The Forest House

It's been a month now since we have moved into our Forest House! It has been quite eventful, starting with our arrival at about 9:30pm on the 11th September.

The plan was that Alan would drive our Honda up to Kuranda, taking around 3 days to get there. After a rather stressful time packing all of the animals into the car (including 45 reptiles and frogs, and more than 100 insects, spiders, centipedes, scorpions and other invertebrates!), Alan left at around 4pm on the 9th September. I was flying up with my sister Tamara to give me a hand, as I was travelling with Tayen and Saige, 2 car seats, Indi the Beagle and all our luggage including lilos and sleeping bags as we were moving into an empty house. The flight was uneventful, and we arrived in Kuranda at around 9:30pm.

I was out on the front lawn taking Indi out for a toilet break (I wasn't sure the fences were all secure, so I had to keep her on the lead), when I heard a car slow down out the front of our house. This wasn't unusual, since I had already discovered a speed bump on the road just outside our house, so passing cars were slowing anyway. But this one was different - it had its indicator on. I was surprised (and overjoyed!) to find that Alan had arrived the same night we did! He had reached his intended destination for the night at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, so he decided to keep going. It turns out that his journey had been quite eventful, since Google maps had directed him down long stretches of gravel road, which were dangerously slippery from all the rain that had fallen in the last week. He drove for 60km slipping and sliding along unsealed road, knowing that if he stopped he would get bogged. He also had a flat tyre, and a cracked windscreen. Oh, and the car was filthy!

Our Forest House (with the filthy Honda!)

With an empty house, there wasn't much we could do, besides clean in preparation for all our furniture, and look after the animals. We started painting our hallway, which was a horrible dark yellow colour. We are painting it cream to match the rest of the house, and also chose some paint for the kids bedroom and the playroom/spare room.

Our shipping container was due to arrive on the Monday or Tuesday, but when it still hadn't arrived on Tuesday morning, and we hadn't hear anything, we called the freight company to discover all our furniture would be arriving on Wednesday. So we had a few lazy days having breakfast in town, exploring our new home, and generally getting sick of not having a chair to sit on! Our lovely neighbour Pam, who runs the Fruit bat rescue house, leant us a few chairs until ours arrived.

When our shipping container arrived, it was all hands on deck to unload it as fast as possible. Up until then, we had mild weather, but the day that our furniture arrived was hot and unloading was hard work, especially up all those stairs!
Tamara had been a great help, and we took some time out to visit Palm Cove, a beautiful beach only half an hour away.

Tamara was going home early on Friday morning, but we had more help arriving on Thursday night - Robbie was coming up for a long weekend of unloading the shipping container, painting and unpacking. The container was practically empty by the end of Friday, so the next job was arranging the furniture and setting up the house - the fun was just beginning!