Life has been a bit of a blur lately, mainly because my glasses are constantly covered in sawdust.

Glenn is working on the cleaver bolt thingies Dad came up with that will make the bed look so much cooler and give the kids more room to play. It involves climbing around in the cramped and dusty ceiling space but I’m told it’s worth it and I’ll let you judge when I post photo’s of the finished job.

Dad came around again to give us a hand with the last of the construction parts apparently I can be left to myself to tidy it up and do the finishing details…apparently.

There was a lot of fussing with bolts that were long when they should have been short and twisted when they should have stayed still but by the end progress had been made. The whole operation was carefully watched by the Tiny Overseer who later told me that they did a very good job.

This is a photo of our old, very narrow, constantly flooded and covered in rubble front path.

It’s one of the things that has constantly bugged me about this house. When ever I pull up on the drive way a little sigh escapes me as I contemplate herding my gaggle of unruly children into the house. Especially as I am often encumbered by numerous beloved creations and an over tired baby meaning I don’t have a free hand to catch the child that inevitably looses their footing and crashes down on the battered pavement.

But no longer HA HA I have conquered the front of house menace!!! I HAVE THE POWER!!!

We raised the level to the bottom step and put in a lot of drainage gravel. Luckily it poured with rain the whole time we were working on it so we got to test our flood prevention theories as we worked, hmm.

The pavers were imitation coble stones stuck onto a backing mat so they are easier to lay.

Easier is always fine by me (Shhh don’t tell Dad) They were also clearance stock at Bunning’s and way cheaper than anything else we looked at. Don’t ya just love a bargain.

Home schooling at its most hands on. The kids had been so fascinated watching the professionals laying pavers next door so I had to let them give it a try. In fact they had a go at every stage in the whole process, so we can blame then if the end product is dodgy.

Lilly tripping up the stairs, sometimes there’s just no helping that girl.

The finished path. So far it doesn’t flood and is wide enough for as to all get around, I don’t think there’s a path in the world Lilly wouldn’t fall over on though.

To make the curve I cut the backing mat and fanned out the cobbles. Now all I have to do is figure out what to do with the left over mountain of sand and gravel we have on the driveway, apparently our estimation skills need a little work.

We got a worm farm, Woot!, yay! and all that. It’s actually quite exciting. Glenn even went to a seminar at Bunning’s in which the guy running the seminar at Bunning’s told him that all the worm farms you can buy in hardware shops are basically just toys and you should make your own out of stuff lying around your house. Bet Bunning’s were glad they brought in that expert. In the end we did buy one from them because we didn’t have anything lying around our back yard other than a large brown dog that would tear apart and roll in anything that wasn’t boxed up with a lid.  Also this way the kids could read and follow an instruction booklet and construct their own toy unaided.

Apparently worms need a blankie to sleep at night, Awwwww.

LOOK, LOOK, LOOK!!!! the icky yucky black stuff is coming off the floor, WooHoo!!! It is so officially Happy Dance time, come on join me one…two…three…kick, one…two…three…kick!

The not very nice to walk on, sticky black stuff (like the tar they put down on the roads to hold the little stones in place) is what we were left with as a kitchen floor after a whole entire weekend of smashing slate. Dad had convinced us it would just take an afternoon to remove the slate floor in the kitchen so we thought we’d give it a go.

To be fair if they guy who owned this house before us had laid the slate properly it would have just taken an afternoon. To lay slate you need to screw a board to the flour first then lay a base then glue the tiles to this. This guy who we are now referring to as The Devil Incarnate just glued straight onto the floor boards. When we first realised this was no afternoon job we went to flooring shops to ask for advice and I’m not kidding you the first piece of advice we got was.

“Well, what you need to do is firstly, find out where the guy who laid the floor lives, go around to his house and shoot him”

Not the most encouraging advice.

