Day 23 - Mini Makeover!

Our garden has multiple little separate spaces and this is one in the backyard that I made over today. After a longer than realised catch up with Sarah in the morning (whose backyard I admired) I came home and had a very quick lunch before getting stuck in. I had been talking to Elva who does all of our garden areas at school, earlier in the week and asked her for her advice on keeping the weeds away (I seem to spend hours on it each holidays). She gave me about 100 copies of the Sydney Morning Herald to put under the bark chip and voila!

Day 21 - Another Item Ticked off the List

One of the big things to do on my holiday To Do list was to clean out my study. To give you an idea of how unorganised and cluttered it was, I did one day hear Jenna refer to it as 'the junk room' when giving a friend a tour of our house! How embarrassing. I have to admit though, because I try to do most of my work at school, it is more of a storage space and with floor to ceiling shelving on two walls, it really can store quite a lot! I did most of this yesterday but finished it off today so that I could take some photos in there with the daylight flooding in. Like I did in our lounge room, I have tried to move furniture away from windows to let more light in and better access. Additionally, I took one desk out because we really only need one in there. One other thing I did consider was the way the desk faces. I have read before that it is bad feng shui to have your back to the door when sitting at a desk and so I rectified that!

This is a room that we have never really done much to, like picking a colour scheme or anything, but I am a little inspired by the black and white artwork that I put up on the wall. These drawings were done by Dale's Nanna. I am not sure when as they are undated. Maybe someone could have a guess at the fashion era? I was thinking that black and white could be a good look for this room, anyway, if I ever get to finishing the curtains in all the other bedrooms first!

Day 16 - Another Day in the Garden

So I spent last Monday in the front yard and today was the day to try and get the back yard started on. It isn't quite finished, but I did fill the trailer yet again for another trip to the tip. No creepy crawlies this time,  thankfully and so it was a majority of the day spend hacking, trimming, sweeping, raking and mowing. By the afternoon it was getting a bit windy, so the blower vac will probably finish the job tomorrow. Only thing is that I need to attack the big pile of 'stuff' up the back from the last garden clean up that didn't quite make it to the tip!

Day 9 - Just How I Wanted It... Part 2

Well the big compliment was that Dale said this picture didn't do it justice. On Saturday I started a bit of trimming out the front. Dale finished it off by cutting the tops off the way too high bottle brush trees in front of the windows which were actually touching the roof! Today another 4 hours and 2 trailer loads of clippings later, it is pretty much finished. You can see the gravel paths again, I weeded the lot and sawed off all the suckers from the base of the tree out front, that had gotten very bushy.

This time I was so careful near where I have now been bitten twice by bull dog ants, but I was shocked to see a bit fat spider poking up out of a little burrow which could possibly be a brown trap door spider. I have to say that all these creepy crawlies in the front yard are really beginning to make my skin crawl!

Day 7 - Puppy!

While we were outside getting a start on the front yard today in the effort to tackle one area of the house at a time, Henry thoroughly amused himself by having a chat with Milly through the gap in the gate. In her excitement, Milly returned the attention by providing plenty of licks and snuffling! One of Henry's latest words is 'puppy' and he even says Moo Moo, which is Milly's nickname around here! You can see in the photo that Henry did squeal with laughter a couple of times!

At the same time, Dale massacred the bottle brush trees obscuring our windows and we made the decision to pull a couple of plants that were messy looking, cleaning up the areas around the garden tap. While we worked, I reminded Dale of the time he came over and 'cut back' my beautiful bougainvillaea... yes it was starting to touch the roof, but perhaps that did not require it to be cut to within an inch of its life. It was also hardly a vine anymore, standing at about 20cm tall!

I hope to post a photo of the front yard sometime next week, after I have cleared up all the clippings and taken them to the green waste recycling place. I also hope to do it without getting another bull dog ant bite. If you remember the post on my blog from last year they are most likely to result in you screaming and hopping about in your street and I got another bite today!

Day 6 - Just How I Wanted It... Part 1!

Have you ever seen those magazine shoots of a beautiful room where they might have a pretty, fluffy dog as a little accessory? Well our dogs are nothing like that, preferring to run around like bezerkos and finally giving me about 0.3 of a second to take this photo of our newly arranged lounge room! Somehow Dale agreed to help me with this today and I am so happy with the result.

Two things I have realised:

1. Corner lounges are super comfy but not really very versatile when it comes to rearranging furniture
2. Often the obvious way to set up your furniture does not look as good as it could when you really think about alternatives

We have lived here for about 3 and a half years and the lounge has always been in the back left corner which is where it was kind of plonked on moving day.

Our plan is to set up a tiny table in the far right corner for Jenna to have her computer (somewhere where we can keep an eye on it) and to get a few more photos on the wall that I have been meaning to get framed;  and then we will be done. I am hoping that today's photo will be the first in a series of attempts at reorganisation of our house over these holidays!