Wow, long time no post.

Hmmm... looking at the dates, it seems as if my last post was in May last year.  I suppose we haven't really progressed much since then but then, maybe we have!  I haven't feel much in the way of updating this blog after Batman's passing.  He's now at Howes Valley permanently looking after it.

In case you are wondering, we did end up adopting another dog from Blacktown Pound, Sprocket.  He's been with us for a little while now.  We suspect he's an alien disguised as a dog, as he doesn't quite behave the way we expect, but he's been great at Howes Valley.  We just need to watch out for any fox baits :(.

I wanted to post today as I'm very excited about the Nectre Bakers Oven being installed!  It'll be installed in the nearish future once we organise the last bit for the 45 degree pitched roof!  I'm really looking forward to being much warmer there and in front of a wood fire where we can cook on it and in it as well.  I think the easiest and quickest thing we can do is pizza... but I can imagine roasts and all sort of goodies coming out of that oven.

In terms of progress, we have since that time have finished all the floorboards (and sold the excess on ebay).  There is still 1 strip of skirting left to go but we need to purchase that.  I've painted the front door... Will has installed 2 antennas --  one for FM radio and one for the TV.  Oh yes, we have free to air TV!

AND we have internet (Telstra NextG).  I suspect we'll have another antenna soon as the reception on what we have is terrible and drops out a lot.  But internet is still goooooood.  We went with a 10Gb which lasts for 365 days.  That should last us a while on light usage.  We purchased the modem/router thing from ebay which accepts a NextG SIM card.

The other thing Will installed is a set of security cameras.  This is after the breakin we had at Kellyville Ridge. So now we monitor both houses to some extent.

Outside there has been quite a bit of work, with fruit trees installed and watered using a rain water tank (which we fill up using our main tank), some 'paving' being done -- you'll see the photos in another post I'm sure!, a BBQ site set up and lots of mowing!  The rain water tank had some drainage piping installed so the overflow goes to the dam.  Thanks to Chris, Susan, Ben and Jenny for helping out on that one!

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!