Another guy told us that if we found anything strong enough to melt the black it would eat the floor boards but he was wrong. After a month and a half of scraping 1cm square per day clear of black, I freaked out. I screamed and yelled at the floor like a crazy woman and told Glenn if he didn’t find something to fix it this weekend I was going to burn the house down because rebuilding would be easier than this. He came home with paint and varnish stripper, not to be used on floorboards, which works perfectly.

So now all we have to do to finish the floor is:

Smash up remaining tiles with sledge hammer (look at the hammer and imagine BIGGER, I couldn’t find the real one)

Use hammer and chisel to magical transform thick black stuff into thin black stuff.

Use stripper to peal of black stuff and induce pink elephant hallucinations, that stuff is strong.

It should only take us another year or so, longest afternoon I’ve ever come across.

P.S For all those people who have witnessed our progress and have kindly suggested that we could have just left it it didn’t look that bad YOU ARE NOT HELPING!!!!!!!

This last shot is especially for my sister who keeps trying to peer past all those annoying kids in the photos I put up to see how the renovations are going. And yes we still haven’t finished scraping the kitchen floor.

Renovation update, we have totally given up on the lounge room for now. After a years work involving ripping plastic wood cladding off the walls, finding and repairing whopping great big holes and old doorways that never got filled in. Then days and days of plastering, sanding and painting it has all come to a grinding halt. You see one wall is left to be completed, this is the wall we are going to attach the huge flat screen we don’t have to. But because we might get one when we eventually get sick of the blue snow storm we currently watch we were thinking of sorting out all the wiring in the wall.

Then they day before we were going to begin it rained. Now in Australia it can be a little dry at times and really since we bought this house we haven’t had that many bad patches of rain. But this day it just decided to tip it down and as I was walking through the lounge room I noticed a slivery snail trail appear on the wall. As I stood there watching the trail grew, the wall oozed wetness and within a few minutes I had one of those new fangled waterfall features in my room. Just in case you haven’t got the significance water and electrical wiring projects don’t mix. So first of all we have to find and repair the leak. As we have no idea how to do that and frankly got so sick of the weepy walls attitude we decided to take a break and fix the kids rooms up. Actually we had to sort it out as Sabi keeps rolling over in the  night bashing her head on the cot and waking up.

So bed making here we come. We tried putting bunks in the piddley little rooms but it just becomes so claustrophobic and dark plus we have night walkers and walking off the top bunk is not the best idea. This is the solution we came up with, the first bed is on a platform just off the floor then the second bed will go along the green wall just under the window sill overlapping the bottom bed at the end.

The bottom bed came together perfectly, the top one we’ll get around to just as soon as we figure out what we are doing.

Everybody’s scraping, scraping, scraping, everybody’s scraping just like me. Why does my head sing playschool songs while renovating??? Must be the tedium, or the monotony or the tiny bits of paint dust that fly up my nose and lodge themselves in the gray matter. Must really check if this stuff is lead-based.

Anyway, I’m wondering if you might be able to notice what is missing in the wall photo above? Look again, it’s not that obvious, it’s only the gyprock! This has been the view that has greeted our guests as they step in the front door since about a month after we moved in and I freaked out and ripped all the fake wood panelling off the walls. Did I mention that the guy who owned this place had a caravan park fetish. After liberating myself from the claustrophobic depression that comes with living in a brown wooden box, I found myself living in a slap-stick reproduction of a house, something that National Lampoons would be proud to call home. It hasn’t been that bad really. I’ve quite enjoyed becoming intimate with the few remaining sparks of sanity I have left, before there was just too much of me to really get to know.

Besides my ever increasing case of wall envy, I’ve found a new justification for ramping up these renovations. See in the wall photo, those little white baby wind pipe sized bits of plaster lying on the floor, they get knocked off every time someone walks down the passage way and this is only one of the multitude of potentially deadly decorating styles this house has to offer.

