Our first erection

We now have our first erection and the landscape of the property has changed for ever. It's no longer virgin land! Yes, that's right, after only seven months the shed is finally up! Originally, we had decided that we wanted to be in before winter, but I guess we didn't specify which winter did we!

James and our good friend and neighbour, that crazy dutch bastard, Shane lined the shed on the weekend. It now has insulation in the roof and walls and is lined with ply. As the shed doesn't have any windows, it was pretty dark so we've replaced four of the colourbond sheets in the roof with four laserlite sheets. We painted the concrete floor to cut down on the concrete dust. We had this brilliant idea that we'd use the lovely tuscan effects paint in the colour Copper on the floor. Trouble is, tuscan effects is one of the paint effects that you see through to the layer underneath and so we had to do quite a few layers of paint. We s'pose that it probably would've been better to have used a concrete paint, but we were going through an inspiration stage at the time of buying the paint. See what happens when you have a thought-it's dangerous I tell you! The water tank is now in place next to the shed as well. We're just going to wait until after the first rainfall before we connect the guttering to the tank as there is quite a bit of crap like filings and metal bits from when the roof was put on. Once the rain washes the gutters clear, then we'll connect up to the tank and finally have some fresh water!

BJ, our excavator, has been working this week on digging the trench for the electricity and putting in culverts under the driveway for drainage. He's also going to start excavating the site for the house, garage and stables. We still haven't heard from the council as to when our development application might be approved, but at least we can go ahead and excavate the site. We're waiting on one more quote to come back for putting the electricity cables in and connecting the shed up so for now, even when we move into the shed, we'll still be relying on the generator for power.

On the horsie front, Betty went on her merry way this week to Andrew's to start her training. We borrowed a friend's float and curious girl that she is, she walked straight on. She was a bit antsy at first once we started driving (it was only her second time travelling on the float), but she settled down eventually. We took her to Collector which is about 15 minutes away and met the horse transport truck there. She came off the float and walked straight onto the truck like an absolute dream. She overnighted at Yass and then apparently travelled really well to Victoria where she arrived at Andrew and Sally's safe and sound. The baby of the horsie family is finally growing up!

Back to the home front and we've bought a new toy. After many years of drooling and dribbling whenever we go past a bike store, we finally bought a quad bike. It's a 250cc jeep off road quad bike and as you can see from the photo, it's in camouflage colours - the horses aren't going to see us coming now!