final boxes now before collapsing in to bed. Wish us luck for tomorrow, 29 degrees will be a warm move. That beer at the end is going to taste sooooo good.

Our Life In Boxes

Merry Christmas

From all of us living here in the canyons of cardboard boxes to all you out there wise enough not to be moving over the next couple of days, Merry Christmas.

Also to those poor people who actually wrote out all of the family’s names on Christmas cards, we’re sorry – next year just make it out to the Malloy Family.

Merry Christmas every one.

Now It’s The Water And The Net

Yesterday I got to complain about the council, today it’s City West Water.

I was at the house cleaning up builders dust when there was a knock at the door. It was a Postie – with two envelopes from City West Water. Apparently he’d been trying to deliver them for two months and it was just lucky I was home.

The two were red letters – one telling us the account was overdue, the other telling us that legal action was about to taken to recover the debt.

When Rae called she was rather abruptly told that it wasn’t up to them to know if someone was actually at the address to receive the bills. The conveyor, quite rightly, sent in the form with our new address but City West Water apparently makes no allowance for the fact the owner of an empty block of land may not be living there.

While I’m complaining I’ll have a go at everyone else living in the suburb. They are all rather greedily using up every available ADSL2+ port at our local exchange so it’s likely we’ll have to downgrade to ADSL when we move in and wait until I bump off enough neighbours to gets me a port.

Let The Complaining Begin

I had to call the local council today to inquire about our garbage and recycle bins.

“Sure, come in and pay the $150 and we’ll get them to you in a few days.”

$150 for bins? What exactly are our rates for? This whole not renting thing is proving to be very costly.

I Won

Friday was a busy day. Rae spent all day at the house (more of which later) and I was at home with the kids and then working. 4:00 came and enough was enough, I packed the kids up and we went out to visit mum at the house. Rae drove the kids home, I finished up and headed on h0me. Half way there Rae called me to go and pick something up but as I was almost home and needed to look up the address I kept on going.

I’m so glad I did.

I pulled in to the drive and Rae was standing there.

“I’ll go.” she said.

“No, I just have to grab the address and I’ll head on out.”

“Oh for pete’s sake, I’ll go – just grab the parcel on the front step that’s been left for you.”

Huh? Parcel? Front step? She jumped in the car while I looked. Indeed there was a parcel on the front step. Freshly delivered. For me.

I unwrapped it and as I did I realised I had won.

Google recently held a competition for the best Google My Map in Australia so I submitted a map I had created a while ago. It documents old signs that still exist around Melbourne and is linked to a web site, www.ourfadingpast.com, that is still under development. You can see my map of old signs around Melbourne on Google Maps.

Any way, the very good people at Google Australia seemed to like it and awarded me the Best Overall My Maps Award. They sent me a great Perspex award in the shape of one of their map markers. And a MacBook. To say I was overcome is an understatement.

The first person I emailed was Andrew from the High Riser blog. Andrew has contributed a huge number of photos to the map, even suffering personal injury in an attempt to get the perfect shot. He’s also brought in others through Walking Melbourne and the map would be a lot smaller and of lesser value without all he has done. Thank you Andrew.

I’m over the moon with the win, and the prizes, but most of all I’m happy that I’ve created and helped to build something that other people like and value.

Oh Dear

I know I’m a geek and that Rae has latent geek tendencies but when your 3 year old son points out the the font on his ‘Santa Rocks’ t-shirt is the same as that used on Dumbo you really do get a whole new appreciation for the power of genetics.