Bonfire night

We hosted a bonfire night and had some friends over-nighting in the house as well as some crazy people decided to pitch a tent and camp outside. 

Some highlights from the weekend:

- the bonfire

- marshmallow antics and the marshmallow dessert challenge

- Ciaran’s mulled wine

- Batman growling at Adam

- Adam and Sheetal on the hammock

- Spud doing support from the campfire

- Adams box of documents being burned (all his MBA notes and assignments!)

- the Tent people (Spud, Pauly, Cathy)

- Jonathan’s snoring :)

- Pauly’s squeaky voice (after her snooze)

- Spud’s Chocolate Pavlova (and trying to whip cream with a) a spatula b) shaking it in a small bottle c) chopsticks or d) all of the above)

- Jenga on a plastic picnic table on uneven ground

- Will’s BBQing skills (and the previous pit digging)

- Jonathan, Will and Adam’s attempt to outdo each other in finding a ridiculous piece of wood for burning

Shame File:

- James

- Evelyn (and Nigel)

(We ate your share!  mwahahaha)

Some other photos:

Progress Photos (May 16)

Will and Batman catch some rays on the north eastern steps.  It’s now pretty cold in the mornings.

Polytech plastic wrap has now been removed and the floorboards in the kitchen completed.

Looking back from the kitchen the floorboards look pretty good!  I’m concerned that we have ordered way too many boards.  All those boards seen in the photo below are yet to be used and there is only the bedroom to go!

Mirror is now up.  Note for next time: porcelain tiles are not good to drill through.  (not sure why we can see a circle in the mirror). 

After the work Nikki helped on to move the bed and put down the silver underlay, I had to reconstruct the bed so we could sleep on it… and we didn’t get around to finishing the floors in the house so the bedroom was de-prioritised.

 

But the corridor was completed! 

Kitchen Floorboards

A couple of action shots of Will doing the kitchen floorboards.  This was late on Saturday afternoon (May 15).

We had to move the fridge out of the way (so we used our old trick of using an upside down piece of carpet to slide the fridge along.  Batman took full advantage of the carpet piece… right next to a food source.

The finished fridge cavity… well other than the beading/scotia bit.  After putting the fridge back in that space we forgot to turn the fridge back on till the morning!  Doh!

Around the Post

Floor board work continued the weekend of 8th/9th May with the difficult task of going around the post.  We had the blue bendy tool from high school (I really can’t recall using it at high school!) and managed to go around the post after two times (the first time Will didn’t like the result so started again.)

The finished result looks like this (looks like I should clean the lens):

Result photo 2:

Will is pooped!

And Batman just looks on…

Tiling and more floorboarding!

The tiling was done a couple of weeks ago but we didn’t have the right tools to do the grouting.  We finally bought the squeegee.  This weekend (end of April) whilst waiting for Will to work on the fiddly bits of floorboard I decided to do the grouting.  

Not having a measuring jug made it hard for me to work out what approx 370mL of water was to mix in with the 1.5L of grout powder.  Thank goodness Will had read on the packet that the consistency was meant to be like toothpaste.  I just kept adding water till it had that sort of consistency.  For a mixing tool I just used our paint edger tool which is totally bent out of shape. 

Voila!  Done.  It was quick work in the end although I think next time I’d wear gloves as I ended up using my fingers to push the grout into the smaller hard to get to areas.  The corners sucked up heaps of grout and it felt like I kept shoving more and more grout it.  I pushed most of the corner areas in with the squeegee and used my finger/s to smooth things out.  It looks pretty good and similar to the professional job on the tiles below the feature tiles :)

Again while waiting for some of the more difficult parts of the floorboards to be done I ended up cleaning the bathroom floor (sacrificed an old toothbrush to my cause).  Whilst you may not see the difference here it has made a huge difference to how I feel about the bathroom as I scraped off (mostly with a fingernail and then the toothbrush and then a scraper!) the excess paint bits which had fallen to the tiles. 

As we left it on the Sunday… you can see some of the main living area is done but we are fast approaching the post which we’ll have to work out a way to cut around.  I had this really old (school days!) tool that was meant to help me draw curved lines (I think it was for the Maths elective torics?  geesh my memory is bad!).  Anyway we’ll be using that to draw the line on the floorboards as it will mould to the shape of the post… Let’s see how that will pan out. 

