There have been other things happening around here, apart from shed building and privacy screen building.

For one, the vegie garden is really coming on. I’ve had peas, raddish, artichoke, carrots and broccoli growing through winter and I’m pleasantly surprised that these things seemed to grow quite well during winter. Most people here in Tasmania don’t grow anything during winter as on frosty mornings vegies freeze and then go all mushy and die off.

Broccoli must be very frost-hardy though – I’ve gone to inspect the vegie garden on some frosty mornings and you could have snapped the leaves they were that frozen. These broccolis were planted in the garden in March. They were planted out as seedlings that I grew from seed. This broccoli has been growing for over 4 months which seems a long time, so hopefully it’s still on-track for eating.

The peas are growing so tall they have climbed out of the bird netting and are just now starting to flower. Hopefully in the next month or so we might get some nice fresh crispy pea pods:

The ‘conehead’ cabbages are starting to bulk up a bit, but not sure if these are really eating quality:

In other parts of the garden, bulbs are starting to sprout, which means that spring can’t be far off. These are daffodils:

And a couple of different bulbs in this pot:

And the roses are actually starting to get new growth:

I took some cuttings from the lavender bush which I planted last year located at the front door step. I hope to be able to propogate these so that when spring arrives, I can plant them along the length of the driveway and have a lavender hedge. It’s been a few weeks since I took the cuttings and they aren’t dead yet, so I might be in with a chance:

I stripped and painted an outdoor Jack and Jill chair that we bought with us from Sydney. Here’s what it looked like before:

And here it is after new paint and new cushions:

Tim has been making pancakes with banana, ice cream and chocolate sauce:

And I’ve started a new ‘big’ project, the sewing room. So far, I’ve ripped out the carpet, scraped off the glued-on foam underlay from the wooden floor boards and stripped paint from the skirting boards. This weekend we hired a sander and edger and we sanded the floorboards. They turned out pretty well. It was very difficult to get all of the old dark timber stain off of the boards because each board was so tightly butted up against each other that over 50 or 60 years the timber had ‘cupped’ so the edges of each board was probably about 5 or 6mm higher than the midde of the board. It took about 6 passes with the coarse sanding pad to grind the cups down to a reasonable level. We only had the sander on hire for a weekend (which cost us $232 – pretty expensive when you think about it) so due to time constraints we couldn’t keep going over and over the boards endlessly.

We’re going to use this room as an experiment to see how we like the bare floorboards, compared to carpet. Whilst we both love the look of bare floor boards, we know that having carpet down will be much warmer in winter. But the carpet is hard to keep tidy for more than a day or two, with us walking into the house with dirty shoes, spilling tea and of course with allowing the dogs inside the house (we can’t NOT have them inside because we like to have them hanging around with us).

If we’re going to stick with carpet, we’ll be getting a brand new carpet laid so we’re seriously re-thinking how worthhile this expense will be if it’s just going to get filthy like our current carpets are. It will definitely be less maintenance if we had bare flooboards throughout the house as compared to carpet (no shampooing or muddy paw prints). But we’ll wait and see how this room goes and if it’s way too chilly then we will go for new carpet in the house rather than polishing the floorboards.

Anyway, here’s the carpet in the sewing room pulled up and the foam underlay scraped off the boards:

It took me about 3 hours in total to remove the glued-on foam underlay.  Then it took about 3 hours to strip the white chipped paint from the skirting boards and give them a light sand ready to be re-painted.

Then in came the sander (which looked like it was from the 1920’s) and Tim went to work:

Then with the edger:

After about 10 passes (and well into the night) it started looking like this:

Tim put down the first coat of clear floor polyurethane (CFP) last night and here’s what it looks like this morning after it dried:

This is the stuff we are using:

As you can see, there are some marks still on the board which wouldn’t sand out. But for a first time, it’s a pretty good job. Today I will sand the floor with fine sand paper, give it a wipe down with a damp cloth, and then Tim can put a second coat of varnish on when he gets home. Then tomorrow I’ll sand again and then on goes the third coat (and if we want it superglossy, a fourth coat).