Weekend

We have had another busy weekend of kitchen preparation. On Saturday we met Gerard, the amazing carpenter who helped us take out the kitchen from its current abode. It took pretty much all day to remove both the kitchen and laundry, and now our house if filled to bursting with bits of cupboards everywhere.

All today then we were painting like maniacs. Andrew and Dave helped us to paint, while John plastered over the exposed brickwork. We are not painting any of the area behind the cupboards, as we are going to tile to the ceiling, but we painted the rest of the wall and ceiling.

Oh first, on Saturday morning we had a guy in to fill the hole in the ceiling.

We took turns in painting the incredibly annoying ceiling while John did an amazing job on the wall.

Than many many coats later, we finally had lovely clean walls.

The Big Night In

On top of dismantling the kitchen last Saturday and squashing his finger with a crowbar, Hugh also managed to sing, play and have great craic at the school's "Big Night In" - a rock concert mainly organised by the kids. Anyone who wants to can play, and it is a night of aspiring bands and young rock stars. Here's Hugh singing with one of the bands:

Floor preparation

It's been quite hard to get much done during the week, but we at least finished off the floor by putting down coats of varnish in the mornings and evenings.

First coat:

Second coat:

Final coat:

But when that coat dried, it was a crazy colour.

So we put down a 4th coat which turned out a lot nicer. Maybe a bit too shiny, as one of our friends has described it as an indoor ice rink, but it will dull down over time.

It's kinda hard to see in the photo of the whole room, but the windowsill has been gone since we took the tiles down. We have started to make a new one using the finest materials we could come across in bunnings - skirting board. Hopefully it'll start to look like an actual windowsill when we finish it off, but for the moment it's pretty unusual looking. Very narrow, and most definitely a horizontal skirting board.

But now we have new wires for sockets woo!

And Hugh has sealed the crazy patch of oily madness in the ceiling from when we had the ceilings raised earlier in the year, and we filled in the teeny holes all over the plaster, so now the place is set for the ceiling dude to call by tomorrow and fix the place up. And of course for plastering the giant patch of brickery in the corner.

Tomorrow we will remove the kitchen from its current house. It should take a bit longer than removing our own kitchen, as we won't be doing it with a sledge hammer.

Sunday

On Sunday morning we were really racking our brains trying to figure out how to coordinate all the parts so that we would have it ready for installation on monday. First off, we had 2 plasterers over to remove the concrete range hood. It came off pretty easy, but took a big chunk of ceiling with it, so now there's a hole in the ceiling and a dodgy section of plaster on the wall. They have covered it with black plastic so giant spiders don't come to get us in the night.

Next we had a plumber in to take out the old taps and put in new ones. The new sink is going to be almost in the exact same spot as the old one, so thankfully it wasn't a huge task. 

The gas man called to look at installing a pipe for the new gas hobs, but he said he needs to wait until the cabinets are installed before he can do his part.

So now we needed to get a ceiling guy to fix the hole. Then an electrician to move the sockets around, and when they were finished, the plasterers would come back and plaster the whole room to get it perfect for painting. It made sense that if we could line everyone up to start their tasks on Friday, we could do the floors now. This was at around 12 o clock, so we raced down to bunnings and got everything we needed. 

First the lino had to come out.

Leaving loads of glue:

We got a glue dissolving paint and then used little scrapers to get the worst patches of glue up. It was like shaving the floor. Very time consuming. 

And then we had to seriously fly though the sanding, as we have small kids next door and didn't want to have loud machines going all night. So we gave the drum sander 3 passes to get all the glue off. 

And then 3 passes with the edge sander to finish it up. 

And there we have it, beautiful sanded floorboards. Richard was over at this stage and gave us a hand with washing in preparation for staining:

At around 10 o clock we put down stain and went straight to bed. Our weekend was much harder than our working week!

Saturday Renovation

We are aiming to get the new kitchen installed early next week, and to that end we have started getting the millions of jobs done that are required. This is what we got done on saturday:

Firstly, it's about time we threw out our collection of expired mustards in the fridge.

Then Andrew popped over and we removed the first floor cabinet. All our plates and stuff are balancing precariously around the house in the meantime. 

The next to go was the wall cabinet. We spent ages trying to delicately take it off the wall, but it was proving tricky, so we smashed it to bits with a sledge hammer. 

