Arriving in Hobart

The house was in great condition - our tenant had done a good job. Unpacking the cars was a big job: the house is up on a hill, and we don't have proper car parking close to the house, so it's a pretty long walk, 8 meters up. One of the things that will happen soon is that we'll be putting a proper driveway in.

We made the downstairs area of the house our bedroom for the next week: our furniture wouldn't arrive until the following Monday, so we had time to do some maintenance and painting of the house. This was all upstairs, so we'd minimise the fumes especially for the kids downstairs.

It really was a week of luxurious camping: on air mattresses, but with heating, hot running water and other comforts, so quite fun, and the kids seemed to enjoy it too! The only inconvenience (if you can call it that) was having to get ice every day to keep the eski cool...

When we bought the house in July 2005 it had been freshly painted, but not really to our liking. Every room had a different motif - lime green in the lounge room (yuck), bright yellow (not everybody's taste, but we like it) in the bathroom, dark blue in Christopher’s room, rosy pink in our bedroom, and about 4 or 5 other colours in different areas. So we bought a large quantity of 'cowardly custard' paint (a nice yellowish, off-white colour) and attacked those colours. In most rooms we left a 'feature wall' in the original colour, and in the lounge room we made a new feature wall of darkish-bright red. We had a good time doing it, and Christopher even helped.

And, we're very happy with the results!

Having a week to do this gave us also plenty of time to explore our new hometown, do some sightseeing and shopping etc.

We visited Neno and Carmelina - our new neighbours that we'd met quite a few times before – Christopher calls Neno ‘Nemo’! They're a lovely elderly (Italian) couple. They've lived here since the houses were built, and Neno actually built his own house all himself - including excavating the rocks under the house... took him a few years! He's got a magnificent terraced vegie garden behind their house: we've had too many lettuces to eat already! Speaking of fresh produce: one of the great features of our house is a beautiful peach tree in the front, next to the driveway. When we arrived it got to the end of the season for the peaches, but we still had about two weeks of loads of beautiful peaches from our own tree. And there are also an apple and a pear tree, and their fruit will ripen in the next few weeks!

Our other neighbours that own the land behind us, further up the hill, are Benn and Michelle. We'd met Benn a few times around the house, and just went for dinner to their place to meet Michelle properly too. Their house is gorgeous, and we thought we had a good view - well being higher up on the hill theirs is even better: uninterrupted 200 degree view of the river, just magnificent! In March Benn and Michelle are leaving for Amsterdam to celebrate their daughter's 30th birthday, who lives there. They're both retiring and will leave for about a year to travel the world starting the middle of this year.