ding dong merrily on high

We're getting there!
















We went up to the block yesterday to get a run-through of the solar electricity system, which is now connected and fully functional! AND... Michael signed off on the Biolytix sewage system as well. Apparently we have to "innoculate" the system for a couple of weeks before the installers come back with the worms and microbes, which is a posh way of saying that we need to use the toilet properly for a while to give them some food! Darling daughter had the honour of being the first innoculator (although I don't suppose in years to come she'll thank me for announcing that!). I had a moment of panic when there didn't seem to be any water in the toilet, but of course it was the first time it had been used and water had to travel along the pipes from the tank. Phew.

The above photo is of what will be my studio, complete with dearest husband standing in front of the new sink unit (very nice). My printing bench will be next to it shortly, serving as a temporary storage/food prep area until we move into the main house.






















Now that we have a working solar system we also have ceiling fans and lights! The recessed lights are 21W LED lights that look a lot like halogen down lights but aren't... much more energy efficient and 'green', and 3 times the price, but never mind. Because of the relatively high ceilings we're not expecting them to light up the place in a dazzling sort of way, and in any case we prefer task-oriented lighting so I have 2 vertical fluorescent tubes above my printing bench and plenty of plugs for lamps, which I will have to convert to using LED bulbs.





















This shows the small bathroom in its glory. We've chosen amazingly cheap dark grey floor tiles and flat white matte wall tiles. The vanity unit was cheap(ish) but smart (drawer unit is on the floor in the front of the first photo), and the fittings were on sale, as were all the ceiling fans! The ceiling fans are all reversible so that we can draw down warm air from the ceilings in the winter, and they were reduced in price by over $100 so we bought all 10 that we need for the house, thereby saving ourselves over a $1,000 dollars!

The savings in the ceiling fans and the floor tiles will - hopefully - accommodate the extra we're going to be spending in some other areas such as wine storage. We went up the other day to meet someone about the cool room, and he turned out to be a brilliant source of pragmatic advice and creative ideas. Now we don't need a huge cool room and were planning to place it diagonally in a square space so that we could fill the rest with wine storage, but our friendly refrigeration specialist (I'll call him Martin but I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember his name. Oops!) suggested making the cool room square, to fill the space, because it will reduce costs and maximise materials by avoiding cutting into the standard-sized sheets of wall/insulation that they use. However, he's shown us a way of using one side of the cool room as a partitioned wine cellar and - here's the fun part! - cutting access into the front of it i.e. from the dining room side of the wall, with snazzy glass doors so that it looks like a swanky commercial wine storage display. Wow! What a great idea, and I could see darling husband's eyes light up at the thought. Additionally, darling husband came up with the equally jazzy idea of using a coiled copper pipe running vertically through the cool room from the exterior water tanks to cool the water on the way through and dispensing it via a dedicated 'drinking water tap' on the pantry side of the wall, above the sink, and thus making great use of the available refrigeration to get cool drinking water and obviating the need for a fancy zip tap.

The only downer is that the kitchen people who gingerly made their way up the muddy track (we'd had a LOT of rain again) to the house still can't see what I'm getting at about the central kitchen storage/island units and so I still don't have anyone lined up to build them, and that could be a bit of a problem.