Not my news

I have exciting news - but it is not mine!

My two best-est friends are both pregnant.  They are only 1.5 weeks apart which means that I will be a Aunty first in July and then again in August!

I am so very excited, so I took some time out from building jobs to do some browsing on the Internet for baby patterns. 

I have a beautiful pile of fabric that was brought for baby clothes and blankets.  Most of it is girly and pretty floral fabric so I hope that one of them has a girl for me, but I have boy (and unisex) things too!

Look at all the beautiful things I found:

From Shwin&Shwin, these girls are seriously tallented!
A Romper Pattern

A pair of Shoes: 

Dress and Shoes: 

And this Mini Maxwell is just too cute for words, however I think it might be a bit complex for me...

   

From Ellie's Wardrobe I found a pattern for Pleated top with Raglan sleeves:   

   

From Sew By Night Design I found this Summer Romper tutorial:

                     

And this cute cute dress and pants combo:

          

From Me Sew Crazy - words fail me at how cute this kid is! And this women has some seriously great stuff on her blog and lots of tutorials.

         

And last but not least Small Dream Factory does a great pattern on a Baby Sleeping sack, she uses great fabric!

   

With only six months to go I will be doing lots of sewing - I can't wait!

Building and mess

So you may have noticed the hap-hazard nature of the last two weeks of posts - intermittent and not very many of them ..... sorry about that, but this place is a mess!

The wonderful J and I have always had plans to make some changes to our house.  They layout of the house is fantastic at the front, but as it gets to the back of the house there is a bit of a rabbit-warren of little rooms and spaces that we have used for storage, as we couldn't do anything with them.

For over a year we have been working with our Architect John, of John de Bruyn Building Sustainability (who I couldn't recommend highly enough - he has been amazing!), to come up with a design that was within our very tight budget, allowed us to utilise the space we had better, but that did not limit us for major changes that we might want to make in the future.  It was a huge brief!!

And that is exactly what he gave us.  We have a spectacular, beautiful plan of what we could do in the future (that we just can't afford to do right now) and we have a interim plan that we can do right now and will give me a new kitchen and a new bathroom!

We found a builder and we were already to start last August.  However with a number of things not going to plan we missed that start date by a mile.  Then we had some differences of opinion with the builder that we were engaging and that set us back again, as we were then without a builder.  Then, out of nowhere, we found a builder/contractor that we knew we could work with - and he was ready to start now!

We went from nothing to everything in just two short weeks, and all those jobs we knew we had to do (but thought we had heaps of time to do) needed to be done right now.  And that is the reason behind the  hap-hazard nature of posts for the last two weeks!

The wonderful J and I have been busy packing, so that now parts of our house look like a bomb went off:

Demolition is due to start next Thursday.  It is very exciting, a bit nerve racking, and there is just so much to get done! but I will make sure that I post as much as possible so you can see the transformation.

In the meant time today's jobs are:

• Finding tapware for two bathrooms
• Matching bricks
• Choosing tiles for the bathroom floor
• Making the increasingly difficult decision whether to do a feature tile in the bathroom (??!!)
• Buying windows

So I better get to it!

Hallway

One of the major things on the Dreaded List for our holiday was painting our hallway. 

When we first brought the house the hallway looked like this: 

Before we even moved in we took up the absolutely foul carpet (this photo doesn't translate how bad this carpet was!) and splashed some undercoat on the walls.  And that is essentially how it stayed; the hallway was very neglected.

One of the main reasons for the neglect is the amount of doors coming off our hallway: there are four single doors and two double doors, and I am the woodwork painter in our household! Everyone who has ever painted knows that the hardest part of painting is starting, and the most time consuming part is painting woodwork. 

However despite the avoidance strategies that we employed, we eventually got to the point on the list where the hallway just had to be done. 

It took two days of preparation to strip back all the woodwork and patch up all the dint's and cracks and holes in the wall.   

And it took two days to paint.  We were interrupted several times by "good gardening days" (cool weather) and visitors, but eventually we packed up all the painting gear and were done: 

P.S. you may have noted that the doors themselves are not painted (still that creamy yellow colour)...... we had to leave something for another day!

Dr Seuss Pram Blankets

It seems like everyone I know has just had a baby, is just about to have a baby, or just found out they are having a baby!

As such with so many baby presents on the horizon I thought I better spend some of my holiday sewing.

A few months ago I ordered some Dr Seuss fabric online from America.  It is possible to get it here but it is much more expensive and we don't seem to have half the choice.

I decided to make a Pram Blanket as I personally think that is important to give practical presents!

The size of the blanket was partly dictated by how much Dr Seuss fabric width I had to play with and partly the average size of a pram. I brought some standard Polar Fleece fabric for the back for warmth and because it comes in such great colours!

The blanket size I wanted to end up with was approx 45cm wide and 60cm long so allowing a few center-meters for seems I cut out my fabric and laid the two finished sides together. I put a few pins in it to make sure it didn't move during sewing, then sewed only three sides (make them the 2 long sides and one short - it makes life easier).  

