The machines are on site!

Our house was built in the 1970s. When we bought it there were lots of things about the house that needed maintenance, and we have been doing these as our funds permitted.

We remodelled the kitchen 12 years ago when we arrived, we demolished the old dark flat roofed patio out the back and put up a larger one with a gable roof. Two years ago we had the whole roof repaired and sealed -the concrete tiles were very much worse for wear.

This year we needed to get into the driveway project. The concrete had been cracked by large trees nearby, the bitumen cross over to the street was potholed and crumbling on the side. Our neighbour is doing theirs, and it is the right time to make these two areas come together.

The long term plan is for a double carport near the front of the block and then to convert the under the roof carport into a home office. That may or may not ever happen! Anyway, we have a bobcat on site and our driveway has been ripped up and widened ready for the bricklayer to come along. Of course everything is now very sandy and wet with the winter rain!

We are also taking the opportunity to put in underground power as it is available next door.


Just in case you think that we are neglecting our garden with all this upheaval out the front -here is a pic of the next garden bed for veggies. I am planning to set it up as a wicking bed to save water during the summer. To read all about the idea of a wicking bed and how to do it, see Scarecrow's blog.

I am always trying to make sure that as little as possible leaves our site to landfill, so I persuaded DH that we could use some of the good garden soil being displaced by the driveway in this new bed. Some of this soil has had 12 years of my carefull feeding and mulching! This one is only half the height of my green bed, so should not be such an effort to fill.

I have also been happy to see the mushrooms come up recently. These will be portobello mushrooms and we are looking forward to lots of them! When the box is exhausted, we can put the compost into the garden beds.

Lots of storms this week -over 30 mls of rain in the gauge (1 inch) so that is greening up everything around here. The trees in the park behind are really soaking it in.

I am of course enjoying indoor pusuits such as my sewing and cooking, during these storms. I have also started attending yoga classes to get a bit of exercise whilst the weather is a bit too wild for walking in the morning.

Thanks again to those who left comments on my last post. Please feel free to introduce yourself -I love reading blogs, so be sure that if you have one, I will visit!