Rain, rain, rain.

As if to tease me, we had a fairly sunny day yesterday.

If it weren’t for work, I might have been able to coat the front door, and even get a second coat on.

Today, we have more rain, and the forecast for tomorrow? Rain. Another weekend wasted.

I suppose for some people the rain is even worse, for example, lawn mowing – can’t cut the lawns in the rain, so no work. Construction – can’t put a roof on a house in the rain.

The rain would be useful, if we got a water tank, but back to it, our consumption is so low it wouldn’t make it worthwhile. It would be useful, for example, the other night, we had no water, because of a broken pipe somewhere, and then you get the follow on brown water for some time after the repair. A water tank would at least allow you to flush the toilet.

I’m disappointed at the inability to do anything because of the rain. I’d much like to be painting or arranging the exterior paint job, or many of the other items I’d like to get done.

Unrelated, but still worth considering, is, we were looking at sites like AV Jennings, for example, who build houses on your land. I was amazed to see they knock up a 3 bedroom house for around $115k. It seems largely finished, except for curtains, garden landscaping, etc – $115k, in comparison to $27k (cladding), $17k (roofing), and $8k (security screens), seems to be a near option worth considering (as we’ve still got a good $30k or so on the interior – and that’s without the extension idea).

If we make it ‘comparable’ to the AV Jennings house we looked at, we’d arrive at $102k worth of work done. Add about $20k for demolition though and the renovation still looks cheaper.

The internal work was ‘estimated’ (very loosely), as $25 – 40k by the builder, which is fair, so if we take his loose estimate as gospel, then to reach our current desired completion (it’ll probably change), we’d have spent $86k.

I’ve excluded the security screens for example, and the solar hot water, and solar power, as these wouldn’t be included in the knock down rebuild anyway.

The benefit of a rebuild though, would be that you get less compromises (for example, the rear of our house is 40mm sunk in the right, barely noticeable, but there none the less).