Sweet backpacks created by Down the Road:

We have been flying by the seat of our pants the last two months. We have had three sets of guests come and stay with us since the 27th of December and we are really only just coming up for air.  The first set of guests was my mum and dad, then Tim’s dad and his friend, then Tim’s sister. On 6 February we are expecting my sister and her boyfriend over for a week then we are expecting Tim’s mum to come over in March some time. So we have been very busy, taking the guests out almost every day, showing them around Tasmania and Hobart.

We were lucky to be walking around the Hobart waterfront the day after the first few Sydney to Hobart yachts arrived. We had no idea that these yachts were so tall.

We also took a trip to Port Arthur, which is the penal colony which was built to contain the convicts that were sent to Australia from England in the 1830’s (most of the people that were sent over here were just petty theives, given transportation to Australia as punishment for stealing a loaf of bread because they were so poor). It must have been a hell on earth for the convicts living in the tiny, cramped, damp, freezing cold cells of the Port Arthur Prison. Many of the buildings that are at Port Arthur are ruins, as it is only in the last 20 years or so that the Government has listed them as heritage-rated and has started restoring the old standstone Georgian buildings. Unfortunately not a lot of buildings that were originally partof the colony remains as hundreds of them were lost to a raging bushfire in the 1890’s.

We took a trip to Richmond, site of the oldest surviving bridge in Australia, being built by convict labour in 1823.

And we also drove up to the top of Mount Wellington, where these spectacular views are on offer (taken behind glass – I’m too scared of heights to go onto the open lookout):

As you can inmagine, not a lot of renovation or decoration work has been done to the house this last 6 weeks or so. The only real thing that I can report on is that in between guests departing and arriving I have managed to build 4 garden beds (and have filled 3 of them ready for planting).

To build the bed for the three circular garden beds at the front of the house, we hired a rotary hoe to help us with tilling over the soil, as the soil was just rock hard and there were too many weeds and grasses to deal with by hand. Here’s Tim operating the rotary hoe (the rotary hoe cost $60 to hire for 24 hours and did in 3 hours what would have taken us 3 weeks to do by hand):

Oh and he found a little frog in the garden bed:

Here’s the garden bed before:

Here’s the garden bed after:

I am using Adbri border blocks to re-do the garden beds around the garden. They are very difficult to work with, as their shape makes it very awkward when it comes to curves and completing a circle (and even completing a straight line is very difficult). Had I thought about the type of material to use as garden bed edging, I probably wouldn’t make the decision to go for these again. Although they look great in the garden and they really go with the colour of the roof and the gutters, there have been many times where I have been so frustrated with these blocks and just had to walk away for a moment (I’ve also been in tears over these stupid blocks). And I’m really unimpressed with the booklet that the Adbri company produces for these things. It’s pretty unhelpful and really needs to go into a bit more mathematical detail about planning the bed in the way of laying out the first row of  blocks. If only they had some standard formulas for the angle that you need to place the bricks and how many bricks you will need … Anyway, there are only three  more beds to be built and Tim will be doing one of those, the last remaining circular bed. Here are some previous beds I built a few weeks ago with these Adbri border blocks:

We took the dogs to the beach recently to see how they’d react to the water and the sand. We’re too scared that they will run away and won’t come back if we take them off the leash, so for now they stay on the leash until we can trust them. We can trust Smokey in our garden to come with us whenever he is called, but definitely not outside of our property. There are way too many distractions for him. Cloe is the same. Whenever she gets out the front, the first thing she does is run to the gate and tries to squeeze underneath it.

Prowling round etsy today I found this lovely Tasmanian seller, That Vintage. I’m loving their Tasmanian myrtle wood earrings:

And their acrylic rings:

We put up the Christmas tree the other night.  A black one, with silver, black and red ornaments. I think the White Stripes would be pleased.

The dogs certainly enjoyed the event.

I haven’t had time to post about her until now but on 16 November we got little Cloe (yes, for some reason she is Cloe, and not Chloe, but still pronounced “Clo-ee’).

She was advertised on the local notice board as free to give away to a good home, as her previous owner was moving to the city and couldn’t keep her any longer.  Well, we had been thinking for a while of getting a second dog as a companion for Smokey, and in keeping with the tradition we have of taking on dogs that their owners can no longer keep, we just had to go and see Cloe. The n0tice said that she was approximately 2½ years old, a small kelpie blue-heeler cross. When we got there, we didn’t realise just how small she was.  She is a tiny little thing, probably not much bigger than a cat, and we think that she may have been the runt of the litter because kelpies/blue heelers are generally not small dogs.

We took her home to meet Smokey and he seemed to tolerate her, but only just (as you can see from his expression in the photo).  We’ve had her for about 3 weeks now and we can see day-by-day the two of them are getting closer.  Smokey allows Cloe to hang around him more and more and yesterday we even saw them both sleeping on Smokey’s bed together.

We have finally moved our computers out of the lounge room and into our super brand new study!

I’m so proud of the effort that we put into this room.  It’s the first complete room that we have done so far in this renovation project.

We hired a builder to put in a few new walls for us and to put in new skirting boards.  Unfortunately, he came and went as he pleased throughout the job and then once he was paid in full he didn’t bother coming back the next day to put the finishing touches on the job and to take away the rubbish that he dumped in our front yard.  So technically our study is not technically *complete*, but we will forget about the nasty builder and enjoy the work that we put into this room ourselves.

We used ‘Green Moss’ on the walls and also painted the ceiling the same colour. We weren’t sure about painting the ceiling but we’re glad we did.

I went around the timber window frame and the skirting boards with All-in-One stain and gloss and they came up reasonably well.

At first we were going to put timber floating floors in this room, so that it would match the timber floorboards in the kitchen and laundry, but we found out that you have to pull up the skirting boards to install the floating floors, and I didn’t feel like doing that after we just had them installed.  So we decided to paint the concrete floor instead. We hired a concrete grinder to grind the top layer of concrete off so that we had a nice smooth surface to paint. Unfortunately this meant that we had to put a third coat of paint on the walls and the ceiling, because the dust that came off the floor got stock to the walls and wouldn’t wipe off. Of course, had we known in the first place that we were going to paint the floor, we would have done the concrete grinding first

Because we were so confident that the painted concrete floor would work(!), we decided to continue the painted floor from the study out into the front entrance, so we had to pull up the old tiles that were there and we grinded that section too. 

Then when the floor was all nice and smooth and clean, we painted the floor.

We just need to go and buy some blinds and install our whiteboards on the walls.

Woodchopping

Steam engines on display

Show jumping

Sweet baby farm animals

I’m loving these cute little birdy earrings by BeadCoutureBySteph.

I think this is a great gift idea, from ameliaKDESIGNS: