The house is ours

We have done the final settlement on the new country house and the property managers have already shown it to prospective tenants - which is both a relief and a sadness, that someone else gets to enjoy it before we do. We went out for a couple of hours on the weekend and had a good measure and inspect ... great but quite different to the meet-the-sellers the weekend before. For starters it was a cold and rainy day, and the house was completely empty, and a bit sad. 

It's definitely an old house and there are bits that don't quite meet and scuffs and stains. It doesn't have many cupboards, the carpets need replacing, there are drafts through the windows. But this is not our first rodeo! I have walked into a few newly purchased empty, echoing cold houses in my life and I know how to fix it :) 

The measuring of everything was good - I do like to operate off independently ascertained facts - for example I currently use 3.4 linear metres of hanging space for my clothes and the new house will have 2.4 linear metres. I need to get rid of one metre of clothes - this is good, this is quantifiable, I can do this. The numbers on bookshelves are much worse - the new house has just under 40% of the built-in bookshelving of our current house. Can I get rid of 60% of our books? Or do we just get more bookshelves? I am in a throwing out mood at the moment so we shall see. We have sheds and outbuildings but some of them look like the Historic Village we went to on school excursions so I'm assuming Not Weatherproof.

But whatever its shortcomings the house is honestly not even a small part of this place. From every window there is a view of the garden that makes me smile. It is so beautiful.... we've just got to power through the next couple of years (and not freak out about the ENORMOUS debt) then we can play shrubberies until our knees give out.

More abstracts

I finally got round to taking photos of what I've been doing so you might be inundated with random squiggles! These are all A3 size, it's hard to tell from the pictures.

I think they would be better if I scanned them properly rather than taking photos (in terrible light) but then I'd have to bring them into work, and do them on the big photocopier, and it would be awkward. Maybe I could do it on the weekend (but who wants to come into work on the weekend?)

You can see a few themes emerging. I do gravitate towards similar shapes, and some of the pens feel nicer than others. I'm still using the Kuretake paints and the wonderful golds that they have - you can mix it with anything for a nice metallic sheen. 

The abstract art

This is what I'm working on at the moment - shapes, doodles, colours. Some watercolour paint, some gouache, some marker pens, some fineliner pens, some paint pens. I am having a very lovely time doing this and it is making me very happy. Not least because I got to go and buy a 75 pack of posca paint pens which are LOVELY although I got the Japanese ones and have no idea what is written on the side. I am assuming I can use a paint pen without instructions and there are no secrets I'm missing?

I was initially inspired by Anita Winterz and her 'intuitive art'. I am not sure about the emotional benefits but I did think that everything she did was pretty, so that's where I started. Here is an earlier one.

And another one below, with less in it, I'm not sure it works so well. It is so much fun that I look forward to it at the end of the day - I'm assuming I'll get sick of it at some point! There is a sunroom in the new house that will be my art room but it's not very big (and also very attractive as a sunroom) so I am googling 'backyard art studios'. Apparently you can just drop one in without planning permission and it is incredibly tempting.

The new house

On Saturday we went to the cottage in the country we are about to buy to meet with the current owners and get the lowdown on everything! They were absolutely lovely - talked us through the garden for over two hours and then we went into town and had lunch together. They are clearly very sad to leave, but are in their mid 70s now and it is getting a bit much. We saw many many bits of the garden that we didn't realise existed, and learned more of the house history, and the names of the neighbours, and people to call for gutters and septic tanks and tree removal. We are advised to join the local garden club, and who does the good coffee, and so many other wonderful things.

I didn't take any photos so this is just one from the website listing. Of course now we want to move there immediately and are very sad that tenants will enjoy it for a year or two before we can retire. Although we had completely ruled out the commute (it's just over an hour's drive) ... and now we're thinking about it. How we could make it work. Hmmmm.....

Last heatwave

Now that we are officially in autumn Australia has decided to have a little heatwave. Not last weekend when I was actually at the beach, goodness no, just during the week when all I get to do is sit inside. I have very tall windows at my back (which is lovely, not complaining) that face due north so when we get anything warm that isn't in the middle of summer my office gets very warm. And snoozy. Not good.

I am doing a lot of abstract art at the moment (scribbles! doodles! circles!) but I keep forgetting to take photos. So without any pictures I give you this photo of me and my grotty high school friends drinking what appears to be vodka in what I know is a camping ground at Waihi Beach over New Year's weekend at the end of 1987. Were we legal drinking age? No. Were we supposed to have fifteen teenage girls in a campground cabin? No. Were we the epitome of 1980s fashion and style? Absolutely not. My god. I'm the one at the front with the red cup, rocking a spiral perm and a never-heard-of-melanoma tan.

Pacific Ocean

I had a busy week at work fighting to stay awake (changes in time zones) before spending the weekend at my own favourite ocean - the Pacific. It wasn't very tropical though; a bit rainy and a bit cool. But I still swam, went for walks, admired the scenery.

Here are some very boring photos of our new blinds - can you take a decent photo of blinds? I don't think so, but I'm still showing them because we are very pleased. They let just the right amount of light through, and then pull up into a small header inside the frame so make the whole place look much lighter. And proper hardware not those shitty roman cords that were always getting tangled and breaking. 

Obviously a project there to fill the old screw holes and do some re-painting. It will be done, in the fullness of time. You can't rush these things. 

We decided not to go with the horizontal blinds you can put over sliding doors - they looked a bit like those daggy 1970s plastic concertina doors - and they were $2000 each. So instead we replaced our manky old cream curtains with new $49 ones from Ikea. They are quite thin and fairly crappy material but they look lovely, and we like that they let the light in! And a matching rug. How stylish .... makes the whole place just a bit more yellow. That is, makes the whole place better, because yellow is always better, as we know.

And I made some boring black work pants which means I used my christmas present for the first time - a pair of proper scissors!!!!! Like a grown up, I now have an actual pair of dressmaking scissors that cuts BEAUTIFULLY. It made me happy to cut the pants out.

Indian Ocean

So I spent last week on two of Australia's external territories - Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. They're about halfway between Australia and Sri Lanka and have a combined population of less than three thousand people - about 600 on Cocos and the rest on Christmas. It was work, so didn't get any touristing in, but we were there to look at outside things, so I couldn't help but take some very pretty photos.

Cocos is about 27 islands on a coral atoll on top of a volcano with nothing for a very long way in any direction. It's ten feet tall at the highest point and covered in coconut palms. The ocean side has maybe 50 metres of reef before the drop off - we saw turtles and reef sharks. I took some terrible photos of them from the shore, that really did not turn out.

Christmas Island is completely different - tall and vertical and covered in jungle. Most of it is a national park and it's known for the amazing migrating crabs. They are forest dwelling crabs that migrate over a couple of months to the sea and then back. We weren't there for the migration but there are still millions of them everywhere (very cute, but I wouldn't mess with them).

It was wonderful to go somewhere I've never been and see some things I've never seen! And never would off my own bat, to be honest. It has a small tourist industry but it's a four hour flight from Perth, which is at least four hours from Canberra, and it's remote Australia so everything is expensive. But stunning. 

Away for work

I am travelling this week in Australia's western-most places (extra points if you guess right) with limited connectivity so not blogging. But I am being useful and also managing to get some swims in :)