[Progress.161] Thanks to excellent service from maintenance guy

Recently we have 2 water/plumber related issues which has been bugging us for a few weeks.

First is the toilet in the main bedroom ensuite. We noticed after every flush, when it refills the tank from the rain water tank, the noise seems to be a lot noisier than the other 2 toilets. The loud squeaking noise was really annoying specially during late nights. We tried pressing the flush buttons harder/softer/slowly, but none of them seem to make any difference.

The next one is the shower. Have a look at the photo below, it might look normal, but if you look closely at the bottom, you will notice there's lots of water coming down the hose too.

At first I thought it has something to do with the shower rose/head. Quickly unscrew it and as below, very simple structure.

I tried to wrap it with the white plumber's tape, but there's still lots of water coming out.

Did a few simple test by holding the shower head/rose on different height. Then I noticed it's actually the shower hose that's leaking!

Went to Bunning's Warehouse and as below, saw 2 type of shower hose available both under $40 range. Struggled a bit as not sure it would fit or not, so I just took down some details and went home.


Discussed with wife, and she prefer to give our builder's maintenance guy a call first as he has always been very helpful in the past 2 years.

Surprisingly after a quick chat, the maintenance guy said he will get the plumber to have a look very soon, cool!

That's why I always let my wife handle the builder/trades person, somehow she can always manage to get things done/move forward without much tension/trouble compared to me... That's also how we share the work: I do all the technical things: investigation, research,...etc, while she handles the non-technical "talking" part.

After a few days, a "assistant" plumber arrived and replaced the shower hose within minutes. Somehow after a few attempts, he wasn't able to "quiet down" the toilet on the first visit. He had to go back to ask his boss for further instruction. On the next day, he returned and fixed the toilet quite quickly. Wife asked him what's wrong, and the response was "trade secret, can't tell you"... I am fine with that as the noise is gone, and I saved $40, we were all very happy with the service and quick response!

Special thanks to our maintenance guy for another excellent service. And tip to whoever just moved in to your new house. If there's any problem, before spending any extra money or fixing anything yourself, try give the maintenance guy a call first... And don't forge to have good relationship with the builder/maintenance guy!!

[Giveaway.001] [CLOSED] My First Giveaway - Blomus Tewo Key Board - Ends on 20/May/2010 [CLOSED]

[Update] This Giveaway is now closed! Please see this post for the result.

Thanks to CSN Stores, I'm excited to announce my first ever giveaway!

CSN is an online shopping center which has over 200 online shops where you can find practically anything for your home: TV Stands, tools, kids stuffs, pets and lots more.

Now, the giveaway: this is a very stylish stainless steel key board for you to hang your keys by the door, and you don't have to worry about losing your keys or wasting time searching for them any more. Just slide your key through the well designed opening, and it will keep the keys in order within seconds. The gorgeous design adds to the ambience of any setting and it's definitely a perfect accessaory for any home or office.

Dimension: 2.4"H x 8.3"




Win It!!
Here are the rules to enter:

Please leave a separate comment for EACH entry and include your e-mail or have it in your profile so I can contact you if you win.

Mandatory:
Visit one of the CSN stores and tell me which is your favorite item and from what store! Please be specific, any duplicate entries will be deleted. This first entry is mandatory and must be done before any extra entries.

For extra entries:
1. extra entry (maximum 3): comment on other posts in my blog and tell me which post you commented on
2. extra 3 entry: follow my blog via Google Friend Connect (on the left side of this page) and leave a comment to tell me about it. If you are already a follower, please indicate this in the comment.
3. extra entry (maximum 5): tweet about this giveaway - make sure to leave a separate comment for each of them!
4. extra 5 entries: if you have a blog, blog about this giveaway with link to this post and TV Stands, and leave me the comment with a link to your blog post.

Unfortunately, this giveaway is open only to residents of the US. Sorry to my Aussie readers and others from other countries/continents... Will try to arrange other giveways in the future!

This giveaway will end on 20th May 2010 (AEST) and a winner will be chosen through random.org. Winner will be announce on the next day, notified via email and asked to respond with full contact information within 48 hours of being notified. Failure to do so will result in another winner being picked.

If you have any other question or further information required regarding this giveaway, please send me an email, my email address: building(dot)our(dot)first(dot)house(at)gmail(dot)com

Thanks to CSN who supplied the products for the giveaway and good luck everyone!

Buy It!!
As we can only have one winner, in case you were not chosen you can still buy this stylish key board from here.



[Update] This Giveaway is now closed! Please see this post for the result.

Disclaimer:
*The Blomus Tewo Key Board being given away in this post has been provided by CSN Stores. It will be shipped directly to the winner of the giveaway by the sponsor. Prize distribution is the sole responsibility of the sponsor, this site and the individuals associated with it are not liable for prize delivery.
*I have not seen or tried the product for myself. I was not paid to give my opinion and the opinions are mine alone and may vary from others.

[PropertyInfo.039] Bubbles, bubbles everywhere...

There were reports of property bubbles left, right, and centre from all media recently. Wonder if you agree or not? From what we observed in the past few weekends, everyone seems to have gone crazy, even worst than the peak back in 2003...

27/3 was called "Super Saturday" as it's the last Saturday before Easter break, with 34 on-site auction scheduled, and we witnessed 2 that day.

On 27/3 morning, we went to this Charles St house featured in previous week's local paper in Putney with friend.

The house was packed...

From the recent sales record of houses in the area, we estimate the land probably worth around $1.2M. From the quality of the house, we think it definitely won't cost more than $500K.

The auction was held at the backyard...

However the most shocking news was, the council still haven't approve OC (Occupation Certificate) yet due to some storm water issue. Looks like the owner must be in some sort of cash flow issue to put the property on the market in such rush...

There were quite a few active bidders and our friend was one of them. He quite "reasonably" stopped at about $1.9M, while the others just kept going. Finally, the young Asian lady with glasses, dressed in black in the middle of the photo below was the highest bidder with $2.118M. Unfortunately it still didn't reach the owner's "shocking" expectation of $2.5M.

We all think the house doesn't worth that much... Later this week, from the local paper, the property was listed as sold for $2.118M...

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In the afternoon, we went to another on-site auction in Epping. All the streets around the area were fully parked, and we heard a couple mentioned they have to walk almost 100m to come to the house... Unbelievable, just look at the crowd from the photo below...

It's a tiny 2 bedroom house, with only 316 m2 of land. Record from On the house as below showed it was sold in Oct 2005 for $560K.

The location is excellent as it's quite close to one of the best primary school in the area, and the competition was even hotter than the Putney one. Starting bid was $560K, and it jumped very quickly, finally sold at surprising high price of $726K, WOW!!

Consider another house on the same street with 697 m2 of land was only sold in May 2009 for $710K, paying $726K for a small house with 316 m2 is really ridiculous!

The property was chosen as the feature property in this weekend's local paper as below.

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This morning (10/4) we went to another open house in Epping, and we were quite surprise to see a long queue outside the house as photo below. Same as the previous mentioned one, the location was also quite close to the same primary school, no wonder it's so popular. But having so many people for the first open house is still quite amazing... What's going on? I thought RBA's rate increase this week would somehow calm the over-heated property market down a bit...

It's another small 3 bedroom house with 404 m2 land, price guide was over $675K and scheduled for auction on 1/5.

As below, there's still lots of people after we left... Would be interested to see how the auction goes a few weeks later.

[BlogSite.029] Human calendar added

Found this Human calendar from Annie's blog: A View on Design which is quite interesting - with photos of different people shown everyday.

Hope you like it!