Before and After Concrete and Garden

Some more before and after photos of our yard.  Here is the back play area with the mango tree, tyre swing, tramp and sand pit.  Stevo and I poured that concrete with our bare hands and a concrete truck! 

And here is the before. Including the spare shed which we called the 'lean to'.  You can just see a glimpse of it around the corner of the house in the pic above.  That tree fern got ripped out and the garden and then we did the concrete.

Here is another before.  Those were our baby chickens we got for Christmas.

and after...  We made those big concrete pavers with the excess concrete, actually Mum did those.  It's a bit hard to see, but we poured concrete with Mary River stone for the aggregate (think that's what you call it) and as we laid the concrete I threw in some big stones.  Then after it set (more wrong terminology!) we ground back the top of the concrete to reveal the rock and a smooth surface, kind of riverbed-ish like.  Then we sealed it and it still looks great.

I have a collection of Broms happening thanks to Mum.

With the excess concrete in the truck, we poured a nice footpath, slab area to the clothes line, made those big pavers, concreted the inside of the chook yard and the landing at the gate and made an awesome potting up concrete slab attached to the big sheds. 

Tissue Paper Pom Pom's and a freshly plastered wall and Cake Pops

 I made these gorgeous decorations for Christmas and they are still going strong.  Thinking about making a fresh lot.  I used Martha Stewart's tutorial and changed it a bit to make it a bit simpler.

 Here is a bit of house improvement action for you.  Check out the awesome arrow patterned bricks!

They are now safely covered in plaster forever more.  It was a dusty few days inside that's for sure.

After it was set, Stephen painted it in Taubman's white on white and hung his new tv on the wall.  I still need to figure out lights.  The only lighting in there is 2 'retro' wall lights and the funny old light on the bottom of the fan.  The wall light switched on in the picture is staying but I need to choose a new actual light (really want chandelier sconces but not sure).  The other wall light which is the black spot on the new wall might one day get in the way of furniture I might move to that wall, so I am thinking of getting some paper lanterns and wired in above this area.  Who knows! 

Just for fun, here is a pic of our first cake pops.  Lilly got the Bakerella book for Christmas and my darling Aunty also gave me a copy.  These were very easy and lots of fun, I think we made them too big and we really need to get our hands on some real 'candy coatings' instead of dipping them in melted chocolate.  But these tasted pretty good and something different from the old cupcake. 

Painting

 Here we are painting at long last.  This is the back verandah part of the house. 

 We are using Taubmans all weather exterior in Hog Bristle.  The trim is going to be done in Stone.  Both Dulux colours.  In this picture, they have painted the part of the wall in front of them and cut in around the windows.  There is not alot of difference between the new paint and the old cream, but I think overall it will look much nicer, esp when the besser blocks downstairs are done too.  In the far right of this photo, you can see the try out paint colours and obviously none of them are even close to Hog Bristle! 

Raining and Pouring

We live on the river, lucky our house is way up high!  Cause when we get lots of rain, up comes the river.  These pics are taken from our verandah and normally you can't see the river flowing under the trees.  The shed/aviary things to the right of the photo are our neighbours chook houses and also please note the myriad of young trees happening to the right of the photo planted throughout the grass.  These have doubled in size, I put them in when we first moved here 2 years ago, they will be awesome one day.

Here is a zoomed in view of the kids and Stevo watching the water flow.  Where they are standing is normally well clear of the river and the kids can play under the big trees.

This is nearby to where they were standing in the above picture and you can see a fence post sticking up in the water, this is our back fence between our yard and the river! 

This is probably the 3rd time the river has come up this high since we have been here and the fence cops it each time!  This is after 3 inches of rain then another fast 5 to 6 inches the next day!

So what do you do on a Sunday afternoon when it pouring and the river is coming up and you know the causeway 100metres down the road will be under...you go check it out and watch for anyone that may attempt to cross it!  In the background you can see Granma and Grandad who were coming over for a visit and instead waved to us from across the causeway!  At this point it was at 1m, which is probably the highest we've seen it, I can drive through here at 0.6m if its not running fast, no one attempted this level of water so there was no excitement.  Lucky the water goes down really quickly here, only a couple of hours and its gone if the rain stops, plus we can get out the other direction.

On the way back up the road we stopped at our neighbours and this is their backyard, well a bit of it anyway.  They back on to our river also but their place is flatter ground the river seems swell wider here.  The line of trees in the middle of the photo through the swollen river is backing on to the horse track, to the right of these trees - the big trees is the actual normal river and there is a bridge in there we cross to continue on the horse track which takes you into town.

Our neighbours have the most unreal frog pond in an old tank, it is full of frogs in all stages from tadpoles to this size and bigger.  We got inspired to make our own frog pond, so we are recycling our old bath tub into a frog pond, stay tuned.

And lastly, the cooking I did for the next few weeks on this rainy afternoon.  Passionfruit Gems (a new favourite), Cornflake Cookies and Chocolate Chunk Cookies- all safely frozen in the freezer out of harms way and ready for lunchboxes!

Tree Climbing

Having trouble uploading pictures and the order they are appearing, since blogger won't let me rearrange them on the page anymore, grrrr.

So the above collection is of my gorgeous mosaic butterfly Mum made me that hangs at the front door. A snippet of our new front fence made from recycled materials, cept the small dog wire to keep The Fox in and some pictures of what goes on here every afternoon after school: tree climbing and tyre swinging. We don't have DS's or whatever they are called!

Thomas Flannelette Pants and a View

Another pair of the same pants pattern for Joe, this time in Thomas Flannelette, which he picked out himself! And a shot of what we can see between the trees that line the river now that our neighbour chopped down a few pine trees! They are the aerials on top of Maleny.