Lounging About...

I really love our new lounge. While we've since needed to rearrange a bit (with an impending little person needing some accommodation) it's still such a nice room to eat breakfast in in the morning. To lounge about on the couch in the sunshine, to read a book or knit in with the french doors open, listening to the chooks have their conversations, the wafts of honeysuckle breezing in and a cat or two wandering past every now and then for a pat.

It wasn't always this way...

Initially we had thought that the far corner (where the wood panels are leaning in the photo above) was sinking slightly, as when you stood in that corner, it felt lower than the rest of the house. What had actually happened was when the room had been turned into one (a few owners ago) the wood beam flooring had somehow become strained and had started straining upwards in the middle of the room. So what we thought was the corner sinking, was actually us walking over a small hill and down into where the floors should properly sit.

So, the builders took out the middle section of floor, released the pressure (taking away the squeaks at the same time!!) and miraculously made the floor level again.

It was never hugely out of balance, but it's nice to have that fixed now. Also, since we were always going to carpet this room, they took a few floor boards to use to replace the two small spots of dry rot we found in the house after we moved in, to keep the same flooring throughout.

And then we stripped the window sills back to their former natural wood glory. (New lights were already in at this stage as you can see in the photo above).

They aren't by any means perfect though. Borer has had a party in them (as well as some more wooden flooring as we found out over Christmas when we were sanding!!) and previous owners have decided to try and bog up the borer holes and paint over them to make them go away. Ummm, borer needs to be rid of first guys, just sayin.

So, before we varnished the wood, throughout the whole house, we directly treated it and did a general bug bomb, then used proper wood putty to seal up the holes and then varnished. Again, the window sills don't look like they were made yesterday, but we actually kind of like them that way. It shows a bit more of the history of the house and since it's not a new house, I don't think these things should look perfect anyway.

Below is the room the morning before the carpet went down. Isn't it lovely? Don't worry, the rest of that old carpet went bye bye as well...

Dulux St Clair Quarter was used on the ceiling and trims and Aniwaniwa Half on the walls. We have that lovely little panelling detail in most corners of the rooms in the house and David thought it might be quite cool to leave them the trim colour as well - I couldn't agree more.

You can also see that we've not sanded back the wood around the french doors yet. They are a much darker wood anyway (they would have been reclaimed from elsewhere when this room was first remodelled) and while we will eventually, that hasn't happened yet. Luckily it's just a wood stain, rather than actual paint.

And the carpet goes in...

I cannot tell you how soft and squishy and lovely this room is to walk in now. My original idea was to go with a natural brown colour, to be a bit more in keeping with the wood flooring in the rest of the house, but we couldn't find the colour we wanted with the durability we wanted.

We bought this steely blue grey, short pile sample home with us, including a bunch of others, and really fell in love with the colour of it. Initially I was worried about the room maybe seeming too dark with a dark carpet, but the room is so light anyway, and the lighter colours in the carpet almost seem to reflect light back up. We also have rather colourful taste in the things we put into rooms, so we felt that it would actually be fine. And we love it!!

A sneaky peek at how the room looked with some furniture in it. I won't show you the full room since we're moving things around now and we've not put everything up on the walls yet, but it's such a lovely room that has had rather a huge transformation right? No more green racing carpet for a start...

xx
J

In Hot Water (or out of it, depending on how you want to look at it...)

Happy New Year everyone!!!

I have to admit, I'm really excited to try and get you up to date with the renovation. Christmas and New Years saw us finally get back into the house side of things (rather than the garden) and we've been sanding and painting and varnishing, trying to get as much done before David had to head back to work on January 5th.

We realised that we really needed to get it done now, or we'd never have the big block of time to spend on it before the end of May, when we're expecting our first child.

Yup, I'm pregnant! And honestly, there isn't much else I can think of as a better deadline than an impending baby!

I'm really glad we have finally started back as well, since there is absolutely no way I'd want to do any of this with a baby. We're currently right back to where we started in June when the major things were being done - dust and stuff everywhere!! We're currently sleeping in the lounge at the moment since we decided to sand/varnish the floors in the new baby's room (our old room) and our new bedroom (what was the office). And then we decided that since everything is out, we may as well paint too...

Anyway, today's little topic - hot water cylinders. Or lack there of.

I think I've mentioned before that unexpected things pop up all the time. The leaky, old hot water cylinder was one of them. Below is our little kitchen in it's original state (taken on a cold Dunedin winter morning before the builders arrived...). The hot -water cylinder box-cupboard-thing is to the right, with the clock on it. If you want to remind yourselves of how the rest of the space looked originally, you can do so here.

You see, the first thing is that we have a small kitchen. I do really like our kitchen, but it is small and the hot water cylinder was in a random and rather inconvenient spot. It was covered by a box that looks like it could have useful storage space in it (see: little cupboard doors) but actually, there was no way you'd want to store anything in them. It was kinda gross and dusty in there. I think they were more 'service' holes (for all that servicing that went on...?) than anything else.

