Monday, April 30, 2012

Mothers Day



Last year the husband refused to buy me a Mothers Day present, despite me being 37 weeks pregnant. He has no excuse this year.

I have been thinking about it a lot lately, as he doesn't have the best track record with buying presents. He forgot our anniversary this year, and is more likely to just go and tell me to pick my own present.

Thing is, I don't really know what I want. I don't need new PJ's, nor do I need a new dressing gown (thats what Eliza and I brought myself last year). Everything that I desire is out of the budget.

Any suggestions?

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Friday, April 27, 2012

Finishing Tasks: Dog Kennel

 When we brought Gus the German Shepard home we built him a kennel and run. That was in 2007.

It still isn't finished.

I got as far as putting one coat of paint on the weatherboards before I got bored. One coat in 5 years when I have painted numerous other weatherboards on the house. The shame.

So it looked like this

Enough was enough, and out came the pressure washer. Oh my, I am ashamed of these photos. I never thought it was that grubby.


The inside for washed down too, as 5 years worth of dog dirt and fur wasn't overly attractive.

A quick two coats of paint and it is looking much spiffier. If we were going to stay in this house I had grand plants of adding some trim and lining it all out, but alas we aren't, so I won't. But it looks much better now.


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Thursday, April 26, 2012

Forgive me

Please forgive the lack of posts of late, my house currently looks like this:

It is hard to believe we could pack up our entire house and shed into one 6x3m storage unit. Then again, there is still a fair bit of room, that white thing on the left is actually our lounge suite base, and there is currently a 1metre squared patch of bare floor space.

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Eliza Wears



Winter is finally coming - meaning we can bring out the tights! I love little girls in tights.
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Tuesday, April 17, 2012

House Hunting - the downfalls

There are certain downfalls of hunting for your next house. Things like

  • budget
  • requirements
  • ideals
  • disappointment.
You know we are serious about a house when we actually make a time to go and look at a house. We're deadly serious when we go back a second time armed with a camera and a measuring tape. We did that with this house. We had both fallen in love with the house and could picture ourselves living there for many years to come.

There were certain downfalls to the house though. Like that it was dirty on the inside, messy on the outside, fences needed repairing, deck restraining and the driveway needed to be rebuilt. Oh, and there was no car storage space either, so a carport needed to be built. So we put in an offer taking the cost of those things into consideration. 

We were knocked back. So we put in a higher offer, the maximum we were willing to pay. Again we were knocked back.

I was gutted by this, I had fallen in love with that house. It ticked just about every box I was looking for in a house (for the record the only thing it was missing was an attached garage). And now every house is compared to it as not being as nice, as homely or as perfect for us.


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Monday, April 16, 2012

Sticks and Stones

The stones in our outdoor area have haunted me for years. Seven years to be exact. I never liked them, but could never justify spending the money to concrete the space either. So they were a little worse for wear, with scattered bark and leaves and patches.

 We recently had a real estate agent visit, and he suggested updating the space, thinking it would be a couple of hundred dollars. How wrong he was. When I told him the cost, and said that I would love to, but doubted it would make that much difference to the sale price he agreed with me. However we decided to spend a couple of hundred dollars on new stones.

2 cubic metres (ie a shit load of rocks) and a very hot sweaty morning later we had moved all the rocks into the outdoor area. It's made a huge difference and it looks just a little bit neater in there now.


We also picked up half a cubic metre of bark chips to freshen up all the garden beds. Thankfully it was a lot easier to shovel into place than the stones.


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Thursday, April 12, 2012

Eliza Wears

The child never lays still! It is getting impossible to get a non-blurry photo out of her.

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Monday, April 9, 2012

Kitchen Clean Up

A little while back I went through a declutter phase. I cracked the poos about not being able to fit something into the freezer and it was on like Donkey Kong. The kitchen was my number one enemy and I am pleased to say I won.
 All of our bulk meat went into large containers so I could easily find the mince/chicken/pork/steak.

The bottom drawer, which was overflowing went on a supreme make over. I wish I took a before photo, as it was a disgusting mess.
Sistema should sponsor me, I went through so many containers doing this. It is actually a little different now, I changed a few containers around to make it fit better. The tool box is now a bigger container to fit everything in without a Masters Degree, and the instruction books for the oven and dishwasher are now in the top cupboard as they never get used.

I also attacked the cleaning goods drawer. In its previous life it spaned the drawer and the cupboard under the sink. I threw out many products that we don't use, and condensed the rest. We now have a tub for the shoe cleaning goods, a container for the dishwasher tablets, another container for sponges, steel wool and chux. It all fits rather nicely now.

To finish off my ramage I hung hooks in the rangehood cupboard for the pot holders to hang off, but it turns out that 3M hooks don't stick overly well to our cupboard doors, and they fell down within a day.
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Saturday, April 7, 2012

New House Inspiration: Guest Room


I have started to think about decorating the spare room. It originally started as Eliza's room, but I suspect that a little girl might not appreciate such a sophisticated space.

I am in love.
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Friday, April 6, 2012

Cubby Houses

As Eliza grows up I am starting to think about the things I wanted as a little girl, but never had. My mum did an awesome job of raising me, don't get me wrong, but we moved house a lot (I have moved house 32 times already - and I am only 27!). I never had a family home that held all my memories, and it is that I want to create for Eliza.

I was always envious of my cousins who had a cubby house, and now I am starting to think about one for Eliza. I could buy one, but where is the fun in that? Besides, have you seen the price of cubby houses these days? Its horrendous!!!

I love this one

(I tried to find the website for the original cubby, but it doesn't exist. Pity, it looked like a cute site.

and this one for its simplicity
 (from here)

but this one takes the cake!
 (from here)
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Thursday, April 5, 2012

Eliza Wears


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Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Love vs Design



I have had Love vs Design bookmarked for a little while now, but never really got around to looking at their site. It wasn't until I saw a picture of theirs pinned on Pinterest that I went and looked.

I am in love with their feather gift tags, and best of all they are free! Now I just have to wait another 8 months before I can use them :(

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Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Feeding Time




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Monday, April 2, 2012

Mailbox

Our mailbox was an ugly thing. So ugly that I don't think I ever took a photo of it. I couldn't even find a photo where it was in the background. So you will have to imagine. It was an old rusted basic mailbox that in an attempt to make pretty I painted to match the house. It sat on a massive red gum pole that once upon a time held up this fence
Pretty sure that is one of the earlier pictures of our house. Pretty, wasn't it?!?

So anyway, one night I went to check the mail and it was on the doorstep. Kinda odd, as our postie is lazy at the best of times. I forgot about it and went back inside. The next day it was the same thing, however I thought I would check for the paper too.

And that's when I discovered it. Our mailbox was missing. Some idiot had taken off with our crappy mailbox! Why you would steal our crappy mailbox and not our neighbours nice mailbox is beyond me.

So, we needed a mailbox quickly. It turns out mailboxes are expensive! Just a plain one like we had was $40! A fancy one was around $250. So I turned to my good friend, ebay.

Lady Luck must have been smiling on me that day, as I found a local seller who made mailboxes and they were having a scratch and dent sale. He had a phone number listed so I rang up wanting to know if I could get the husband to pick it up that afternoon. He was a lovely man who was not only going to be in his shed that afternoon for us to pick it up, he was going to sell it to us for $100!!! The company he sells them to sells them for $299!!!


I have looked over the mailbox in many different lighting conditions, and I can't find the dents or scratches in it. It looks pretty perfect to me.

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