Piles of shit

There are piles of crap everywhere in the garden and it's driving me mental. I am trying to be relaxed, because they are all absolutely necessary to projects-in-progress, but I don't like it. I sometimes move the piles from place to place, which doesn't really help, but lets the grass recover and reduces the risks of snakes. 

There is a lot of wood that we may well use in the future in projects, and which will be stored neatly in a 'spare wood' place.

The builders leave whatever they are using in one spot.

And pile their rubbish in another.

Anything that needs to be undercover is on the back verandah.

A large pile of crusher dust appeared last week, which I'm sure will be very useful, in a few weeks. I am mentally noting all the spots I will have to re-seed in autumn.

This pile of stones has already been useful, for drainage around the foundations, although it has spread for metres in every direction off its tarp.

And the pile of terracotta pots that I have been using to plant things in but somehow the pile is not getting any smaller. Not shown are the literal piles of shit from the builders' three dogs. We don't mind the dogs, they are all very friendly and lovely, but they do tend to drop a celebratory turd the second they arrive. So that's my rant, I am trying to look at the bits that aren't a mess, and there are lots of very lovely spring scenes at the moment. Which I will post about next time, when I'm more cheerful.

Grand plans

Even though we have fifty million unfinished things on the go at the moment, we can't help thinking about more grand plans. One of the unfinished things is dealing with that enormous dead pine and the ridiculously huge mountain of crap wood it created. We don't want to hire a log splitter so we needed a way of dealing with the rounds that are too big to split by hand. 

I rolled eight of the roundest to the front under the north pines to be seats at our future fire pit! It is a nice slope, reasonably near the house for winter sojourns but not too near (for fire reasons) and far enough away from the pines to be safe. I have watched several youtube videos on how to build a fire pit from old bricks (we have old bricks) and I am quite confident in my abilities to do this, even though it will probably not work out at all. But there you go - fire pit. I will also make cushions, for the pine tree logs. 

There are eight of them because I had seven originally and it made me really uncomfortable. I wouldn't say I am even a tiny bit superstitious but I felt like arranging seven old pine stumps in a ring in the garden was asking for trouble? Is that weird? I had to go get another one.

And this is for the not-so-round pieces - my cyclamen garden-to-be. Nothing grows under these pines - including grass - so I'm arranging the pine logs close but not touching; in autumn I will fill the gaps between them with compost or soil and plant some cyclamen corms. According to the internet it should work, and I do like cyclamens. Grand plans.

I also planted the remaining few snow in summer in a bed by the verandah. Under the little-known caulking gun bush. Sigh.

Precision carpentry

The hammering, drilling and sawing is not making life pleasant, but it is resulting in some improvements around the house. This wall is now watertight, with a new window frame (not rotting) and a nice undercoat of waterproof paint.

This is all new weatherboards - the old stuff was not salvageable - with a new window frame and a repaired window that actually opens! Very exciting, we haven't had opening windows in the kitchen so this is definitely a step up. The guttering is yet to come, but there's new flashing (possibly? maybe something else?) and general useful things. It is all costing a ridiculous amount of money and taking an unfeasibly long time but we have nothing but time, and who needs overseas holidays anyway. Not me.

Next we have non-precision carpentry paintstakingly put together by me and my husband (mostly him, but I helped) using whatever we had. This is offcuts from the studio.

Cold frames! For the next stage after our little seed starter trays (my marigolds have sprouted, it's very exciting). Random wood, laserlite roof, hinges and a rope handle. Opening and closing, it's amazing and we are very pleased with ourselves. Surprising what screws and bolts and things you have laying about when you look.

They are only meant to be temporary while we sort out what kind of greenhouse / shadehouse arrangement we want permanently. You can't rush these kind of decisions (and we have no money, see above).

House things

So this is what the north wall looks like at the moment - new rocks, carefully concreted in, chimney has a new brace, weatherboards removed and replaced, window frames primed and now we just have to finish the undercoat on the new boards. We can't decide what colour to paint the house so we've booked in an online meeting with a colour consultant! I have never done such a thing before in my life so I am quite intrigued by what they do and will report back. 

It is a work of art and we are very pleased ... if only it wasn't about a tenth of the outside of the house! Carpneter has moved onto the kitchen wall, which was resting DIRECTLY ON THE DIRT. This isn't good, so he's dug down, put in a concrete footing, created drainage on the outside and is replacing the bottom couple of weatherboards where they had started to rot. We are hoping to save the beautiful yellow rose but it's not looking very pleased with life.