So the race is on, the deed is done, we’ve thrown ourselves head first into this (and any other clichéd catch phrases you can think of) WE ARE NOW OFFICALY RENOVATING!!! (well repairing anyway, can’t get too excited we are from British stock)

This last and slightly freaky photo is to celebrate the removal of all the wallpaper I can reach. The top bit is for Glenn, giant that he is. I know, I know I could just used the step ladder and finish the lot but then he would feel left out and we can’t have that can we.

Sorry that this photo is not my usual glamorous self but this, I’m afraid, is the look you get when you combine wallpaper removal and sleep depravation. Did i mention she is teething. I’m not sure what the record for days with out sleep is but if i don’t get any tonight I’ll have beaten it. Oh yeah and just because they have broken through the gums doesn’t mean they stay down, some times they POP BACK UP!

Poor neglected House has gotten some long over due attention today. My trusty little assistant and I began the exfoliation treatment this morning while Sabi slept. I have to admit, I’ve been putting off this job.

I spent most of my youth scraping wall paper off the walls at my parents house. Scraping their wall paper was a horrendous job, I remember standing in the passage with Mum both of us looking like oversized Lamingtons stuck all over with desiccated wall paper. With our exhausted scraping arms limp by our sides we stood there admiring the 30cm square patch of clear wall, the patch that had taken us the last 3 hours to complete. Ok so may be I exaggerate, but not by much. Ask Glenn he was involved in the all nighter we pulled to try and get the foyer ready before Christmas, the same foyer, I might add, that they are in the process of renovating again (they will never stop)

House however behaved amazingly well, he must have been dying to get rid of that cruddy stuff because as soon a we wet it large chunks of the stuff just pealed away. In one little baby sleep (which at the moment is not very long) we completed all we could reach on one whole wall. Admittedly it’s a small wall but hey, we did it. When we finish I’ll post before and after then you can see just how far House has come along since we moved in. The guy that owned him before us had some serious caravan park fetish going on evident by the fact that he encased every single wall and a ceiling with plastic wood panelling. You just wait till you see those photos.

I’ll end this with the ever inspiring words of Miss Lilly Pilly:

"I’ve got to get out of the bath now, my skin is nearly all off!"

…but with this being the first spring we have had in this house……

……and considering all the muscle straining hours I have put into this garden……

….just to get it to the semi presentable state that it is in now…..

…..I thought it highly appropriate to honour the beautiful flowers it is now presenting me with as a reward.

However when Glenn saw what I was doing he thought a more appropriate approach for this weeks theme would be to document all the germs and illness this family has had blossoming inside us, poor baby Sabi is on her very first course of antibiotics. So If you are felling in a hopeful and joyous mood you my look at my photos or if you are feeling more gloomy like Glenn here is a photo for you.

To check out more blossoming pictures head over to Cindy’s

I have a confession I love doilies, I know, I know, how Little old lady of me. Mostly I just look at them, take them for a little walk around the shop then put them back (I’m not sure if other members of this family enjoy having them around quite as much as me) But I just couldn’t put this cute little guy back. Maybe It’s my British heritage, maybe it was because I couldn’t stop smiling at how happy that little drumming man looks but mostly I think it is because I know that some unknown hands of the past held needle and thread between their fingers and added all those tiny crosses all those tiny dashes because they were inspired to, because they wanted to make a plain piece of material special. Thank you unknown hands.

I also found a wooden high chair. I have been wanting one for ages I find the plastic ones so hard to clean, and well, who really wants a giant blob of white plastic right in the middle of their kitchen.  This guy was a mess when I found him he looked like he’d never been oiled, was all gray and dirty. I really wish I’d taken a before shot, but I didn’t. I honestly thought he’d have to be sanded and re-varnished before he looked any good.

So instead of a before shot you are going to have to make do with a baby shot instead, I hope you don’t mind. Of course the little high chair matches perfectly with the furniture in the kitchen that we are about to get rid and not at all with the furniture we currently have on lay buy. I wonder if I should stain it ??? or just leave it as a contrast??? what do you think?? the new furniture is a very dark brown. Oooh look at all those question marks, can you tell I’m in a dilemma?? Ahh there I go again.