Scrap metal for garden ornaments???

Right when you were probably wondering what this had to do with our blog (or not so much for anyone who knows us well)

Well.. the truth in the statement actually lessened this weekend.

We went from 6 garden ornaments to FOUR! Ohhh i cant even explain how much lawn space this frees up. So much so, i had to pop down to bunnings and celebrate by buying some grass seed to repair the proof.

Heres one....

And the other. (THANK YOU ALLAN & ALISON)

This is all very exciting... until of course... My lovely husband finds the next bargain, project, or waste of space to adorn my garden with. I wonder how long it will take!?

This is Christopher Wells

Apart from looking like a muppet and following that up by acting in a quite a unique way... believe it or not he is quite amazing and helpful.

Here is what Chris drew during his work hours for, i think, about 3 full days straight. We now have awesome CAD drawings of our house with our proposed renovation plans. And don't they look perdy? (sorry the pictures are so small)

Ain't he clever. And aren't we lucky :) Thank you Christopher.

Job well done

Our tiles are looking quite impressive... if i do say so myself.

Come for a walk around my garden with me...

Oh this is just so exciting... Our apple is loving life - look at it poking its little head out. Our lemon tree - courtesy of Brent & Sarah. Check out that new growth!!
And look at this. Stupid lawn grubs? Apparently they munch on the roots of your grass for breakfast and make your lawn look manch. Not impressed. Solution for this Dad?
I'm sorry... but this has to go. Its horrid. Why would you plant a pink camelia anywhere near rusty red coloured bricks? Not a fan.
And here are my river rocks.. courtesy of the Hutt river.. shhhh! Need some more actually.. its looking quite bare!

Hope you enjoyed that little tour.

Before & After

I'm right into reviving things at the moment. Resisting the urge to buy new and modernising what we already have.

Here is a shelf purchased from the Warehouse for 10 bucks. Crappy materials, but totally purposeful and i really couldn't bare to have them any longer. But what do you do?

1) Throw them out? How wasteful! They are still in a great practical state.
2) Put them on trademe? Nobody would bother with them as they are so cheap to buy new in the first place.

or
3) Revive them. Makes the most sense of all.

Here they are with a new patterned back face. So simple, just laminated a feature pattern to the existing hardboard. And to top it off - i painted an otherwise dated forest green table lamp with a new fresh shade of blue to match.

Blossom baby blossom

When we bought this place, we were told this was a plum tree.


I got slightly excited, that was until he mentioned that it hadn't produced any fruit for a while. I'm not sure how long. In fact i dont know anything about it, but what i do know is that i'm not giving up hope just yet. Especially not today.

About 2 months ago my lovely mother-in-law/Chief gardening adviser helped find out how to revive it and then we attacked it with a huge pruning session removing all the dead and non-essential growth. We crossed our fingers and let it be, hoping it would magically put its fruit producing ability back to good use.

Yesterday, i was shifting all the offcuts into a new pile of crap for the dump. A particularly pretty pile of crap actually - because it was blossoming.
It took a good 10 minutes to realise that the blossoming was in fact the branches we removed in the plum tree revival attempt, and what do you know the entire tree is now in blossom. Cross your fingers that this is the start of our first fruit season from our very own revived plum tree!

I'm Back....

It has been swine flu central here for a week and a half - finally i'm back on my feet and just a horrible cough to get rid of now.

So, as you can imagine, the kitchen progress has been slow. But there has been some progress so here goes:

We now have a nice row of white tiles as a splash back on the wall above the bench. Just dont bring your vernier callipers around please. Nah, they look great and we are yet another step closer.



Grouting is tonights job.

To be honest that is all we have done in two weeks. Better get our butts back into gear...