We were close to Xmas when we made an offer for Carisbrooke. As usually we had lots of pressure from the Real Estate agent to finalise the sale. He would have needed the commission to buy his wife's Xmas present. 
We had another inspection of the house and were satisfied with most of the things in the house and yard and closed the sale, making the agent very happy. Because we were not in a hurry to move we decided that we would make all the changes in the house, especilly indoors, before we move in. The Murphy's lay say that what could go wrong, goes wrong and with us it was not an exception. 2007 December turned up to be one of the wetest year on record with massive rainfalls and floods.
The only advantage was that we had the opportunity to test the house for storms and the findings were not that encouraging. The roof around the office leaked under heavy rain and we found out that it was a design fault of the guttering system and cost us some money to fix it.
Also the backyard had no drainage at all and we end up one night digging a channel to drain the water from the backyard to the road otherwise the house would flood. Lack of proper drainage resulted in all the mud from the neighbours yard above us end up on our pool
The only bright side of this coin was that with the rain painters were looking for indoor jobs and we managed to get our house all painted for a good price. In the next sections we will show you the work we done to turn the Carisbrooke house into our home.
The thing I still have problems understanding is what happened to us in relation to this house. We have bought quite a few houses in our life and although we changed them quite considerably during the years we lived in, we never experienced a thing like Carisbrooke.
Nothing in this house seemed to satisfy us...and we started changing everything. The first casualty of this phenomenon was the interior of the house.
Out they went the curtains, the carpets, the bathroom fittings, the painting scheme and even the layout of the lounge / dining room. These are some photos showing the work that went on indoors...
After we completed the indoor changes we moved in. We moved all the Norman Park furniture and the bits we had stored away for 5 years from our house in Nowra. It was like an advanced Xmas opening all the boxes we had in storage.
Friends came up to wish you all the best in the new house and obviously we started having parties at our new house
When we looked closely to what we had bought we started seeing some problems that we "couldn't live with".
We had to do something drastic...
The first thing we did was to organise a big clean up of the backyard so that we could plan what needed to be done.
We engaged a specialised firm that cut and chipped most of the trees with exception of the palm trees.
And this was the result ....
The outdoor area is quite large (1,040 square meters, including the house) and our heads boiled with million of ideas of what we would like to do with it.
I sat at the computer and tried to picture the main work. Thanks to Photoshop it was relatively easy to build "what-if" pictures of what the place would look like.
The beauty of it is that even the non technically minded person could visualise the final product better than any 2D engineering plan. After a few attempts we agreed on this plan. The first two thumbnails show the initial overall plan.
After agreeing on what it would look like, it was hard work for several weekends for the Costas and Teixeiras. The thumbnails below will show you a collection of photos taken during the construction period. With the exception of the concreting all the work was done by us.
After concreting the backyard we calculated how many tiles were going to be necessary to cover the area and come to a number of approximately 800!!!
The two major problems to ovecome were in the first place the cost of the tiles and next the fact that we had never done this type of work.
But because we believe that there is no insurmountable obstacle when we have the will to overcome it, I spent some time on Google to see how to do it, bought the tools required and dived right into the job. The job itself it is not very dificult but without the tricks of the trade we made some errors so obvious now, that surprise us how we couldn't see then then.
However the final result is more than acceptable, it is functional and we spend some good moments doing it. Some of our friends (special thanks to Margarida and Henrique) joined us and helped a bit.
