Green Cape Lighthouse

Green Cape Lighthouse, originally uploaded by moncur_d.

Well after all the wedding and deck building shennanigans we felt we needed a break, so we drove down to Tathra for a few days swimming in the ocean, eating fish in various guises, and exploring.

The photo is of Green Cape Lighthouse south of Eden on a cold almost Scottish late summers day. Warm enough for t-shirts and shorts in the sun out of the wind, but step out of shelter and you were scrabbling for a windproof and a fleece ...

Mandy and Cyrilo get married!

Mandy and Cyrilo get married!, originally uploaded by moncur_d.

This should really be the last post about the deck being renovated. It won't quite be, as the deck is 99% finished as of Thursday evening, but not quite.

The last week has been a major drama, with having a new hardwood floor laid in the house , and the deck finished off. The deck should have been ready for Christmas but the bad weather just slowed everything down terribly, and the floor was delayed because of Chinese New Year - the guy booking it looked at the 2010 calendar and scheduled right in the middle of Chinese New year - which was a bit fundamental given the installers were all Chinese ...

But, finally by about 8.30 Thursday night it was done, or as done as it was going to be in the time available.

Huge sigh of relief as we'd agreed to host Mandy and Cyrilo's wedding on Saturday...

And yes, everything went well

picture of the artist ...

picture of the artist ..., originally uploaded by moncur_d.

ever wondered what living with an artist is like?

paint everywhere, all the microwave containers stolen to mix things, but then you do get to see finished result ...

light relief for a friday ...

Well,

with floods in Brisbane and Brazil, and buhfires in WA it's been a grim week, however this cartoon from Country Life in the UK did make me smile.

As the image is copyright I'm afraid you'll need to click on the link, but it's (probably) worth it ...

renovation madness continued

the continued bad weather has left us with an uncompleted deck, a house that's 75% rendered and an unsightly pile of junk in the yard, made even more unsightly by pulling up the old carpet in preparation for the new floating floor - the original plan had been to finish the rendering and paint the eaves this weekend just past and pull up the carpet next weekend.

Well, that was not to be.

Instead on Saturday we played hooky and took a drive over the Tinderies on a road we probably shouldn't have due to several washout but the Subaru 4WD handled it well enough - didn't even need high ratio on a couple of the boggy bits, and then over to Bungendore for an ice cream and a rootle in the second hand bookstores - turned up an as new copy of Michael Woods 'Domesday' for five bucks.

Sunday we work to rain and the joys of carpet clearing - controlled destruction has its own pleasure - something repeated on on Monday (I have some flex owing and am not working Mondays as a consequence).

Other than the bedrooms and some strategically positioned mats we now only have bare boards throughout the house, something that has annoyed the cat as he can no longer just curl up anywhere at random ...

Winter expectations

Interesting article in the NYT about life in Mexico City in winter. Apparently most houses are built of concrete, windows are single glazed and buildings don’t have any heating to think of. At first thought, given that the city is almost on the Tropic of Cancer, that doesn’t seem so big a deal. The city is of course at 2300m altitude and consequently cold in winter.

Just like Canberra, while most of the city is around 600m above sea level we’re 35 degrees south giving us a winter (and summer) climate like Madrid. In short, cold in winter. Seriously cold. We managed –6.7C overnight in the middle of winter.

And yet, because Australia is a sunny warm, hot even, country houses were built until recently with little or no insulation, single glazed windows and no heating save for a couple of pissy electric convector heaters.

The result is that most houses in Canberra are cold in winter, even after retrofitting insulation, central heating and double glazing. We’re definitely colder in winter than we were in our heavily insulated house in England despite living in a warmer climate overall…

deck renovations and other madnesses

rendering #1, originally uploaded by moncur_d.

In a moment of insanity we decided to render the brickwork and paint it to set off the new deck.

So far so good. Rendering is kind of fun, letting you revisit your inner three year old to make mud pies and get gloriously mucky in the process.

The two big walls are done just the front of the house and the back, both of which involve a lot less in the way of ladders and buckets ...