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.

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!!!!!!!

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.

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!"

I had one of those rare moments today were I was completely content to be in my own company, alone in a room, no sounds other that the rhythmic slish slish of my paint brush. Concertinaed into a small oblong of space between the cot we have finally assembled and the chest of draws I was painting green I had nothing in the world to do other than concentrate on covering old with new. Even the sounds from the busy road outside the window melted into the background of my subconscious and tricked my mind into creating images of oceans. Maybe it was the rain softening the swoosh of the cars but if I closed my eyes I could have sworn I was at the beach.

I don’t usually go for green it was Glenn’s choice of colour for the wall in our room that will now double as a nursery, but this isn’t a bright in your face kind of green. Its actually quite dark, a deep dark forest type green and not the type of forests we get in Australia full of friendly little creatures that will pop up to say hello then fill you with venom, no this is more the forest were you picture Robin Hood and is mob hanging about in trees eating berries. A calming green hopefully a baby sleep inducing green.

Now in the future I imagine myself reading this post and wondering why a quiet Saturday afternoon was so noteworthy that I wrote a blog post about it. But when you stop and think about the week I have had with myself two kids one baby and one husband succumbing to the flu probably the swine flu according to our doctor but who cares all flus are serious and some others are more deadly than that piggy one so we don’t bother testing anymore.

If you know anything about families and illnesses they don’t do the sensible thing and all get sick at once no no one child brings something home and is ill, nursed lovingly back to health then on the day that it all looks bright and sunny again child number two sulks up to you leans her snotty nose against your cheek gently coughs in your face and said my head hurts, and so on and so forth until by the end of the week you are waking up five times a night to un clog the babies breathing tubes and wipe off the snot that has somehow dripped up her face into her hair and rock her back to sleep, only to be greeted when the light shines in the windows with a house full of sick, almost recovered, and I’m completely better now and so bored with this very boring family that I’m going to spend all day long bouncing of the walls and singing on the top of my lungs children. The only one of us who hasn’t been sick is Lani and we look at her now like she’s some kind of ticking time bomb.

So now you can understand why a day, where the kids played together quietly with puzzles on the floor and Glenn and Sabrina practiced saying Hello Daddy, just to make sure they are her first words, was so special. And I painted till the sun went down listening to the paintbrush telling me to Shhh Shhh quiet now.