This doesn't look very exciting but when he took off the weatherboards it turns out that underneath is still the original slab hut! This is very old school - no framing and probably not sawn timber. But it all seems solid enough... It should see us out :)

I have come down to the beach for a couple of days to get away from sawing, hammering and having to get changed in the bathrooom. It is very peaceful here and I've been for some lovely walks. Not quite swimming weather yet.

Cat is happy

Our cat is a creature of routine, and really hates it when we go away. Or go out in the morning. Or move the furniture. Or have the afternoon coffee on the sofa instead of the sunny patch on the spare bed. So she has been super cuddly since we got back, which is very lovely, except this is how I eat my breakfast now.

And my lunch. I'm sure you're not meant to let cats clamber over your dining table but I don't care any more. She purrs SO loudly and gets cross when you try and take a photo. Or a sip of your coffee.

Speaking of cute pets, the builders brought this round for a visit. She was part of a litter rescued from someone's farm and my husband had said he was interested. I was not 100% convinced that we needed a kelpie/collie cross puppy in our lives but look how adorable this damn dog is. 

Crazy. She even smelt nice. Anyway, the couple who did the rescuing decided they wanted to hang onto her, which is fine by us, because we are not set up for puppies at all. But gee she was cute.

The builder was determined to find where our roof downpipe went (no sewerage in town, it's all septic or just downhill somewhere) and eventually did, and cut the end off. It disgorged three feet of disgusting which is now all over the lawn, but probably better there than in the pipe. Another delight of an old house.

Haulin' and burnin'

We had another burn pile for bits and bobs lying about. Sadly it was a day I had quilters and art class so I didn't get to light things on fire, but my husband had a lovely time.

My role was limited to taking nine? ten? ute-loads of wood down to the bottom paddock. Yep, I drove our ute to one part of our vast acreage, threw lots and lots of shitty pine onto it, then drove it to another part of our vast acreage and made a big pile. It felt very countrified, and getting rid of it felt even better. That pine is never-ending, and you can't burn it 100% of the time or it gunks up the chimney. Apparently.

I pulled apart some of the burnt-down compost bins too, so I could take it to the burn pile and finish the job. Also bits of crap wood from the lavender shed re-vamp (still in progress) and a heap we meant to chip but it's now too dry and dead to chip properly. 

I took a photo of the smoke as I rode off to quilters on my bike. We had to take some trees down on the shared access road a while ago (professional job, they were enormous). One of our neighbours has put iron flowers in the stump. I think they look very cute.

My garlic is up ... just another six months before harvesting! It is not a speedy crop. 

I also had a birthday. We threw away all the old manky birthday candles when we moved house so I got a household candle. It worked perfectly well and the cake was delicious. Number one and girlfriend came out to stay the night and we went out for dinner and then had cake and played scrabble by the fire. Perfect.

Windows

Here is something very small but very life changing - new windows in the living room! This is the state of one of our exterior walls at the moment, after the carpenter took off the old weatherboards. Nothing like a couple of mornings of minus six with plastic on the wall.

 

He is going to put them back (or probably replacement ones, not sure if any can be salvaged) but had to re-concrete the literal rocks our house is built on first. 

We are very happy to have our rocks cemented in a bit more. Rabbits are a massive problem and can easily cause your house to collapse if they get in underneath. So blocking the holes is good. This wall is in the earliest photos we have of the place so it's the original timbers from 1876 - original chimney too - and it is definitely the wall that gets the most sun. It is north-facing and perhaps the least shaded by trees. 

So of course nobody thought it was a good idea to put windows in. This is from the inside.  And when the boards were down we thought - how hard would it be to put windows in? Not hard at all as it turns out. Half a days work to cut through, another half day to do the framing, another half day to put the glass in and all the trim, including painting. And it has changed the room beyond belief.

There is light and views. It is a lovely view too, or it will be when all the carpenter's detritus has gone. We will have to re-arrange the furniture but that has to wait on the studio, so we can put the desk in the sewing room... etc etc. Can't rush these things! We are very happy.

Fixing the outside of the house

Now the concreting is done and the lavender shed is (nearly) put back to rights, we are moving onto the next big project, which is fixing the outside of the house. It is weatherboards - but all sorts of boards added on at all sorts of times and done over all sorts of sub-structures. Carpenter guy's first job was to wander around the house poking things with screwdrivers. 

Many did not respond well to being poked with screwdrivers. Carpenter guy has two verdicts: "strong enough" and "completely rooted". Many of our weatherboards are completely rooted ... but this corner post - manifestly an actual part of a tree - was still solid as a rock.

Speaking of rocks, our house is genuinely built on them. This is the original back verandah (now my husband's model room) and the footings are rocks. Apparently completely fine except for a couple of places where mortar was used and that needs to be replaced with a bit more concrete. 