This was my favourite part - removing the 60s-tastic curtians and the filthy old blinds. 

Agh, Hugh smashed his finger with a crowbar! 

But the show must go on, so John popped over to give a hand and we quickly took out the remaining cabinets, cooker and here he is angle grinding through the sink. Who needs to disconnect things carefully eh?

And finally, we took the tiles off the wall. Some were easy to remove as they had been put on with regular tile adhesive, but most were stuck on with thick concrete. What were these people thinking? It took quite a bit of elbow grease to get those ones off, and John smashed all the concrete off back to the bricks, so we can plaster properly. 

In the meantime, Hugh and Dave have dismantled everything in the utility room.

What a day! 

At this stage, we realised that we would ideally like the kitchen installed on Monday 4th, so that left us 8 full days to have everything ready, including the electrics, gas, plumbing, get that thing taken off the wall, sanding and varnishing the floor, plastering and painting. And floor varnish needs 5 days to dry with noone standing on it. Start your stop-watches! 

Current Kitchen

Here's a reminder of what our kitchen looks like at the moment. There's quite a bit of work to do before it's ready to receive the new kitchen. At least it is the same shape, so the plumbing is in the right general area, as is the cooker. But we need to run a gas line in for the gas hobs, get more sockets, and of course gut it and paint everything and sand the floors. And remove that strange thing that is sticking out above the cooker.

Start your stopwatches!

New Kitchen (ish)

So it turns out that new kitchens are incredibly expensive, but check out this beauty that we found on gumtree. Everything you see here in included for $2000 (except the dishwasher), which is a good $20,000 less than the cabinets alone come out as new. It pretty much exactly fits our kitchen space, and is not far off the colours we wanted. And our floor is the exact same, so bar the blue splashback, this is what our kitchen is going to look like in a few weeks time!

More wall

Things are progressing well in the lydon building site. We have started on the second side of our top level wall. We discovered that steps are bloody difficult to build without being a total safety hazard, so instead we are allowing space for slopes between levels. This also means we can push wheelbarrows around, which will be very helpful once veg production is in full swing.

Danananananaannnana

We've having some fantastic visitors at the moment. Dan and Anna have been here for nearly a week and Phil has just arrived for a few days. Lots ,of delicious food and festivities for all!

I'm On A Boat!

This is the ladies E-Grade 8 that I coxed this weekend in Bunberry. They are great craic and quite a tidy crew. Lauren is the stroke and is laughing away here at my t-shirt that says "One speed - go!" Note how 2 at the back is having a nice little look at her blade. Eyes forwards in the boat! Square early! Watch your timing ladies!

And this is Hugh's quad crew getting ready making sure that nothing is going to fall off. Greg, the big tall guy on the left, is cursed in races. Every race he was in suffered a crab, including his C grade skull. Eek. The other lads here are Dave, who started with Hugh, and James, who is club captain. 

Spring is truly sprung

All our photos these days are taken in the late evening so they are pretty dark, but this is one of the first signs of spring in the garden. Our peach stick has started blossoming. Strange that it blossoms before having leaves, but there we go. Judging by the number of blossoms, we are going to have a nice few fruit this year. Note how we have mulched the bed underneath like good water-conserving Aussies. Everything dries up to a crisp here without watering and mulching. It's quite different to gardening at home where the focus is on drainage and weeding.

Paving Animal!

Richard is back this week to lay a section of paving between the chicken coop and the palm trees. Look how massive it looks now that he has the area cleared! On the first day he cleared loads of rocks and general mess and dug the area down to a level to match the coop base. Check out the pile of sand below he removed - it's nearly 6 foot high! Then yesterday he put down weed fabric, covered with gravel, compressed, and got most of the sand in place. He's amazing! Today he'll be finishing the sand and starting putting down the paving. Now to think of what to do with our new grey mountain.

Grey slabs, your days are numbered.

These slabs have been in our garden for 50 years, and I reckon it's time for them time for them to go. Next week the amazing Richard will start laying lovely red half brick pagers. Very exciting! We've spent the last few weeks collecting various pavers from friends and recyclers on gumtree. Come Sunday morning we will have transported approximately 2500 of them. W'ere getting very efficient at it. Perhaps we should go into business.

Springtime!

I've still not quite gotten used to the seasons here, but I think it's around springtime, so planting begins! In the bottom picture we have planted rows of carrots and lettuce directly into the ground. They are just starting to poke their heads out now, but are too tiny to catch on my phone camera.

In the top picture we have seedlings planted in trays. These are all alliums - leeks and onions and things like that. When they start growing they have a little string loop that breaks through the surface first. Just about visible in this picture. When they are a few inches tall and around half the thickness of a pencil we'll put them in the ground next to the carrots.

We are going to build raised vegetable beds at some stage, but for the moment the ground servers perfectly.

Extreme gardening

I put this picture of our garden up on Facebook a while back and a friend commented that they didn't realise we were moving to the third world. Sometimes I think we may be making the house worse!

Truffle Festival

We are going to a truffle festival tomorrow with some friends from the rowing club. It's an hour or so north of Perth. I've got to say, they look pretty gross. But seeing as potatoes are so delicious and they come from underground, I'll give truffles a go.

Portal 2

This is the latest game we've been playing. The idea is that you are trying to escape from a vast factory/laboratory where you are an unwilling test subject in intelligence experiments. You have a portal gun which fires 2 shots. The first makes a blue circle appear on any white surface and the second makes an orange one. Walk through one, and you come out the other moving at the same speed. It's really good fun playing with the physics of it. If you want to shoot out of a portal and fly across a gap, you figure out a way of falling into the opposite portal at great speed, etc.

We have yet to play the 2 player version, but I give the 1 player 2 enthusiastic thumbs up. A flash demo of the game developed years ago is available here and it is good craic - Portal

Colour Decision

Now that the bathroom is starting to look like a room again, we are thinking of what colour to paint it. Blue perhaps. We've put up a few sample splotches to see what they will look like. At the far side is a very light blue, and closer is a slightly darker light blue. Oh these difficult decisions.

The purple masking tape marks where the towel rails and vanity unit will be. These are getting installed today!

Shiny White!

Look how shiny and new this is! We have a team called Smart Style Bathrooms, lead by the wonderful Cameron, renovating our bathroom at the moment. It took them half an hour to rip out the old shower, bath and sink. 1 week later and it's already plumbed, rewired and tiled. Amazing! Over the next few days they will install the vanity, taps, mirror and glass door for the shower in the bath. Can't wait to use it!

Check out the old bathroom. The new bath above is in on the left where the shower was. The vanity will go on the right where the old bath is, and then there will be lovely floor space in the middle.

Rock Garden

This is the beginning of the pretty planting in our garden. We've been making a lot of structural changes - putting up walls and the like - but now we've started actually planting stuff. We're going to run this rock garden the length of the right side of the back garden. We have hundreds of these big red rocks in the garden, and all the plants are in pots from the previous owners, so all we have to do is drag them in place and cover them in pebbles. The pebbles act as a mulch and also keep weeds down, I hope. The weeds here are pretty grizzly though and grow easily through concrete so we'll see how effective it is!

The mini trees are called money trees and are a bit like bonsais. They will probably not get much bigger than they are now. They must be very old as they take years and years to grow. We have around 10 good sized ones in pots and hope to use them all. The other plants are various cacti and we have put flower bulbs under the pebbles for the spring. It should all be in full flower for our guests in September and October!

Empty the Bins

Look what new terror Australia had for me today. Thankfully this was only online, but it's a coconut crab, which is found quite commonly here.

Hugh's First Race

Hugh had his first race this weekend. He raced a double with Seftan, above, and a quad with Tim, John and Dave. They came 4th in the double and I think 4th in the quad too. Not bad for beginners! Race conditions were a bit rough, so the start was tricky.

The race was in a place called Champion lakes, which has 8 permanent lanes set up. Most of the Perth rowing clubs host their regattas there, so this weekend was our turn. Like a good wifey, I did the sausage sizzle. Note the heavy coats on everyone. 20 degreees and the Aussies are freezing.

The Chicks

Here's today's picture of the chickens. On the left is Dougal, the champion, but idiot chicken. On the right is Gandalf, the fluffiest chicken on earth, relaxing on the food container. In the background is Matilda.

Below is the first picture i took, where Clancy jumped in at the last second, scaring the daylights out of me.