It is with great regret that I write this blog. I will soon have to leave my beloved little cottage. My darling husband has taken a job offer and we are moving. We are excited to move and will have more opportunities in our new town, but we will be sad to say goodbye to our first house. We could not bear to part with it completely, so we will be renting the house out. In order to ask for the rent to cover our mortgage, we needed to do some renovations. Most of the things we have done are things we have wanted to do for ourselves, but never had the time. We have painted the outside and are now painting inside. We have done up the bathroom, by adding a new sink and vanity unit. All of this has contributed to making our house into our dream home and now we won't be here to enjoy it. The up side is I will now have a new canvas to work with in out new home.

Parties

One of the things I love to do for my son is throw him a birthday party every year, my darling husband always complains and states he does not know why I go to the trouble, he often says things like it would be heaps easier just to take them all to Maccas. While this may be the case, I get just as big a kick out of it as my beautiful son.

This is the cake I made for his 9th birthday party, we had a Mad Scientist theme. I had 10 little boys on my back deck mixing vinegar with Bi-Carb soda and watching the chemical reaction. They also mixed cornflour and water then held it in there hand and rubbed it into a ball then stopped to have it ooze out between their fingers. Everyone had a great time and surprisingly they were not to dirty at the end of it all.

I will try to find some more photos of Liam' birthday parties to post on here for next time.

Flood

The Australian climate is certainly one of extremes, last fortnight we had hot humid days and today we had flooding at work and had to shuffle all our paper records around so that they did not get destroyed by the water flowing through the room. As I was the lucky one who was not cut off from work by rising flood water, I was stuck at work for most of the day, and will be back there all day tomorrow as the other girls are not able to get in to work. As I was coming home my son Liam and I stopped by the river for a look and I took some pics on my mobile.



You can see the river has come right up over the park, we are now in a minor flood, one more meter and the water from the river rushes into the town. They have been sandbaging the river area all afternoon. Hopefully it does not come to the point where I have to leave my home as we are in a fairly low part of town that will be evacuated in the early stages of a major flood.

This is the after shot of my kitchen floor, it is a major improvement on the carpet, which unfortunately I don't have a picture of to show just how bad it was. I have also put in a picture of the rest of the kitchen to show how well the floor boards fit in. We have not done anything to this room other than the floor and the splash back tiles. The previous owners of the house had to replace the kitchen before we moved in due to water damage, so we have a brand new kitchen. We plan to paint the kitchen at some stage, but as there are other things higher on the priority list it will just have to wait.

I put in the picture of the kitchen scales I bought at a market, I picked them up for $2. I thought about painting them, but I think I like the worn look they have. The kitchen in my house would have to be one of the most important rooms, as I love to cook. I love the open plan to my kitchen, it allows me to grab anything in an instant as I don't need to navigate my way around any obsticles

Kitchen Floor renovations

I have posted this photo of my kitchen floor as we were cleaning off the rubber backing that was stuck down all over the floor boards. I put up with carpet in my kitchen for as long as I could because my husband thought it would be too big a job for us to do. It took us almost a week but we gradually pulled up the carpet (the easy bit) then scraped as much of the rubber backing off the floor as we could, then I got down on the floor and soaked small patches with turps and scraped the glue off the floor with a paint scraper (the hard part). It was very hard work and the fumes got to me after a while so I had to progress slowly. Eventually we got it all done then we got a professional floor sander in and had him sand and polish our kitchen floor. They came up beautiful, they are a different type of wood to the rest of the house as I think the kitchen was added on later, they re a cyprus pine and a lovely golden yellow colour as opposed to the rich dark brown of the Tallow wood floor boards.

I live in an 80 year old house in a small country town. We are about 10 min from the beach, with beautiful mountain views and a river close by. My house is made from Red Mahogany, with Tallow wood floor boards we have sanded and oiled. We bought our house about 4 years ago and we are slowly renovating it. I hope to include some before and after pics of some of the work we have already done and anything we do in the future. Now I have found some wonderful inspiration on here I know where I want to head with my theme for the house. As it s such an old house we want to keep as much of that old charm as possible.