Tasmania, Be Tempted

Hello. 

I've been away. 

I've been back in my home state of Tasmania, catching up with family and friends in some of the lovely settings Tassie does so well.

I've been putting my feet up at my Mother's house...

and enjoying the luxury of turfing my child out into the backyard without obsessively checking for snakes first (I know you all think I'm paranoid - but we had a meeting with a large snake shortly before leaving Queensland. It was right next to Lucinda's play things. Lesson for the day - just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you)

And above all, we enjoyed some cracking Tassie weather, a friend's wedding, some excellent food and wine and some serious boat-observing. 

Regular programming is due to resume shortly, once I get through the mountain of laundry and my currently flat post-holiday mood, that is. 

Sikaflexing The Storms Away

In a turn of events that can only be described as a very happy accident, Dan finally got to doing an overdue Big House-waterproofing job that has been top of the to-do list the day before this storm hit:

Yup, the storm was every bit as powerful as it looked here.

As you may know or notice, Big House's exterior is unfortunately clad in aluminium not timber (why, people of the 70s, why...)

Aluminium deteriorates quickly, it's completely inflexible and - when you replace windows as we're doing - you pretty much have to replace the whole exterior of your home's cladding too. 

Take THAT, landfill. 

We aren't replacing the cladding just yet, so for now the exterior of our house continues to take on a patchy, ramshackle, hillbilly-compound look that increasingly bemuses our curious neighbours. They're a forgiving lot, luckily.

This is the kitchen end of Big House at the moment.

Classy, no? I think the wonky hills hoist really completes the look. 

Until we can pull all the cladding off and replace it with weatherboards, we just patch and repair as best we can. 

We'd had some water coming in the sides of the new timber windows, Dan's dodgy temporary cladding patches above clearly weren't holding up. So, on Sunday, he got up there on the trestles and filled in the gaps down the side of the windows with Sikaflex-PRO.

He snapped these photos while he was up there. They show what a mess the exterior is at the moment. 

Here, you can see the crappy aluminium cladding and the VJ lining of the pantry on the other side. 

This product was actually donated to us about six months ago by Sika to block the gaps in the Little House floors. 

The colour (Redwood) was picked to match those floors, but the job kept getting put off because all our renovating time really goes into the Big House (and has to, if we ever want to move in there again).

After the big storm came through on Monday, I went and did a pretty thorough check of every last nook and cranny for water entry points.

The entire house, verandahs and all was BONE DRY. No water in the kitchen, pantry or study.

So for now, at least, we can continue forging ahead on the inside, happy in the knowledge our externally-ugly duckling is finally watertight.

The Sikaflex-PRO featured here was donated by the good people at Sika Australia. 

Getting On Top Of Benchtops

When we ordered our kitchen through Freedom, we decided to skip their benchtop options and do our own thing. Their options, from memory, were stone and laminate. 

We wanted timber benchtops but, with champagne tastes on a beer budget, had to be a little creative.

For Little House, we had used bamboo benchtops from Bunnings Kaboodle range and we decided to get the same ones for Big House.

Dan has fitted them over the last week and I'm pretty happy with how they look. He also laid out some of the splashback tiles and put in the sink, so we can get more of an idea of the finished kitchen.

Then, he did exactly what we did in Little House and using a hard-wearing two-pack floor product to give them maximum strength.

The finished product is hard-wearing and glossy and came in at a fraction of the price of traditional timber or stone benchtops. 

As you can see above, Dan has also put in the backing board for the tiled areas and has tiling the kitchen in his sights soon. He's also been busy framing, insulating, lining and plastering the ceilings in the study and pantry. 

Even with the speed he's going, we've had to revise our plans to move back in early this year. We're now aiming to be in by Winter which gives us a little time to get more money together (saving time again!) and finish painting this area. 

The Highs and Lows Of It

In January last year, this is what our place looked like. 

Heavy rain brought more flooding to the Lockyer Valley and our paddock went under. We'd only been here a few weeks and, while our houses will always be above the flood level,  it was pretty confronting watching the water take over the lower areas of our property and valley.

This is what our back paddock looks like this year - dry, brown and thankfully a little less weedy.

We've had a few storms come through. This one looked pretty spectacular but did little in the way of rainfall.

It came after Lucinda's bath and I wrapped her in a towel and took her out onto the verandah to watch the lightning.

There, listening to distant thunder rumbling and with the ever-present background hum of our industrial-size fan, she quickly fell asleep on my lap.

We all grow up with associations from childhood summers. Hers, I suspect, will involve the constant hum of fans.