One day, when I was sitting in our 'office' working away and minding my own business, there was a knock at the door - it was the plumber who was there doing some work on the bathroom.

Plumber - "Hi. Um, I have some bad news for you"
Me - "Oh....?" *dread creeps over  - can he not do the bathroom anymore for some reason???*
Plumber - "Yeah, your hot water cylinder is leaking. Not heaps, but, it's dripping. It's a really old one too, so while I can fix it, it'll get worse over time and you'll need to replace it"
Me - "Oh..."

After further conversations, it was clear that we may as well do the work that needed doing now (while everyone we needed was there) and that the plumber thought going for gas hot water was the best option. I knew that I wanted to move the cylinder from where it was - it was annoying and took up much needed space. But it would cost the same amount to move it elsewhere as it would to convert to gas and I had no idea where we would move it to in the first place.

David was still away but I managed to catch him on skype and we agreed to go for gas. No more space-hogging cylinder and we'd get good water pressure (goodbye old header tank!) and we'd save money on electricity since we wouldn't be constantly heating hot water.

You can see what I mean about non-useful storage, now that the front of the cupboard is gone. The pipe going up into the roof was the wetback pipe.

As the builders were taking the cupboard down, it became apparent that the visible beam that runs along the ceiling, wasn't actually sitting in the wall. It was about 2cm out. So, the cupboard had been supporting the beam, rather than the wall. Erm... don't worry, the house wasn't going to fall down and the builders put in a new supporting beam against the wall (which you can see below - looks like pink wood) and everything was fine again.

After that, the electrician came and put the plugs that were in the side of the cupboard into the kitchen wall as well as adding two extra at my request (this house is annoyingly lacking in power plugs. We're going to get another double set put in as well on Friday, since our oven has pretty much died, taking with it two power plugs. But never fear, we bought a new one in the boxing day sales and I cannot wait to get baking in it!! An oven with the right temperature?? I'll take it. But alas, yet another example of unexpected things popping up...).

The builders had done a great job of saving as much of the original coving as they could, but they had no more left to finish off the bit where the cylinder cupboard had been. I told them to leave it for the time being while we tried to figure out what to do. And then the plasterer arrived...

His name is Andrew and he looked at the missing coving and said "Do you want me to something about that?".
Me - "Ummm, yes? The builders have no more coving left so we're trying to decide what to do"
Andrew - "I can make something for you. It might not be perfect but it'll be okay"
Me - "Yes please!"

Half an hour later I came back to the below...
Me - "Oh wow! That looks great!"
Andrew - "It's not perfect..."
Me - "Looks pretty perfect to me"

Now that it's all been painted, you'd honestly never know it was any different. Turns out Andrew has done a lot of work on some of the older buildings in Dunedin doing restoration plastering, including replicating some of the very intricate coving the buildings had. Can't get much better than that now can you?

The fridge is now in that space (rather than sticking out into the kitchen space when you walk in) which makes the room seem much more open than it did originally.

xx
J (&D)

The {partial} Evolution of a Garden...

I was going to try and get you up to date with the garden today, but it's been so sunny and beautiful lately that a whole bunch more has happened, and if I tried to get you up to date, well, this would be a long post indeed. As it is, it's pushing it :)

If you need a reminder of the jungle, you can re-fresh your memory here. (Eeeeek, I just had a look and can't believe it ever used to look like that!!!).

To be honest, I don't even know how we got the garden to the stage it is now. It's amazing (if I may say so). There are lots of little spaces that you can actually get to and lots of little places to plant pretty things and edible things. You no longer have to duck under the rose to get to the bottom half of the garden (and we discovered the frame the rose was climbing on was the frame for one of those double swing seat things! But it was so over grown, you'd never know). You can meander down paths without things grabbing your clothes, you can stop to admire the plants (because you can actually see them) and you can have a conversation with a chook, who will happily run over for some attention.

I thought it might be easier to just show you two sections of garden to start off with, including the vege patch. Time to start clearing this lot then...

Please never buy fennel (and potatoes) and then let it go wild. It's everywhere and the roots are thick and seem to go on for metres... trying to remove it will age you a few years.

Although you'd never know it, this part of the garden was already roughly laid out with hidden paths breaking it up. All of the bricks we've used are bricks that were already here, hiding under weeds, dirt, piles of sticks, lawn... you get the picture.

Just looking at those photos above makes me so excited at how it looks now. I'm glad we were quite naive when it came to tackling this garden, if we had had any idea just how much work it was going to take (and is still currently taking) I'm not sure we would have even started!

Now though, when I wander through my lovely little section, I'm so happy we did tackle it and I'm really glad we tackled it at the pace we have. It's meant ideas could evolve, areas could become functional and beautiful and we would have never have ended up with what we have if we hadn't taken our time with it.

