December

Uses for a wallpaper sample book:
uhhhh... wallpaper? Suddenly the kitchen is much more bearable, and it's only up with blu tak so, whatever. I like it.

It's amazing what you find in a skip. Like these bed ends. Exactly what I needed! I'm just not sure how to attach the wooden side rails that I found in the inorganics. Errrr, requires more thinking. And also a trailer or something, because I can get them in the hatchback, but I can't close the boot! Arrrgh.

Naughty little Trademe purchase. A sewing machine from the same era the house was built. I was given a modern sewing machine, but it's kind of yuck to use. The whole thing shakes across the table with a plastic rattle and buzz, and the foot pedal slides across the floor underfoot. I'm used to Mum's old knee lever Bernina, which is on it's last legs. This Singer does straight stitch, and that's it. It doesn't even do reverse. And it's a joy to use.

I went to a giant demolition yard, and found some brackets for the pink sink! They cost $20 freakin' dollars. My $1 sink is now a $21 sink.

My Mum has weak elbows from old work related injuries. This makes it hard for her to lift things like 2 litre milk bottles. At her place she uses a milk jug. At mine, we now use an old milk bottle. I put a standard milk bottle top on it by cutting away part of the inside spiral so it just pops on and off.

Finally got around to getting some paint on the gib behind the shower. Well, actually, Mum did it. That's her, just finishing up the bottom corner. Suddenly it's starting to look like a real bathroom. From a certain angle.

These guys finally made the move. So far they have made it two whole weeks without being stolen. Gatepost gargoyles. I've also re-plastered another section of the lounge walls. Now it's half done. It was three quarters done when it was suddenly decided that I should do the piles. Then all the walls cracked along the joins. Now I have to do them all again. On the up side, I am getting much better at plastering.

Nights in Pukemiro are still blissfully cool. It's much easier to sleep without Auckland's crazy humidity. And sleep is what I'm going to do now. ZZzzzzzzzz

A bit of backtracking.

There are a couple of things I forgot to mention.

This is the carport. The much less leaky carport. Clever uncle Phil works in a timber mill, where they use these giant sanding...belts? I guess you'd call them? So he was able to grab some used ones that were going to be thrown out. They have a sort of rubber backing. He sort of stapled them to the carport roof. Ta-da! Now there are only one or two bits where it leaks, where the belts overlap. Much better working conditions for power tools now. (Don't look at me like that! It's only temporary!)

Also forgot to mention my other uncles genius idea. Getting bits of tin out of a scrap bin.....

....in order to patch some of the bad holes in the weatherboards! This resulted in at least one pair of birds being ejected from their nesting site. Unfortunately not the very noisy stomp-y ones in the roof over my bedroom.

I knocked together a seat for the kitchen out of bits and pieces too.

In garden news...

Started picking my lettuce and spinach already! And those tomato plants have flower buds starting on them. Crikey!
When I planted this garden, I kind of forgot I had already planted a tray of various seedlings. Instead of wasting them, I decided to build another garden. Not sure how wise that was.

Here they are all covered in bird netting. Cucumbers, courgettes, more lettuce and more spinach, and more tomatoes.

...and here is the strange frame I made to hold up the netting and for the cucumbers to climb. Will it work? We''ll see.

The feijoas have flower buds. I wonder if they will come to fruit? They haven't been in the ground long.

I admit, I've been raiding the green waste dump again! Picked up some bromeliads, succulents, and possibly some kind of dietes? I will have to wait until they flower to find out!

Trains and automobiles. And hedges.

The good news is... the BBQ works! (How could it not?) See my lovely assistant dressed in fetching "country attire". You can't beat a proper wood-fired BBQ for that smokey flavour. We had BBQ for dinner two nights this weekend, just to make sure the first night of deliciousness wasn't a fluke.

Sunday was a Bush Tramway day. It's open first Sunday of the month April to December, so the next one is the last until Autumn. (Apparently they aren't allowed to run in summer because of the fire risk!)

Here is Conrad with Pukemiro Junction Station behind him.

Somewhat confusingly, Pukemiro Junction isn't that close to Pukemiro. Infact, Glen Afton village lies between the Junction and Pukemiro Village, about 5km distant. Somewhere down that way.

It's free to enter the "grounds" but to ride the train you need to buy a ticket for $10, that allows you to ride all day. Our train was stopped by this solitary bandit.

In house news, someone threw out a whole hedge, which I proceeded to rescue from the green dump across the road. I think I got about 10 plants. I reckon they would sell for at least $15 each at the garden centre, so it's kind of like rescuing $150 from the rubbish.

Because I don't know what type they are (some kind of buxus?), I don't know how large they will grow, so I'll have to wait and see if they will need to be moved. I need a reasonably tall hedge as a wind break, so if they remain small I'll have to move them up the back. No biggie. The soil is actually quite nice and easy to dig compared to the volcanic Mt Eden soil I'm used to!
The vege garden is doing well, I think the lettuces and spinach will be ready to start picking in another week or two, which seems very quick growing to me. The corn and tomato plants have doubled in size during the week too. The boysenberry I planted against the fence has new shoots, so I guess it has survived, and the mandarin seems to have kept it's blossoms, (unlike the plums). I didn't know I was supposed to trim the plums when I planted them! It wasn't mentioned in the gardening book, but I recently read another one. All the information about pruning is terribly confusing.

