Living Room Finished

Kicking goals as the weather warms up and we can finish the painting of the living room.

Before:

And after:

Keep up with our house renovations.

tickle tour at Handmade Cooperative

13 months ago, I took over as editor at Handmade Cooperative, a select group of 70 small independent businesses who handmake gifts and clothing for kids. I have had an incredible year leading this group and have thoroughly enjoyed exploring these awesome businesses and sourcing and negotiating exposure for them. In some ways, my schedule with the Coop has meant less time for my own business ~ as evidenced by the reduction in blog posts, for example ~ however I believe that the professionalism of kaetoo, as well as my skills in blogging and online community management have blossomed.

A big part of Handmade Cooperative is the fun activities with like-minded artisans. Our most recent task, which took place last week, was a tickle tour. We each chose a project from the most recent edition of the creative lifestyle magazine, tickle the imagination, and shared our "real world" interpretations in a loop tour on Facebook.

If you know me, you know that (1) I can't follow a recipe and (2) I'm not brilliant at cooking sweet food. But my husband does love chocolate cake! So, with Miss 4 and Master 1 helping out, I set to work to bake the cake. It's meant to look like this:

It took two days.

My cake turned out to be a triple chocolate cream nougat cake made with 70% cocoa dark chocolate - it's chocolate pastry filled with chocolate tart, covered with chocolate ganache, covered with cream nougat. It looks nothing like it was meant to.

But it was SO GOOD! Nougat is better than meringue anyway...

Search the hashtag #tickletour on Facebook and Instagram to see the other projects.
Grab the recipe and your own copy of tickle (digital or in print) right here.

And, yeah, if you're missing the blog posts, I will try to do better. You can always stalk me through 
Facebook and Instagram to see what the kids and I are up to.

Painting The House

I have been doing a lot of painting over the last few months, not of canvases but of our newly recladded house. Here's a visual of the front exterior's transformation over the last four years.

Keep up the history of our house renovations.

Our House

I'm not stupid. I've dealt with tradies a lot over the years. So when our builder said that the house re-cladding would take two weeks, I mentally doubled that estimate.

Sigh.

Two months later and the builder is getting close to finished. The actual re-cladding and insulating is all done, as is the new guttering and new roof. There are probably two or three days left of finishing up the frames on the new windows and the trims, I'd say. Of course, the builder would have to show up to do that... working two jobs at the same time isn't necessarily the most efficient.

Meanwhile, Darren and I have been spending our weekends and evenings up ladders painting, painting, painting. Any guesses on the colour we've chosen?

Keep up with the history of our house renovations.

Christmas Is Coming

Christmas is coming! It's only a month away and Miss 3.5 is getting excited. This week her grandparents took her to the city to see Santa and the Myer windows. At home, we have started making Christmas crafts...

...and getting the Christmas tree decorated.

Next up, making Christmas cards and gingerbread.

What are you doing with your children this Christmas?

Love The Garden

At it again...

We are at the house renovations again. This time we are re-cladding the house, adding insulation, removing the external asbestos, replacing the windows, replacing the eaves and guttering, and re-painting. Not much, eh?

Keep up with the history of our house renovations.

Dining Room Finished

Hurrah! The dining room is finished!

Before:

And after:

Keep up with the history of our house renovations.

Still Going

I don't even have words to explain how annoying it is to be still attempting to fix the leaking shower that was installed in May 2013. Sigh... If I wanted it to leak, I wouldn't have hired professionals to do it.

You can follow the history of the house renovations here.

Renovating House - Raised Garden Beds

Darren has been working very hard at making raised garden beds in this concrete space outside our back door:

And here is the result:

Miss 3 has already staked her claim!

Follow the history of our house renovations.

This Is My Family

Back in August last year, I showed you our renovated study and said that I would tell you more about the tree later. Well, after more than half a year of nagging relatives for photos, here it is, our family tree. Five generations in photos. The leaves of the tree are thumb prints of our friends and family - if you are visiting our house, please do make sure that you add some leaves to the tree.

This is my husband's side of the family, all born in Australia. The blue arrows help you navigate who begat whom.. We are missing photos of both of his paternal great-grandfathers, both of whom appear to have disappeared before anyone caught them on film.

