Melbourne holiday

We visited my sister and her family in Melbourne last week and had a fantastic time!

Our Little Man got to spend some quality time with his cousin who is three months older. LM followed his older cousin around the house, mostly in awed silence at his chatty, busy cousin. Below my sister is blowing bubbles for them which is always a thrill.

Melbourne was REALLY cold, wet and windy but we still managed to fit in lots of activities, including...

A fun, fun swim at a local indoor swimming pool...

A trip to the city by train...

The best ever visit to Collingwood Children's Farm...

... which allowed our Little Man to get up close to all the animals..

and a visit to an organic farm in the city in which the cousins were far more interested in the bicycles than anything to do with growing vegetables!

Best of all the cousins grew closer and loved playing together.

Gardening

Spring is coming soon. What joy!

I've been desperate to pot a dwarf apple tree we bought some months ago that was threatening to become root bound and finally I did it! I planted the tree in a big ceramic pot and, as suggested by mum, planted some violets around the base of the tree.

The tree at the moment looks like a stick in a pot because it has no leaves but the flowers are so lovely!!

In a bid to distract our Little Man from plucking off the flowers, I set him the task of watering the plants (all three of them!) and he LOVED it! I have a little watering can for him and he happily drowned the chives and parsley and watered the balcony tiles as well.

He's been teething lately with three molars coming up and this was a happy distraction for him.

He ended up naked, sopping wet and loving it, till he slipped on the tiles and hurt his hands and it all ended in tears!

Final Reno Post

My final post about Ben's renovations is his Magnum Opus, the storage room behind the garage.

I'm very annoyed that I took no 'before' shots, but if you can imagine it was a dark, dingy basement-like room, which had exposed, cobwebbed brick walls and a dusty concrete floor.

Now it's very different:

The walls were very hard to paint because the brick was so porus.

He painstakingly painted the floor and then one by one stencilled the Fleur-de-lis over the top.

Now it's ready to go on the market!

I'm back!

After some severe morning sickness and a bout of Gastro to boot, I am now somewhat back to normal and have the energy to blog again!

My sister and I think we caught the Gastro bug from some sour cream that we had with wedges at a cafe. It could have been much worse than a few days of (extra) vomiting and the runs, so I'm thankful for that :-) A few days in bed was the best remedy.

I've been wanting to post some more about Ben's work on our flat and one of the major things he did was to paint the brick veneer wall in our living room. The dark brick made that part of the room a gloomy space and was somewhat dated. 

Ben used  Porter's Paints interior Limewash and had a big job with the porus brick absorbing all the paint.

After all his hard work, the wall came up a treat and the room looks much more spacious now.

Two adventures

On the weekend we visited a place called the Brick Pit, which was obviously once a quarry for making bricks. It's now an environmentally protected area due to a rare green and gold frog that lives there and it was turned into a great aerial walk which circumnavigates the pit.

It took a while to convince our Little Man to stop taking the exits so we could do the full walk, but he finally got the idea and we walked the whole way around :-)

On Monday, we had the chance to catch up with two friends with whom I volunteered in Indonesia about five years ago. Bev lives up by theLakes and Mel and her Indonesian husband Dikky were visting. We took to two hour drive up there to have lunch and catch up after a long time apart.

It was a very happy reunion for me. It brought back so many memories of Indonesian life and the friends I made there. It also allowed me to reflect that at that time I could not have imagined my future as it is now, and how happy and blessed I am with my little family.

Bev lives right on the water and on such a calm day, the water was glassy and smooth. A view one could never grow tired of!

Thanks to Bev for her hospitality and for such a great lunch. Even though Dikky and Mel were exhausted from travelling they made us welcome and it was a day I'll never forget.

"We forgot to take his plug out for the photo!" says Bev.

Bedroom renovations!

I don't have any 'before' shots of our bedroom but basically Ben has painted the very dark wooden built-ins with a Porter's high gloss enamel in Milk White. It's a non-toxic paint that doesn't smell very much at all when being applied.

Our bedroom is very small, so it was important that we painted the wardrobes white, and the gloss on the paint reflects the light from the window and helps make the room appear larger.

Ben also fixed new handles on the doors and little silver knobs on the very top sliding doors.

Nice job!

Bathroom renovations!

Finally, I'm posting about Ben's renovations! I'm sorry to family in other parts of OZ that it's taken so long..

Below are pictures of the original bathroom which had a charming avocado and khaki green colour theme. It's a very small bathroom and the busy pattern on the tiles made it look smaller:

You can see that he has already painted the inside of the shower in the above photo.

Mmmmm. lovely...

Ben painted all the bathroom walls, tiles and ceiling white, which I think has created a calming effect. The tiles have a detailed embossed pattern on them and once painted white, the lovely texture of the tiles came though more clearly (although it's hard to see in the photos).

He painted the basin white with a special paint for sinks.

He made from scratch a lovely frame for the mirror which matches the cabinet.

And he put a new fly screen on the window as the old one fell out.

With brackets bought from Ikea, Ben made the shelves and stained them. I love these shelves! We really needed a towel rack and I like having fresh towels available in the bathroom.

He also bought the cabinet in the above picture on ebay and put it up himself.

My one contribution to all of this work is the fishbone fern! The rest is all my talented husband.