Oh, and in non-house news, my car was a victim of siphoning. (In Auckland, not Pukemiro!) Someone got under the car and cut the hose! Bastards. So I lost about $60 of petrol (They would have got about $35 worth, and I tried to put $25 in and it all fell out)and it's going to cost another $70 to get it fixed. I'm resolving to not have a full tank of gas anymore. Half will do. Unless I'm travelling out of town. Which is every week. Grrrr.

Here comes summer.

It's been all go lately. The little house is coming along in leaps and bounds.

Thanks Uncle Phil for the excellent work on the bathroom floor and walls! It was a pleasant surprise to find there was building paper on the walls.

I forgot to get a photo of the bathroom with all it's walls on, but it does look fab. Now I have to figure out how I'm going to attach the old fashioned pedestal sink to the wall. hmmm, no bolt holes! Oh well, it only cost a dollar.

My first solo-power-tools project was building a new laundry tub cabinet. Success!
Before

After

After

The compost pile in the back corner of the garden looks great now all the weeds are gone and it's been turned. It was a nice surprise to go down this weekend and find the bits of tin had been nailed over the worst of the holes in the weatherboards. Thanks guys!

I've had a really brilliant weekend down at the house by myself, very productive. Dug a little vege garden...

....with spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, corn and parsley.

Rebuilt the back steps....

....it's more like a little deck now. Can you tell how proud I am of it? I'm calling it the gin deck. Just big enough for a gin and tonic! And then I got even fancier and built steps on either side.

AND THEN, with the 12 concrete blocks that were excavated from the old steps I built a BBQ. Sort of.

Well, I haven't tried it out yet, but I'm sure it will be fine! Just in time for Labour Weekend too.

I don't know who or what the Rotowaro Legionaires were, but their sign was used as the backing for the old bathroom cabinet.

Pukemiro Moonrise.

See the way the moonlight reflects off the septic tank in an attractive manner? ;-) hehehe.

Spring has sprung.

The wisteria has developed fuzz wee buds and a couple of them have burst into flower!

We've been planting fruit trees! Feijoa hedge (can two trees be a hedge?) between me and the neighbours, with a lemon tree at the end of the row, that we transplanted from the middle of the front lawn.

A Satsuma mandarin at the side of the house.

New neigh-bours! Hehehe. These guys are just grazing over the back fence for a while.

It's been a month of slow progress. High winds, bad weather, flooding (not on my section though!). But little touches are starting to really make the place feel like home. Pictures on the wall, a chest of drawers, incense, cushions.

I can't wait for the summer.

Grand Progress

Family took at 10 day "holiday" down at the house over the last 2 weekends, while I came back to work during the week in between. Mum installed these "steps" so we don't have to walk on the grass to get to the carport,(or step over the herb garden, though herb garden might be an optimistic name for it, it's currently full of daffodils and weeds).

I turned up Friday after work, in a car loaded down with a shower I bought on Trademe.co.nz, a new shower liner, shower mixer, and waste outlet. When I opened the door to the bathroom, this is what I found:

Bath gone, walling removed, chip board floor pulled up to reveal floorboards underneath. All in a days work! They started pulling the bathroom to bits Friday morning, and when I got there late afternoon it had reached this stage. The day before they had taken the trailer to pick up 2 sheets of aqualine gib for behind the shower, and 1 sheet of marine grade strandboard for the replacement floor underneath.

Although these wooden floorboards are under the ratty old chip board, they are not sealed and seem a bit "gappy", if you know what I mean. Not being part of the original house, I don't feel too precious about them, but I'm glad they are there. I'll just leave them safely tucked away under the other flooring, in case I win lotto, or in case a future owner of the house wins lotto. :-) I can't get under the back part of the house to insulate. In fact, I can only get under a small part of it to do any plumbing. Lucky then, that that's daylight you can see through the bottom of that wall, because it's where the floor level drops in the house. The shower plumbing is easily accessible! Same for the hot water cylinder next to it. What's not good, is that there was no shut off tap for the hot water cylinder. Even with the water off at the tank and pump switched off, gravity meant that once the hot water pipe to shower was unscrewed, the whole cylinder drained out through it. Lucky my uncle has brains. We went without hot water overnight, but ended up having to fill the HWC so we could have any water at all. Next day we had to drain it again to finish the plumbing. A great variety of sizes of pipes and fittings meant we didn't have the right sizes on hand, and had to wait for the local Placemakers to open the next day. In the meantime, uncle found a valve-type thing in the shed that was the right size, and fitted it so that we could stop the hot water in future. Most unfortunately, it has a very slow leak, so it will have to be replaced, and the cylinder drained again! Getting on to that as soon as possible. Anyway...

The old bath.

Gib up, tray getting all level and stuff.

Waiting for silicone to dry, about to maneuver shower liner into place.

Liner propped up while glue drys.

How the bathroom looks now.

Still to do: Doors to assemble and be put in, silicone sealing, waste pipe to attach.
The new shower waste I bought didn't fit under the floorboards, as it had a ...bottle trap? instead of a ....U bend? Something like that. We installed the old one, but then the U bend was too close and hit the floorboards underneath. grrrr. So, need a longer pipe to it. Anyway, by the end of next weekend, I'm hoping I'll have a working shower! Fingers crossed.

In non-bathroom related news.... this was discovered.

It's not grass between the tank and the shed! It's brick paving!

"Huntly Firebrick" :-)