Glamorous Homeowners

Oh yes, being a homeowner is pretty glamorous. Look at this close up of the fabulous carpets we have around the house. The whole house. We have ripped it out of the living room, but it's still in the hall and both bedrooms. It's starting to feature in my nghtmares.

I think this picture is hilarious and captures the spirit of a renovation. I call it "Hugh mops wall".

New Norcia

We went to New Norcia last weekend with Jamil and Deborah. It's an absolutely beautiful Benedictine monastery built in the middle of the outback north of Perth. It used to have a school where aboriginal orphans were taught my the monks, and later also nuns based there. This is us outside the chapel.

Hugh's school is taking a trip there in February for a music camp. All of the ensembles are staying for a week. Last weekend it felt like it was a million degrees there. Come the height of summer, it'll be pretty darn warm.

Buff Orpingtons

 This is what our hens will look like when they are fully grown. Isn't she magnificent? Ours are still teenagers and may end up to be roosters, eek. They are getting braver these days and now follow us around the place. Our neighbour Bill built us a fence last weekend so now we can leave the hens have the run of the garden. They love it. But the first thing they did was to eat all my vegetables. Lesson learned.

Look how great they are when they are chicks though, awwwwwwwwwwww.

Garden Party

These are a few of the people who came to our garden party on Saturday. In the foreground is Nicole, the clarinet teacher and Lynette, the violin teacher from JSR. They are great fun. Deborah and Andrew are lurking around in the background too.

The collection of people in the house really brought to light the fact that we only have 3 chairs, so after some ingenious diy, and using all of our upturned flower pots, we can now officially seat and feed 20 people at a time. It does stress our kitchen resources though, where we only have one working hob. Here's to winning the lotto and getting a new kitchen!

Connies

This is a picture taken last Saturday night when we were out in town. Northbridge in Perth has a terrile reputation and features frequently in the news with reports of fights and all sorts of terouble breaking out in the small hours. To be honest though, we've been thre a few times and have seen no sign of it. Sure people are screaming and shouting and dancing and all that, but it's all normal carry on for a night out. Nothing threatening really.

This is Jamil, Deborah, myself and Hugh. Jamil is the choral director in JSR and Deborah is a German student teacher there. She is the one who helped Hugh get our chickens last week.

Chickens!

We finally got chickens! I've really wanted them for ages, and Hugh started coming around to the idea when we saw some Buff Opringtons in a petting zoo in Wales last year. They are lovely birds, very big and pretty cool looking.

Hugh and Deborah from john Septimus Roe went and collected 3 of them last Thursday. At 14 weeks old they are still teenagers, and it will be a few months before they start laying. They are living in the aviary cage in our back yard. They are seriously scared of us though and run away whenever we get near. Laura says that giving them tasty treats is the key to winning them over, so we'll have a go off giving them watermelon this evening.

The Living Room Begins

We have started to sort out the living room. Hugh and George took all the furniture out and put it in the spare bedroom last weekend. That room is now so full that you have to take a running jump to get in. The living room though is now fine and spaceous.

This is the large window visible on the front left of the house. There are terriflyingly dirty net curtains over the windows, so when we get a full bio suit, I'll have them down. In the meantime, this is going to be the next room to get the zulu plain treatment. 

And these are the double doors that lead into the living room from the hall. This was taken last weekend when the wall was still white in the corridoor. I'm really bad at getting photos off the camera at the moment. These ones are from George. Soon though we'll have the auld internet in the flat again so will be back in full comms action.

We quite like these doors, but they are going to be impossible to paint around so we must figure some way of taking them down for a while. They are on sliding rollers, hanging from the top, but the complication of unhooking them is that there is a decorative cover over the top which is trapping them in. A new power tool is required no doubt.

Hallway

We finally got the whole house clean, so now we are starting to properly renovate. Step 1 is painting everything. We thought that the hall would be a good place to start as then it would be something nice to look at when we first step into the house. Over the past week we cleaned the place, filled all the cracks with polyfilla and masking taped it, so we could do a proper job of it.

Then on Saturday, me and mom painted the ceiling and walls with 2 coats of white paint while the lads were out at the cricket. We both strangely like painting, so are really enjoying it. We have lots of paint brushes and rollers, and a really great stepladder that has a table top for paint cans to make it as easy as possible.

This is it halfway done, how glary does that look? So then yesterday me and Hugh masked the ceiling and painted the walls a colour called zulu plain, which is a light brown. It sounds nasty, but is actually really nice. I'll get a picture as soon as we can.

Also Hugh and George moved all the furniture from the living room to the spare bedroom so now we can properly tackle that room too.

New House!

Here I am in front of our new house. The chimney is a wonderful example of the bad taste of previous generations. I'm starting to like it though. The fireplace inside is no better. And the carpets are the stuff of nightmares. But it is ours.

We started off this weekend with a massive cleanout of the kitchen and main bedroom. This is still in progress as we got distracted slightly yesterday by some friends coming over for a nosy around the new house.

We received some lovely presents from Hugh's family on the morning we moved in! Excellent timing! This is from Carole and Don, and we have a lovely bunch of flowers too from Mamgu, Janet and David in Swansea. I'll get a picture of them later.