Just in case you forgot what the front of the house looked like ...

What with all the work going on on the back... here's the front, again:

I love the external cross-bracing which, interlocked, holds the house together better than any bolts & nuts possibly could.

You can see our big dog, Chooks (a black and tan rhodesian ridgeback x) lying on her bed.

Building progress

Building has been delayed by heavy rain the past week, alas. And there was a bit of a setback when the key cantilever beam, which is to support the deck roof and hipped roof, was placed incorrectly. Sigh.... Even though I *reminded the boys beforehand*. Mind you, the roofing represents a fairly complex engineering structure, so I guess it's understandable that errors are made ... after all, they're only men ... ;-). So, the beam had to be taken down and re-placed: a hefty job as it weighs more than 100 kg. Unfortunately, once the old skillion roof was removed, the skies opened and we had a torrential downpour ... So I brought out the buckets, mops and towels ...

But today the sun shines and work seems to be progressing steadily. Here's a very recent photo of the current  happy chaos :-)

During and after: bedroom restoration

A bit quiet on the blogging side but much is being achieved on the restoration and farm front! One of the jobs is the slow and painstaking restoration of the interior walls. Some of the rooms had been panelled in the 1970s with a horrid synthetic multiply cladding, which we have been taking down (where it hadn't falled down already). Other rooms had simply fallen into disrepair (having been beautifully painted by Val Battistuzzi in the '70s and '80s in nice pastel shades... and then abysmally treated by the last owners). Despite having used a pressure cleaner on the interior house when we first moved in, the walls still require washing and scrubbing. Then the walls and ceilings are sanded. Then the gaps between the boards are filled with an acrylic elastic sealant. Then the painting (first by brush along the boards, then with a roller), in two coats. All in all many hours of work on each wall.

During ceiling restoration - early stages, new white coat. The walls are gap filled already.

Door and original lock restored

Ready to move in! This is now Yarrow's room.

The cats get the best seats in the house?

An evening scene on a cold winter's night. Our wood burning stove is the source of heat (and we cook on it too quite often). The chairs are drawn in closer, Yarrow is reading a book on the floor in front of the fire (she's reading "Little Women" for school). Sunny and Inkling are in the best chair (got to feel sorry for Inkling with his leg in plaster), our 'new' cat Minnie - who we inherited due to the marital separation of our good friends Julie and Trevor - is on the wooden chair. She's still a bit wary of the other two, but that will improve. John's successfully solving the crossword with the help of his porter gaff.

You can just see a bit of the new skirting boards and architraves that I have mounted around the room. I love the rich warm colour of the native teak floorboards.

A homely scene :-)

It never rains but it pours? :-(

Seriously, for a while there things were not looking very bright... All manner of things went amiss, amok, awry, adrift. I was sad for a while ... which is why I wasn't blogging very much.

In a nutshell: my father was in hospital; then my mother went to hospital for a minor operation which went wrong and she nearly died; my brother Marc in Amsterdam was terribly ill as well as distraught for very real reasons; my sister Anoush suddenly had to have major back surgery. My relationship with my darling John was going through a dip, which grieved me muchly :'-( ... and our young cat Inkling got hit by a car (miraculously survived, phew). On a more minor note, the header tank at the top of the property collapsed, which besides losing our water, crushed the tank beyond repair.

My life felt like this poem, which I recall reading in a book by Spike Milligan:

Since I hurt my pendulum
My life is all erratic.
My parrot, who was cordial,
Is now transmitting static.

The carpet died, a palm collapsed,
The cat keeps doing poo.
The only thing that keeps me sane
Is talking to my shoe.

Smith has a bath

And enjoys it too...

Holiday week one: renovations and restorations

John painting the ceiling boards

Both John and I were really needing a holiday, so we took two weeks off work. The first week was quite fraught really: having been so busy we had not really had time to work on our relationship and family, so there was some serious renovating to do on that front. Parenting is a minefield anyway but we have a blended family and that brings with it a unique set of issues, which require upkeep and attention. The stats on blended families are not cheering: 90% don't last five years, sadly. If anyone reading this would like more information or support on this topic I can recommend the University of Florida "Stepping Stones for Stepfamilies" series, and a number of other sites.