And my side of the family. We are missing my maternal great-grandfather's photo, but do have photos of my paternal great-great-grandparents to compensate. My maternal side are from Ireland, Jamaica and China, and paternal side are from Australia, England and Switzerland.

We have a photo at the bottom of us with Miss 3 (then nearly one year old). Need to update with the four of us - perhaps a yearly replacement photo as the children grow?

Building A Bookcase

It turns out that Darren is quite fond of building things. His latest effort has been a bookcase for our study.

He drew up the design and then got the wood pieces cut and drilled at Allboard. Then he painted the pieces and he, Peter-from-The-Toy-Boys and our friend put it all together on the wall, killing a few screws in the process.

It's turned out to be quite a masterpiece and is very solid too. Hurrah.

More on our move and house renovations.

Oh! And I'm guest blogging today over at the Madeit Blog, sharing some super autumn mushroom finds.

Bathroom Makeover

Obviously, being pregnant and subsequently having a new baby slows down the renovation process. But here are the results of our completed bathroom renovation (pending painting the window frame, once we work out how to get the sliding part out of the window frame...).

Before...

... and after!

Catch up on the history of our move and house renovations.

Ikea-hack BENNO DVD Tower

I thought that I'd share with you Darren and Peter-from-The-Toy-Boys's effort at creating an Ikea-hack DVD tower.

Darren's DVD tower

Darren is a big fan of CDs and has a reasonable collection, plus a few DVDs. He already had one BENNO DVD tower and thought that an additional three would be a good storage space, but the wall that was available wasn't wide enough to fit four towers side-by-side.

Single BENNO DVD Tower
Borrowed from Ikea.

Solution? Take three DVD towers to your father's workshop and drill holes and guides into both sides each of the upright panels, so that the towers are all attached. This means that instead of having a double thickness of wood, there is only one upright panel for each tower (plus the two on the outside) and you can fit more on a wall. Not to mention it's more aesthetically pleasing.

They accomplished the four tower hack in an afternoon with three towers, plus some extra bolts and screws and a backing board, all sourced through Ikea. The spare upright panel was cut up to make the fixed shelves of the fourth tower.

They also salvaged some extra shelves to accommodate all the media.

Very clever.

Renovating House: Kicking Renovation Goals

A couple of months ago, I Blogged happily about the fact that I have a functioning bathroom, which just needed painting. About a week after this, we realised that the shower was leaking out of the corners and had five or so return visits from the builder to attempt to find the problem (as well as some tradie visits to replace a feature tile that had been put in upside-down and the carpet that had been pulled up). Since work was still on-going in the bathroom, we focussed on other rooms in the house.

We painted the hallway (still need to paint the cupboard doors) and moved in a three-foot tetra tank that we "inherited" from my mother. Unfortunately, no before shot, but here's a photo of me in my jammies up a ladder taping the walls for painting, aided by a small child:

And after:

Next we painted the study and moved in our other three-foot tropical tank, which currently houses a large black ghost knife fish, three Australian rainbowfish and a large bristle-nosed catfish. Big, big thanks to my brother who had been babysitting all of the fish until we were ready for them to move in. Still to be attacked in the study is the renovation of the wardrobe/media cupboard, and the addition of a bookcase, as well as painting the door.

Before:

And after:

(Like the tree? I'll tell you more about it in another post...).

Outside, we've been pottering in the garden over winter, but the big change is that with some friends, we chopped down five trees that were either rotten or growing too close together. There's a bit of loss of privacy at the front of the house at the moment, but that will be resolved with replacement trees and an actual garden out the front. Hurrah!

Hello, Spring...

Follow the history of our move in November last year and the renovations to our house.

I have a bathtub!

So when I left the last bathroom update, the plasterboard had gone in. Next was the floor underlay.

Then the cornices.

The waterproofing was a particular stinky stage of proceedings.

And then the window frame, doors and fittings started going in.

We chose this point to go away to Queensland for five days and when we returned there were tiles. The rest of the fittings went in and over a couple of days everything was finished off.

So now we have a functional bathroom that just requires painting (by us). I'm a happy lady.