You will note in this photo that my Yellow Polar Fleece is much larger than my Dr Seuss fabric; this is just because I had more of it, you can trim it all down before or after your sew it together but I generally don't worry about it too much.       

Once the sides are placed together I simply sewed around the outside edge of the smallest piece of fabric. Then cut off each of the corners diagonally so that when turned inside out, the corners sit better. Then it should look like this: 

Because I wanted the quilted look I added some welting (at least I think it's called welting?).

Then turn the whole thing inside out and makes sure to push out the corners.   

Then I pinned around the edges, it takes awhile but it is better to do it properly as you get a better finished edge.

The edge that I didn't sew in the first step I needed to tuck both edges into each other and put in lots of pins to hold it. 

Once I had done all that pinning I sewed around all the edges.

And it should look like this around the edges.

I then sewed two lines up the middle - thus...

And since I was on a role I made a few more.

Chicken Run

So you would remember all the turf the wonderful J and I removed from the front yard? 

Well it had to go somewhere, and that place was the chicken run. 

You may remember that the chicken run when we first created it was beautiful!  

However over time it had fallen into disrepair.....

All the turf had died and it was looking very sad and dusty.  Miss Chicken does not spend any time in there so there was no real hurry to get to it - but with all that turf needing a place to go, this suddenly went to the top of the list! 

So we dug up the chicken run and lay all the turf down...

It doesn't look great at the moment! but it will in a few weeks after some good watering. 

This is some we did after we lifted the turf for the front stairs.... it is going great guns now!

Beginnings of a Garden

So after the finishing the stairs it was very tempting to pat ourselves on the back and spend the rest of the week resting.  But 'The Dreaded List' forced us to carry on, and the next think on the list was starting the garden. 

First was the removal of the turf.  This is hard hard work! and after doing this patch the wonderful J and I have given in and decided that we will get a turf cutter to lift the rest - this is one job we are happy to pay for now!  

Miss Chicken: Gladys was very happy joining us in the front yard (and managed to get in our way the whole time), she had the time of her life getting all the bugs we were turning over! 

We trimmed the May bush which needed some serious love and care and will in August be absolutely covered in beautiful white flowers.  Underneath we planted Gardenias that we had been cultivating (killing) in some pots in the back yard for the past year. The May bush is absolutely beautiful but unfortunately does not have any scent so we thought that it would be nice to have the Gardenias underneath our bedroom window.

It doesn't look like much now but give it six months and I am confident it will look amazing! 

Stairs

So the wonderful J and I have spent about 2 years drawing sketches of what we wanted to do with our front yard.  The plan has changed too many times to count, and even now we have not really come to a final version of it! 

However there was one thing that always remained the same in all of our plans, and that was the placement of the front stairs.  

The front of our house has a bit of an entrance way with two large pillars at the front of a rounded roof.  The current path and stairs are actually tucked away at the side of the veranda, which means that you come at the house from the side .... quite strange really... 

So day 1 started with the supplies gathering all the supplies: Bessa Blocks 

And bags of concrete and mortar.

After lifting all these into the car, and then out of the car, and having to make 3 trips to pick it all up! there was no way we were starting to build them that day! 

Day 2: of course this day started with removing the turf and rechecking all the measurements we had made the previous day.  

We gathered our human resources in the form of my mum and dad (mum would shoot me if I put up a photo of her in her working gear! but let me tell you, she too was hard at work!!).

The Form-work was made and banged into the ground.

And then the level was checked.

And then went in 16 bags of concrete.  What these photos don't show is that I was sent out on a mad dash to the hardware store halfway through to get more bags of concrete! but it was done!

It seems like such a small slab in comparison to the amount of work that it took to build it!

Can't you just see how great they are going to look! 

Day 3 was (very unfortunately!) without our human resources! so the wonderful J and I got up nice and early to start building before the sun got too hot.  

If you are thinking of doing this yourself and you see how big these steps are and are thinking "this doesn't look so hard - I am sure that we could knock that over in a few hours" you would be thinking the same thing that we were - and boy are you wrong! 

Building just the top step took us 6 hours - six hours?! you may by thinking, but that is right, six long painful hours.  

I (fortunately!) had to go off to work on day 5 and left the wonderful J to do the second step on his own.  In a mammoth effort he got the bottom step done and collapsed in a heap for an hour before he came to collect me from work. 

And this is how the steps stayed until just 7 short days ago.  

In the period between early November and late December we were not idle (well we were a bit!), we sourced the step treads and talked a lot about how we were going to put it all together..... But finally on the day after Boxing Day we did it: 

The step treads we used are Terrazzo stone.  They are a natural stone that have lots of imperfections in them.  We love them.

So clearly there is still more work to be done on the steps! We need to do some planting and we have to so something so that bottom step is a bit closer to the ground (don't worry it it all part of the greater plan!).

However for now they are done while we work on pulling together a garden around the new stairs ... and that I can tell you is proving to be no easier than building these stairs!