We took a flight down on Sunday 29 June as we had to do a pre-settlement inspection, to make sure that the owner hadn’t taken away the dishwasher or the oven, light fittings, etc. Anyway, they hadn’t taken anything so that was all fine. So we got the keys on Monday afternoon and we slept in our new house on the Monday night and the Tuesday night before flying back to Sydney on Wednesday morning. We were very happy to see that the electricity and gas was still connected, otherwise it would have been too cold to stay in the house, we would have had to stay in the hotel on the main road.

It was weird to sleep in the house those two nights. Knowing that it is our house but then at the same time not really knowing the house and the different house noises it makes. I was a bit scared but slept reasonably well. The first night we slept on the floor. Not the most comfortable night’s sleep we’ve both had. The next night we slept on the little fold out day bed in the sunroom so we slept on that instead.

The main reason that we stayed down there for Monday and Tuesday was that there is a bunch of ivy on the side of the house (the south facing side) that has become way too dense that I wanted to get down asap. I have a gut feeling that it started to creep its way into the roof space. I hate ivy. So it was a good excuse to sleep in the house for a couple of nights and to take down the ivy as well.

We bought all the right tools from Mitre 10 (2 minutes drive down the road) and we set to work taking down the ivy from the side of the house. As you can see we had a bit of fun while doing it.

We poisoned that thing to within an inch of its life (I hope!). Hopefully it will stop growing and start dying now. Apparently we’ll have to constantly monitor the base of the ivy and put weed killer on it each time it shoots new sprouts. I’ll make another post shortly on how to remove ivy from the external walls of a house. If you have ivy, don’t let it grow, get rid of it asap, it will take over your wall and then start growing under the house and then it will start growing into the roof cavity of your house. As we were clipping away at the ivy on the wall we noticed that the ivy had grown around a pipe and that the pipe had a slight leak in it. The leak in the pipe combined with the denseness of the ivy in that particular area had caused the board to become rotted so it will have to be replaced.