To do the floorboards and lay the underlay meant we had to move the furniture (all one piece of it ;) ) and all the floorboards (all zillion boxes… ok so maybe it was only around 20 boxes?) to different parts of the house.  We had so much loaded on one side of the house it was starting to squeak when Will walked in the area!  That was it for that area and we started pushing boxes of boards to the kitchen floor instead.

Will is using his table saw in the photo below to create nice straight lines to start the ground floor and end the upstairs loft.  Nathan lent us the drop saw which is coming in real handy to complete the end bits of the floorboards.

We have another visitor.  These wallabies are pretty cute.  Batman also thinks it’s pretty cool to have such strange creatures on our land based on his carrying on! 

Floorboards….

We started on the ground floor on the Anzac Day weekend but didn’t get very far and had to continue on the following weekend. The doorway again threw up some calculation problems for Will to solve. We thought we could continue into the evening but the bad lighting made us stop around 6.30pm. It’s slow going but as they say… haste makes waste!

Batman had to try on the ear muffs to see if things outside were as loud as they seemed… they are looking massive on him! Safety first guys!

After purchasing a table saw, Will was able to finish the top floor’s final row.

Finished top floor!

Anzac Day Weekend

Floorboards were continued over the Anzac Day weekend… starting to come together now… the joins seem to be a fair amount of work…

The upstairs loft floor is looking pretty good. The stair well in the middle killed productivity as we were going well with a bit of a rhythm with two of us working on the boards… but the stairwell made it a lot of stop start! The ‘rules’ for laying floorboards sound easy in concept but was very complex as we never seemed to have the right lengths:

• Boards need to be min 20cm long
• Adjacent joins need to be at least 40cm away from the last one (don’t ask how the 20cm board one works on that?)
• Need a 8-12mm gap for expansion on each side

We drove down to the bottom of the valley (still on the property) and I had the zoom camera so managed to find the house in amongst the trees.

The kids tuckered Batman out. Gavin tuckered us out totally! How does Nora do it???

We played Jenga and Fact or Fishy in the evening with the kids and even tried to give them a taste of a camp fire by barbequing over a fire… sausages, onions and kebabs.

Before Anzac Day weekend

The camera ran out of battery one weekend so I took some photos of where we left off...


The el cheapo bed we scored from IKEA. The bed was only $29 but the slats cost us another trip to IKEA and $40 so all up a double bed for $69. We'll be finishing the pine in some colour we have used in the house (probably to match the stairs) but that's a project for another day. We will need to wait till 25th April to actually "install" it according to the Chinese Farmers Almanac.On the 25th we thought we'd actually put the rest of it together including the $100 double mattress (new!) I bought via ebay. Picked it up in the ute from the city of all places. But it looks soooo comfy esp compared to the mattress pad or even the sofa bed... at least we'll be less dog height!
Whilst waiting for the next thing I could do inside I thought I'd start pulling out some weeds. Managed to get a fair number of them and found all these rocks (ha!) so pulled them out to build a bit of a framework/constraint to work in. This is the shady side but at least has less rocks. Maybe put some herbs in here? Lots of light just no direct sunlight... hmm...
We have blinds! Got them via halfpriceblinds.com.au which stuffed up the delivery... but we finally have them installed. Makes the place look a lot more finished even if there is now a little less light during the day...
Starting to put some nik naks on the shelves. The colourful mugs and crockery looks pretty good!

Easter Break (Part 3)

Pretty much last day of the Easter break we are up and just finishing off a few things...

The robe doors are painted and have been remounted...
Fancy blinds (from dealsdirect.com.au) were installed and look pretty swish for a laundry!
This is the before photo of the tiles before they have been stuck to the wall. See the dodgy paint job that is done before the tiling? But at least that room paint wise is done :)
Feature wall is now painted. Makes a huge difference to the feel of the place! This was done in Rialto which is the same as one of our feature walls at home too. Thinking of getting a glossy version of this colour for the front door too...

Easter Break (Part 2)

Batman is trying to help Will read the tiling adhesive container... I don't think he'll be able to reach the areas to be tiled though! The two additional rows of tiles are to be stuck on so they are in line with the tiles in the shower... Lazing on the job again!