Going Nowhere

Our little project is not entirely under control at the moment if truth be told. 

The living room is full of bedroom, the dining area full of study, the study is around here somewhere, and the bedrooms are pretty much empty of anything useful, except that whenever we need to find something that we absolutely can't do without a minute longer, it usually turns up under some sanding dust in one of them.

I suppose if I could only stay motivated to keep sanding for more than a nanosecond at a time I'd be making some visible headway by now, but every nanosecond generates an hour of clean up and cleaning up is one of those mind numbing tasks that leads to thinking. 

Today's thinking led to trying to discover what the living space might look like if the dividing wall was removed, except that once the wall sheeting was gone, the frame was riddled with electric wires running across and back and Trevor our electrician won't be back till Saturday, so we'll have to wait a few more days.

Today's thinking also led to discovering that cleaning up after removing a couple of gyprock walls takes even more time than after sanding. 

Progress?

A few weeks in and the list we have on the boat seems to have paled in to insignificance compared to the list of jobs in the house.

The first wardrobe is in at least, the second ready to go, and the third, well the parts are in the boxes with the funny writing on the labels although with a bit of deduction we think we can spell "Ikea" in Mandarin.

Perhaps we shall have three habitable by the time Santa comes, but that's a bold prediction.  It's about economics you see, it's far more economical to have Brad the gyprock guy in once than once for every room, so sadly the plan to finish each room before starting the next has involved into a plan to start every room and leave the place in a complete state of disarray for as long as we possibly can.

We've crossed one thing off the list though.  "Airline Tickets 2012"

If the disarray is still with us by the end of March, it is safe to say it will be here until September!

Unbuilding Dicky Beach

Ahh Joan, before the white comes the colour!  

The old wardrobes have magically disappeared, although it's fair to say there are rather large marks where it's been.  It's not just the colour that tells us a little of what has been before.  If one were to take out all the drawers in the old robe, and lie on one's back looking up at the underside of what may have been a dressing table, one would have seen carved ever so carefully in the chipboard, a heart with "Vanessa" scratched within.

Of course if one had taken to the structure with a big hammer and a crow bar, there would be no need to lie on one's back....

On another note, we've spent more time than we care to admit I suspect, poking around in a well known Swedish furniture store over the past year or so, acquiring bits and bobs for the boat.   

This became painfully apparent when once again we trudged south to a store from the very same chain, to start the reconstruction process for the house, and we discovered the cafe was on the wrong side of the entrance hall.  Not only that, but the tables were square not round, and as we popped in to start the day with our "free" coffee (for members of the "family" of course), we should not have been surprised that the prices had a dollar sign, not a "€", but we were!

Seven trolley loads, four hours and 450kg of more stuff from the collection point later, we had all the pieces we needed safely on a truck hopefully to re-appear in our driveway after a few days.

Then we can do the same in the other bedrooms, then fix the electrical stuff, then the gyprock, then perhaps, we'll bring out the whitewash!

Unpainting Dicky Beach

If there is anything more mind numbing than inexpertly painting the inside of a house, it must be unpainting it after it's been inexpertly painted.

Despite my best intentions expressed so firmly before leaving France that we'd do nothing to the house for a year, all that flaking paint and the creaking doors have got the better of me and so far the score since arriving back four weeks ago today, is one pirate ship, one larger hole in the living room wall than was once the case, and one bedroom almost denuded.

The colour revealed once the layers of time have been removed may once have provoked a "what were they thinking?" response from ourselves, but now, well it's sort of cheerful, and it reminds us of another place, another time. (click on the link or see the photo below!)

For an instant one of us considered leaving it, a blue-green sky dotted with friendly clouds...... but the rest of us thought I'd like to paint it quite soon please.

Ship Building Daisy Hill

It's hard to believe that we've been back two weeks. Even with the fog on our brains now dissolved we seem to have been living in something of a whirlwind.

We've been seriously planning what to do with the house, even knocked out a wall for good measure. We've walked along the beach twice a day with the mighty Grand Dog while trying to figure out what we might knock out next.

But Mr Four becomes Mr Five tomorrow and there was a pirate ship to build, so that seemed like a good place to start. It was nice to be hanging round boats again if I do say so myself.

It's come to this. Dicky Beach

When one resorts to posting pictures of one's grand-dog on one's blog, it's probably time to hang up the keyboard for a time.

We are taking it easy, sleeping in fits, getting to know the house we left not quite settled in.

Even after a lifetime of living on this side of the world, the cars suddenly seem stupidly large, the sky similarly so, and drivers on the freeways just stupid.  

I had panicked for a bit on Friday, desperately trying to get all that had to be done, done before the shops closed on midday Saturday, to be gently reminded that they don't.  We went into a well known European brand of supermarket this morning and as is my custom, I made a bee line for the non grocery items on sale.   Browsing, I was surprised to find myself reading the instruction label on an item without faltering, and even more surprised to discover it was written in English.

I think we are a little disoriented, but to be fair to us we've been away a while and we will need to once again familiarise ourselves with some things.

Last Tuesday, in a Post Office in London we were scrambling to rid ourselves of change and found a gold coin that should have been a Pound, but it seemed too thin.   We couldn't work it out, so asked the lady in the queue behind if she could tell us what it was.

After a short examination, she pronounced it to be:

An Australian One Dollar coin.

A Patch of Blue Dicky Beach

The sky is clear, the sun is slowly rising above a patch of blue.

It's a perfect welcome home.

The only thing wrong is that it's not much after five in the morning, and we should really be tucked up in bed with all the sensible people.    We've been awake for a while, thinking that it was an hour later than it was thanks to Mr Telstra thinking that we live in NSW and changing all our automatically updating clocks to daylight saving time.

So we sit on the beach for a bit, and pinch ourselves to remind us that we aren't actually dreaming all this.