It will be memories of intensely hot days (it got to nearly 45 today) and regular rolling thunder. It will be going outside, as we did this morning, to find a fallen tree has brought a fence down.

It will be ice blocks and playing under the sprinkler.



And, hopefully, it will involve going outside with her Mother after 6pm when the weather has relented to water the plants, check the animals and, some days, watch the sunset.

Pressed Metal Ceiling Restoration Pt 2

Has Christmas already been and gone? I feel like I barely noticed, what with everything else that's been happening. 

When last I posted, we were painting the ceilings in the kitchen with rust converter. That went well, they looked gorgeous all dark and clean. 

The grey going over the top here is metal primer...

Meanwhile, in the living room, the Peel Away paper was removed, leaving behind sludgy, softened paint, which had to be removed with a high pressure hose to get all the last paint and stripper off.

It was a messy business. 

We used a wet/dry vac to quickly clean up the water, then pulled up all the plastic sheets and mopped and dried the floors off.

Then, after the ceilings had all dried off, the primer was painted down to the white end here, which is old paint but in really good condition.

Phew. 

Still with me? Next up, we started sanding the walls. What an AWFUL job that has been. It's been stinking hot, the paint is stubborn as hell, and we've had to wear full cover suits and breathing masks. 

I look irritatingly happy here. That's because I hadn't started work yet. 

It's sticky, dirty work, but rewarding as the old layers of paint come away.

In many rooms, we've discovered the best way to remove the last layer of crumbly acrylic paint is with a paint scraper.

It's painfully slow, but it's been far more effective than either of the sanders we've used, one of which is so delicate it does almost nothing here and the other of which is so aggressive it leaves big gouges in the timber.

We also tried a heat gun, but all it did was turn the paint to mush.

So, for now, it's the scraper.

This is about two hours work.

In many areas, we've just sanded out the rough patches and left the rest. We've bought a special primer designed to work over painted surfaces. But, in areas like this bedroom where the paint is literally crumbling off the wall, there's no choice but to remove it all.

If you're in the Lockyer area, own a paint scraper and are at a loose end over the next few days, please feel free to come our way.

We'd be so happy to see you.

Peel Away on pressed metal ceilings

Yesterday afternoon, work started (again) on the ceilings. The main job of the day was applying the stripper product - Peel Away 8 - to the section of the ceilings we still need to remove paint from.

Basically, you roller the product onto the ceiling and then stick sheets of paper on it. The stripper has to sit for a couple of days and then you pull the paper away and - in an ideal world - the old paint will come with it. 

It's meant to be a safe and easy way to remove lead paint in particular, but I think 'easy' is a relative term when it comes to these nasty jobs. 

Last time we did this, in the kitchen area, we used the paper in the large sheets you buy it in. Unfortunately, they were too heavy and wouldn't stick to the roof. 

We emailed the manufacturer and they recommended ripping the paper into small sheets, which has worked so much better. 

So, the middle section of the ceiling is now sitting in its chemical bath until tomorrow, and Dan has started work back down in the kitchen end.

He's using a wire brush on his drill to get off the last stubborn flakes of paint, then applying a rust converter...

...which is turning the kitchen ceiling from a dingy rusty mess into a dark, slick metal ceiling again. 

What a relief...

The Demise of the One Hour Rule

Last Summer, I had a 'one-hour' rule. 

Basically, I spent an hour a day working outside in the garden trying to get and keep things under control. Usually, I did this while Lucinda napped, which meant it was the absolute peak of the day and it was HOT. 

A friend of mine recently posted this photo he took on Facebook. It's Lucinda and I, a few weeks after arriving here. All I see are weeds and myself looking absolutely knackered. And my gorgeous daughter, of course.

Thankfully, this year, Lucinda does some daycare, we have a gardener who comes regularly to help out and the place is much, MUCH more under control than it was then. 

The one-hour rule served its purpose, but I'm glad not to have to reinstate it this Summer. 

This garden bed has been a big experiment over the last year. I've planted a lot of things I've found down at the street markets and not everything has thrived. It gets a lot of shade as it's right under the big tree in our front garden. (In the photo above, you can see the same area before we put the flower bed there - it's just weeds and old irrigation pipe).

I'm just going crazy with geraniums in here now, and some succulent flowering ground covers.

I've planted loads of pink red and now white geraniums through that empty patch there. With a bit of patience, we'll see some results in a year or so.

In other news, I was walking with Lucinda out in the paddock to 'her' pony, and we spotted this python. S/He was hard to miss. (These guys are not venomous, for those who are not aware)

They do have the most beautiful markings, though.