The bath must go!

Mmmm...does seem an odd place to start. The idea is that we'll be getting the restumping underway pretty soon. The front four rooms are on stumps and the back is on a slab, which means we need to move everything from the front to the back. Given that we're in the middle of a drought, it seems a bit odd to have a big bath, and I decided that we could use the bath space as storage.

Of course I didn't think to take a photo before I started, but never mind. Now I was expecting many things when I pulled of the fascia, but foliage was not one of them...

It's the morning glory from next door. It's actually quite an attractive plant, but it's classed as a noxious weed. If you cut it back on a summer morning it has grown back by late afternoon. This stuff was dead but had obviously been pretty rampant at some stage. It didn't look so bad after I pulled as much out as I could.

A heave ho and the bath was out.

The morning glory had grown right up inside the walls. Yikes! I pulled loads more out, and was surpised to see Hojo's nose. There was no drywall, just straight to the weatherboards which were not in great nick. I'll pop around today to check them out.

Anyway, a bigger concern than the weeds was a hole in the slab. The it was about 11 cm deep at its deepest, and about 20 x 30 cm at its widest. When they installed the bath they ground out the hole to accommodate the trap.

I posted the pics on Renovate Forums which is a fantastic resource. The upshot is that because there is no cracking around the hole it's not a worry. Phew!In actual fact, the slab is in great nick, so a big relief.

Now that the bath is out I need to fix up the area to make it suitable for temporary storage. The big picture plan is to have the kitchen here, and I'm sure looking forward to ripping out the rest of the bathroom.

Our edible garden

My first entry about improving the house rather than demolishing it. Unfortunately I need to lump in some demolition too because the gardening photos are the only ones that have the pergola type thing at the back that I pulled down. So here goes.

There was already a raised bed when we moved in, but it wasn't really up to much. First thing was to clear it out.

You'll notice that the back corner is decidedly gloomy despite it being a bright day. That's the cause of the pergola-ish structure, the purpose of which boggles the mind. It must go! But more on that later.

So, original plants ousted we laid a foundation of newspaper and manure and waited. We then had one cubic metre of soil delivered. One cubic metre doesn't sound much, but goodness me it is. Et voila!

So while R pottered about with plants, I got busy with more manly things.

Ripping down the shade cloth really made a difference to that back corner. The structure was full of nasty looking black spiders. A bit of research identified them an Victorian Funnelwebs, which aren't nasty at all even though they're similar to the Sydney variety.

So the garden was planted with all sorts of delectables...tomatoes, peas, chillies, beans, strawberries, a couple of difference lettuces, silverbeet, zucchinis and basil.

Here are some progress pictures:

The zucchini was definitely the most successful of that crop, followed by the chilli. The tomatoes went OK, but we weren't inundated as we were lead to believe we would be. We never got to try the silverbeet as it was food of choice for our resident possum Pinky.

Now that we have the angel with paws/black hairy devil, these are but fond memories.

Aecht Schlenterla Rauchbier

Take one part smokey wurst and one part water and blend. Bottle.

Or at least that's how I imagine this beer's recipe goes. I looked up rauch in the reverso dictionary and it means smoke. I was thrilled that an example given was "Wurste in den Rauch hangen" which means "to hang sausages up to smoke".

It overpowered the chilli I ate with it, so not a session beer then.

The tree must go!

There's not much point pulling up the concrete without tackling the cause. Save the trees and all that, but this one had to go!

The porch must go!

We knew something was amiss before we even set foot in the door.

The cracking was caused by a bad root.

So the concrete porch had to go. I fancied myself as quite handy with a sledgehammer, so I spent a balmy weekend at it.

We hired a ute and carted all of the concrete away.

That was over a year ago, and alas the front is still in the same condition. I suppose it might keep robbers away.

The castle is ours!

13 March 2008 - we collect the keys to our Northcote castle. The plan was to live here for a year before doing anything so we could get a feel for the place.

There were a few things we knew we wanted to do:

Boring stuff
Re-stump
Re-roof
Re-wire

Cool stuff
Move the bathroom & kitchen into the middle
Open up the back
Get a veggie patch going

Doesn't seem like that much...