Overall layout

Just a picture to show you the overall layout of the three buildings so far in relation to each other.

And another roof raising

Well, this is our third roof on the property - the shed, the house and now the garage. Only one more to go - the stables. After the heat we've been having, it was nice to have a much cooler day to put the roof on the garage. Of course, Murphy's Law being what it is, it was windy which made construction a bit hairy. As we didn't have any scaffolding we had to make some up out of wood and ladders. Not very good OH&S but heck, it kinda worked. Our builder friend, Peter, arrived nice and early on Monday morning and whipped us into gear. Thank goodness we had someone who knew what they were doing! Having said that, it was easy enough, we just had to work out which part went where - sort of like a big meccano set. While James and Peter did all the heavy and high rise stuff by clambering around in the sky, Tracey helped by throwing things up to them like trusses for the hip parts, nails, dropped hammers (etc). All in all, it was a great day. We're now just putting on all the bits and pieces to make the garage nice and sturdy so we can untie the tractor from it and then we'll put on the guttering and then the roof.

The external walls will arrive around the first week in March.

The window people are hopefully coming out next week to instal the massive bi-fold doors and the sliding door from the kitchen to pergola area.

What do you do on Christmas Eve but ...

... build a garage. Yes, unlike all you sane people, we decided to spend our Christmas Eve putting up the frame of the garage. Like everything with our project, it's turned out far bigger than we expected!

Even though the weather has been very hot, we've kept quite cool working down in the house. The holiday period was spent staining and sealing windows - still. One coat has gone on the windows both inside and out and one coat on the sliding windows on side. We still have about another three coats on all sides to do!

New Years Day was spent in the hammock watching DVDs. Oh how far we've come from the days of playing Yahtzee by torchlight in the caravan with no electricity or water.

The shed was way too hot to stay in so we went down to the house and hung the hammock off the frame in where the double sliding doors to the study will be and propped our portable DVD player up on a sawhorse and watched a DVD - luxurious!!

We're now trying to organise the guys who gave us a hand with the frame to come and help us with the roof trusses on the garage. It's not very stable with just the external walls on - hence why it's tied to the tractor so once that's done we'll put the roof and guttering on it and then it will be up to the same stage as the house. As the walls fo the house and garage will be out of the same stuff, we'll put them up all together.

Here's hoping that this year is the year of the house warming!!

We hope that santa was kind to you and you kept safe over the holiday period. We're very much looking forward to catching up with you this year.