So the boards come off, get repaired or replaced, insulation goes in wherever possible, boards put back up, and away they go around the house. It will cost a fortune and take forever but everything does at this point. Not a good day for the plants by the house either; one rose has already been sacrificed to the cause.

The studio is still staggering towards the finish line. The insulation is on the back wall but not the colorbond yet; the electricity wiring is in but the lights aren't installed; the flooring is down but not the skirtings; the painting needs one more coat. Aaaargh.

More little things

I don't know where the past week has gone since my sister left - we were looking forward to her visit for ages and now we have to face the chores and other events. We went into Canberra last Saturday for a christmas in July lunch and overnighted with friends, which was very social and involved a lot of food. It was a beautiful morning in Canberra on Sunday - as we left (to go grocery shopping) our friend went off  to walk her dog and that is the one thing I miss about living in the country - going for a walk in a park! We get plenty of fresh air but it's not the same.

Painting of the art studio continues. It is taking forever and we are sick of it. The floor did go in on Monday which is progress - it is commercial vinyl and I haven't taken a picture yet because he left logs on the floor holding down patches until the glue dries. I don't think he normally uses logs but they were lying around. Speaking of logs, this photo is of the gum tree that had to have a few branches taken off it so the concrete truck could get in. The tree looks much better for it, and it took me five wheelbarrows to get that tiny pile of logs off to the woodpile. It looks much tinier in this photo than it was.

We've had two mornings of minus six degrees which were unbelievably cold. Our ute got left outside and refuses to start now so we have to figure that one out. Our pipes froze over so my husband went down the hardware first thing to buy some lagging and they didn't freeze on the second cold night, so it must have done some good. Apparently he wasn't the only one in the shop buying it. Some of my broadbeans are looking a bit sad but I don't think it's the frost. We haven't had any rain so I better give them a water. 

The electrician spent all Sunday here (he is young and has deeply overcommitted himself) installing our new EV charger. So now we don't have to use a very slow plug in the garage but can park it outside the house and charge at about six times the rate of the outlet plug. Very exciting. I have programmed it to charge during the day when we have that free electricity window ... our solar panels are still producing three fifths of nothing. We shall see if it improves in summer.

I have started pruning the roses - slightly early but it's such a massive job that I may as well start. It's so much easier than last year! I am dealing with roses and not demented prickly trees. I think I am being a bit less ruthless this year too - I still have no idea what I'm doing but I'll see how this goes.

And I have been keeping toasty warm in this glorious woolly cardigan. No, I didn't knit it, my mother knitted it for me when I was at uni. I haven't worn it in thirty years but I couldn't throw it out - not one of mum's handknits! - so I'm now wearing it. It is super cosy, and I did not brush my hair for this photo.

Visitor, concrete, painting

It's all go round here at the moment - the best bit has been my sister visiting for a couple of days. She was on holiday in Sydney with her family but ditched them for a couple of nights to come and see our part of the world. Which was just lovely, although the weather was AWFUL. Freezing and super windy; so I'm not sure if we showed our little patch to its full advantage. 

Not much to do round here as a tourist - we wandered round the town (half hour max) and otherwise sat by the fire, went for dinner at the pub, and paced the garden, briefly. Monday morning the hydro-trenching guy came back to make an electrical trench and an enormous amount of mud slurry ... super cool and absolutely showed the network of tree roots and unexpected pipes that exist round our house. Normal digging would never have got through it, so I'm glad we went with water shooting guy. My husband mapped all the unexpected pipes for the future, although we don't really know where most of them go.

Tuesday morning we had our concrete pour which went well. No Dad, we didn't smooth the top of the concrete to make it too slippery, and we are already enjoying the luxury of having somewhere to stand while hanging the washing.

The floor of the lavender shed also looks much better - we are going to concrete in a ramp so we can park the mower and chipper there. They took the back panel off to get the concrete chute in but didn't need it in the end. 

My husband is also a historian who is annoyed by a lack of date documentation ... so he dated the concrete. Why not.

Other than that there is endless painting of the studio. Windows, doors, walls, ceiling, inside and out, fascias, eves, beams. They have to come back and do the step, then stain the deck and the steps. It was horrible on the windy days but rather lovely on a day like today when it was sunny and still and frosty in the morning. 

This is the colour I've gone with on the walls - the photo is after I've cut in the corners and the grooves between the boards with the white of the undercoat showing in the middle. I took this because when you've painted the whole wall it just looks like an off-white, but when it's next to an actual white you can see that it's a very soft grey-green. I am very pleased with it, and with my ability to pick a muted colour when every instinct wanted something much much stronger. The floor is another story though, and should be installed next week.