The first weekend

 Our bedroom, with clean walls.

 And again, with the first touches of a shade of blue called Foresight.  Soooo much nicer than the hospital green it's been wearing all these years.

 The loungeroom with clean walls and a clean window.

 The loungeroom fireplace, with partly sanded timber floors.

 Scrubbing 50 years' worth of cigarette smoke off the walls made an enormous difference.

 The creative one is quite pleased at the prospect of an indoor toilet.

 An army of generous friends pitched in to help with the work.

 Some much more deft with a cutting-in brush than we are.

The helper's helpers.  The seven-year-old took the story of the old man who didn't clean his house to school for show-and-tell on Monday morning.  

And now all that cleaning has to be done over - at 7.30 Monday morning the chasers hacked into our walls, cutting grooves for the new wiring.  Shortly after that the electricians crawled into the roof to feed the wires down, and then the plumbers dug up the 1920s era plumbing from under the 1940s concrete.  

We move in in two days.

The night before

Settlement is tomorrow.  Today we had a hiccup - the bank realised it had miscalculated and suddenly needed another chunk of cash.  The settlement agent rang sounding grim, and so the practical one made a dash to the bank.

And we are once again assured that everything is in place for settlement to proceed without a hitch.

It had better!  The plumber is organised to fix the alarming leak in the outdoor (and only) toilet at 3pm, and the electrician is expected at 4 to do preliminary work.  There is a bottle of champagne chilling.
 

Nearly, nearly there!

At last the SOLD sign has gone up in front of our house.  We had the final pre-settlement inspection this afternoon, and a good laugh with the real estate agent about the ghostly activity in the house.

Our plans are starting to become tangible.  The electrician and plumber are booked and have promised their work will be done within only a couple of days.  We're going to believe them, because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Our rental was open today to prospective tenants - who looked very suspiciously at the appliances and fittings we've collected in our carport.  So far, we've got a stove, bathroom basin and taps, hot water service, kitchen bench and a toilet.

Settlement is next Friday, and then there will be a flurry of activity.

Completely unexpected nutcasery

The background:  the real estate agent who sold us Marmalade Cottage is sympathetic to the amount of work the place needs, so he's been quietly giving us extra access.  So long as we don't do anything to change the place, he figures it doesn't hurt.  This has meant we've been able to get the place pest-inspected, take a heap of measurements, and get a plumber and an electrician in for a quote.

Since the  place has been empty for so long, and is wearing 50 years of cigarette smoke on its internal walls, we took the opportunity to do some scrubbing.  As an afterthought we scattered some sprigs of bay, growing in the backyard, about the house to help with the smell.

The nutcasery: it turns out the daughters of the deceased owner visited the house.  Two of them are quite reasonable, the other one is mad.  She was, the real estate agent reports, incensed that we'd moved some of the furniture.  She also took the appearance of the bay sprigs as a supernatural sign that her late father was turning in his grave! We believe coniptions were had.  The poor real estate agent got quite an earful.

Annoyingly, it means our quiet and non-destructive access to our house prior to settlement has now abruptly ceased.

It's ours!

And so the reinvention can begin in earnest!

The mortgage has been properly approved, and the reinventors start the count-down to settlement.

Calls have been made to tradies and appointments have been booked.  Scary figures are bandied about.

A book is being run on how long it takes before there are tears.

This is where the story begins

We put in an offer on this the day after its first home open.  The offer was accepted without argument.  We suspect the agent put in a herculean effort convincing the three daughters of the man who'd owned this house to accept our offer.  It's a deceased estate and has been empty for something like three years,  the old man had been in a nursing home for two years before he died.

Apparently it's traditional for Italian families to wait a year after the owner has died before selling the house.  Not surprisingly, the house is musty and dusty and most of the garden is dead.

We're going through the mortgage process, and it's tedious.  We should hear soon whether the house is ours.  Our mortgage broker is confident.  We're trying not to think about it.