But we also had some serene times that week. We listened to some marvellous ABC RN  while we worked on restoring the interior of the living room, which when we bought the Grange was panelled in gaudy 1970's plasticised sheets. My brother Marc helped us pull those down quick smart, when he was here last year, bless him! The hardwood boards underneath were damaged but whole, though shrinkage had left many gaps in the walls. We fixed those with flexible gap filler (we used 17 tubes on the one room). Then sanding and filling of the many holes and finally a nice coat of paint. I still need to make more architraves (which had been removed in years gone by and are lost alas) and finish the cornices / scotia and skirtings. Good hard work but the net result is much better. Before and after shots are below.

I think the relationship is much better after the week's renovations, too.

Prior to purchase

Nearly finished

 

The living room after panelling removal but before painting.

Spring flowers :-)

"Yesterday, today and tomorrow" bush

These flowers are very close to the house ...  

This orchid lives in the old frangipani tree

Woodwork

Last weekend, to chase away the sadness of losing Remy I decided to build a little bookshelf / cupboard-thing for in the toilet (otherwise how else to keep a loo orderly with four teenage girls in the house??). I sketched it at breakfast, went out with John and bought the wood and built it in the afternoon. 

sketch

Finished product in Tasmanian oak

 

Very therapeutic.

Simple steps to stop your house falling over

In keeping with Queenslander building style, The Grange is held up off the ground by a series of tall 10cm square poles (called 'stumps' even though they don't look stumpy). One of the stumps had been shifting over the course of years and we thought it was time to put it back where it belonged before the side of the house started to sag ... 

John procured a very smart device called an acrow prop from his friend Peter C and in no time flat we had propped the side of the house up;
(see photo below)...

and repositioned the stump. See bottom photo. (Phew, that looks better!!) 

The whole exercise took about five minutes.


That's all I've done this week on the house / farm front as I've been quite ill with fever and flu and even walking to the chook pen was uncharacteristically arduous!

At last ... combustion (convection) heater ... YUMMMMM ....

After decades of cold under the previous owner, the Grange has once again a working wood fire ...

And let me tell you, the warmth is so, so, so welcome ...

(John's lounging here on the armchair in his *shorts*!!)

Cheerio from a toasty warm Mieke ...

Lunar eclipse

We lit a bonfire and stayed home to watch the full moon rising and the lunar eclipse on Saturday evening ...







Here's looking West over the sheds as John lays the bonfire ...














Tess took this lovely photo of the eclipse itself...

Help with the crossword

Sometimes when you're doing the crossword it helps to put your thinking cat on.

You can see how it would help.











... You can see why I love John very, very much ... :-)

Photos of the Grange

Here are various photos & aspects of our lovely old house, The Grange. We don't know exactly how old it is but it pre-dates the 1890s for sure. There are various features that indicate potentially early C19th architectural building styles, such as single skin walls with cross bracing and studs exposed, the separate (straight! not bullnosed, which is a later style) verandah roof. Probably early Victorian in style, and of the Queenslander type.

About Queenslanders ... this is from Wikipedia: "Queenslander buildings are primarily of timber construction and can be low or high-set, one to two storeys. They are typically "tripartite" in sectional composition; underfloor (stumps), primary rooms (can be two levels), and roof. All have one or more veranda spaces, a sheltered edge of the building that is typically only part-enclosed and used as another living zone. This consideration for climate is the defining characteristic of the Queenslander type."

A morning guest

As the rising sun hit the house and sheds, warming the cool earth, a sleepy visitor came out of its bed to see what the chook pen had to offer.


Luckily for our hens it chose one of the pens which is vacant at the moment (though the hens do sneak in and lay their eggs there).

I'm always a bit undecided when it comes to pythons in the chook pens ... Should we remove them in case they swallow a bantam or two (as has happened before)? Or should we leave them be so that they can do their excellent job of keeping down the resident rodent population (who come to feed on the chook food and scraps).