 Snow day!! 

You can see that we managed to clear this entire area before the winter snow fell (who am I kidding, it fell for maybe 2 days max!!) 

And in the background is our mountain, Harbour Cone.

Many thanks have to go to our hard working chooks for their rather vigorous weeding. We opened up their chook run all the way from where their house was, down the right hand side of the garden path, to the bottom behind the bean fence (below). They loved eating all the bugs and weeds, and we got a weeded and tilled garden. Win win. They then slowly got more grumpy at us as we gradually made their run smaller and while it's still not as big as the whole length of garden they had, it's now still much bigger than their initial run was when we got here, and they have a beautiful willow fence that David made for them. Oh, it's so pretty!! But, I'm saving that for the next garden post, so you'll have to wait :)

The bean fence and strawberry patch above was the first bit of garden we raised. The strawberries are little wild white alpine strawberries that we found in various places throughout the garden. We decided to move them and plant them all together for our own little strawberry patch and they are doing really well together.

The pea straw closest to us in the photo is where I planted our garlic bulbs. Upon further research, I shouldn't have planted them anywhere near where beans were going to grow (companion planting rule #1 - beans hate the whole onion/garlic family...yeesh, drama much?) but there was no where else to put them at that stage, and the bulbs really should have been in at the start of winter, as opposed to the end...

We then sectioned off the corner part of the glass houses and proceeded to build a little trench into the dirt for the water to run off. Where the 'red' concrete path ended by the purple glasshouse, water was (and had been for a long time) pooling because the garden wasn't level in that area. It smelt really really bad the day we dug that garden bit up because there was no oxygen getting to the dirt. David dug the trench on an angle, put in some of the spare stones we had from clearing the garden to the left of the purple glass house and then put in a big section of black drainage piping we found behind the house down into it. Then we covered it with more stones, gravel and then dirt. Now we have no more pooling anaerobic water and the paths are nice and level.

Perfect to pop in some raised beds now I reckon...

Look at how pretty those raised beds look! David and his dad built them and they are so awesome! Being able to get around the garden without walking on top of other plants and getting caught in things is really lovely. You should try it.

The paths in between the beds were levelled with dirt, we then put weed matting down and then fine gravel so that we could put the original paving stones back down easily and they wouldn't move.

Spot the chickens (being grumpy because they were no longer allowed this far down...)

 And spot the little Mocha-bee...

Yay, bricks go down...

 Monty inspects and approves the paths. Thank goodness...

Once the bricks were back down, we put sand inbetween, just to be extra sure that they weren't going anywhere, and to brush into any small gaps. Then we put our old carpet and curtains on top of the beds to stop any weeds growing since it was still too early to plant any summer veges, and way to late for winter ones.





We also weed matted and then barked the paths in front of the strawberry/bean garden (and put up chicken wire because neighbourhood cats were using it as a toilet! We've since cat proofed the entire section... no more neighbourhood cats - so far.)











And here it is in the sun, because the sun makes everything look better.

Do you remember when the patch next to the glass house was a mound of dirt and weeds?  Clearing it, weed matting and then pebbling was one of the first major things we did.

We've since planted and barked the rest of the section by the raised beds, but for now, lets move onto the other section that we left open for the chickens, the bit behind the drift wood fence.

It was weedy and you couldn't really get far enough in to see anything (see original garden post), let alone try to collect the hazelnuts from the two rather big hazel trees in there. They would fall to the ground and rot because there was just no way to see them.

So, I had the idea of turning it into a patch of lawn. Easy to care for, easy to harvest fallen hazelnuts, a lovely spot for a picnic and just another nice little section of garden to enjoy.  

Behold below, after the chickens were evicted (you can see where we moved the chicken fence up to the old apple tree in the photo below. That is now the size of their run, so, a lot bigger than what they originally had).

And there's the swing frame I was talking about that went over the path that the rose grew on. It was all out war tackling that climbing rose (which you can see to the right of the photo, now much smaller) but we won...

Once we raked up the little bits of weeds and sticks that the chickens had left that you can see above, we went off to get a trailer load of new garden dirt to fill in some of the uneven surface of that section and to provide a good platform for the grass to take root. 

We then planted our new little lemon tree and sprinkled 'easy mow' grass seeds over the whole thing.

 David raking in the grass seed and our new little lemon tree in the middle.

All finished, now to wait for the grass to grow...

We've heard from several people that the garden used to be amazing. The lady that owned it before the people we purchased it from had owned the house for a number of years. She was an avid gardener and had spent years building up the soil quality. Unfortunately, it was then left to its own devices before we got our hands on it.

I would have loved to have seen the garden when it was in its prime, but hopefully we're getting it back to that stage. And even though it's probably quite different to how it would have looked, damn at least it looks good!!

So, that is the first instalment of the garden evolution. More to come, so much more...

xx
J (& D)