I took the close-up photo 'specially for Kevin who, I am fairly sure, will like it. As with all photos on this blog, click to enlarge!

Anyway, we left the python be and hopefully it found a nice rat or two to eat.

Yarrow has a new bed

Four of the five bedrooms at the Grange had a double bed: the odd one out being Yarrow's, which had a rather wobbly bunk bed. Nice for the occasional guest sleepover, but there is usually a spare bedroom here anyway, depending on which of the girls are staying where. (Bella, a grown young lady now, hardly sleeps here anymore, as she has the Myth and her Bails cottage at her Mum's house ... not to mention her lovely loving boyfriend Tim ...).

And young Grange girls being young girls, they like to lounge around on beds and chat and read and watch movies with their sisters, and Yarrow's bed was not too conducive to that sort of social behaviour.

So, when walking through a furniture store in Ballina while whiling away time before dropping Kat at the airport, Tess, Yarrow, Kat and I saw this lovely bed ... which Yarrow "reeeeeeeelly reeeeeeellly liked, Mum". And it wasn't too $$ so I bought it and after dropping Kat at the plane (Bye darling Kat!! Come again soon!!) we managed to squish the packages into the Subaru Forester ("Well if fold this chair down, and we angle it *this* way, and slide that *there*, and fold this underneath, and sandwich Yarrow against the door and fold Tess in six ungainly positions -- OK, don't breathe for about half an hour, Tess, no worries, should be right -- it *should* fit. There!").

Then in the evening Yarrow and I dismantled her old bed and put it away (nicely labelling each part and cling-wrapping the bolts to the relevant posts for future assembly). Then Yarrow unpacked the new bed and deciphered the quite reasonable instructions and then with only a bit of help from me, assembled it. And here it is. New bed for Yarrow!

I took the photo by holding my camera high above my head and hoping for a reasonable focus / pic. Not too bad ...

Honey, we're hoooome!

Well our intrepid young travellers, Tess and Yarrow, have returned hale and happy from their exciting sojourn in Europe (to see pics of their trip go to http://crystalcadenzas.blogspot.com/). They had a fantastic time: thank you Hans and Niki, Anjes, Lisa, Marc and family, Denise, Cees, Bertie, Peter n Trix, and everyone else for making their time so memorable.

I've returned from a very interesting field research trip to central NSW (I'll put some pics up soon).

When we got home (simultaneousy) we found that Briony had festooned the house with delightful 'welcome home' signs. And John had arranged a surprise welcome home social event, inviting our much-loved Gales family, as well as Teagan and Bonnie, over for a relaxing social afternoon. We had a lovely lovely homecoming ...

The photos show:
- the largest of Briony's many welcome home signs, above the door to our bedroom. You can see where Marc, John and I have removed the plastic 1970's panelling to reveal the original wall boards. We've yet to restore and repaint the walls: a job for much later.
- Tom Gale, cat whisperer extraordinaire, relaxing in the hammock with Sunny, in the afternoon sun.
- A gathering of olives from our olive tree in Julie's basket. Kel climbed to the top of the tree to collect these. In the meantime I was telling Julie about the latest book I read, which she's going to borrow. Hope you enjoy the book, Julie! And we look forward to tasting the olives when they're ready!

Remy is S.M.A.T!

'Cos he can do the crossword too.

Happy Birthday Briony!!

It's Briony's birthday today and she's a wild and wonderful 16 years old!!!

Here's your birthday 'card', love! This photo was taken at 6 a.m. on a December morning (last week) ... already warm, and temperatures expected to reach 43 degrees in Lismore, but cooler here nearer the coast, high on the ridge where we can catch the breeze.

This is the view from the back step looking ENE (East-Northeast). Ethereal, hey...

Have a happy day Briony! I'm sure you will, seeing as your sisters have just wrapped you in cling wrap and ribbons and are graffiti-ing your back ... :-)

Aerial view of the Grange

Click image for larger photo. The red border is the farm boundary. Thanks to Google Maps!