Restoring the Old Girl

Pottering around
Today I did some good old fashioned pottering around the garden. Gardening is very soothing I find, and I had a suprisingly productive day in the end.
I tossed out some herbs that had gone to seed, and replanted some other plants that were crying out for bigger pots. With our budget constraints in mind, I'm mad for good old fashioned cuttings at the moment. It's amazing how many plants will just grow if you break a bit off a large plant and stick it in the ground.
I've also found that there are quite a few plant sellers at the Ferny Grove markets on a Sunday morning. We got our murraya hedge plants there for $1. Although they're small, they grow like a weed those things.


Geraniums are cute, grow from cuttings and are seemingly impossible to kill, the darling little eternal optimists.

This spiky beast is a euphorbia. I had to wear gloves to repot it. They are quite good looking plants and can often be seen sporting flowers when nothing else is.
This is the outdoor table I scored during the council clean up. As (bad) luck would have it, my friend was driving past just as I was going through someone's rubbish to get it into the back of my car. Although she was sweet enough to say most of her furniture has come off the side of the road, I've been to her house, and I don't think that's quite right.

I also forked out actual money,although not much, for some other pieces of furniture lately. Take this iron and glass table for example, it was $15.

Or, this side table, which I will probably tart up and use as a bedside table - $14.50 on Ebay. It's not the best photo, but hasn't she got good pins.

I also got this pot stand for $3. It's not the greatest example of one, but this is by far the most user friendly way to store your saucepans. Has anyone seen any modern versions of this? Every house should have one.

After my gardening efforts, I moved onto the drawers of the big sideboard, which are so jammed with junk they don't open or shut very easily. I found these forks, which I then silvo-ed whilst complaining to my husband that we should have 'staff' to do that sort of thing. Likelihood of this happening - nil, which is a pity.
They will be going into our everyday cutler drawer. They're just too good to sit in the dark any longer.  We already use the old style bone-handled knives with the big wide blade. They leave modern day knives for dead as far as good looks and usability go. I'm amazed at how small old dinner plates and portion sizes were, but the cutlery is huge?

Whilst I'm proud of my modest domestic efforts today, they pale in comparison to the old man, who started the fence this morning. He concreted in the posts and hung the gates - rails and pickets still to come.

 They will be painted white, so they'll stand out more. We wanted extra large posts to hang the gates off. My husband went to two large well known hardware shops and was told at both of them that this size is no longer stocked, and only available on special order. As luck would have it, we found an 'old-school' timber yard last weekend so we went out there, and we had a choice of this larger sized post in various timbers. So there you go. They are called Schimmell's and they're at Redbank Plains. Don't scoff, you never know when you'll need a timber yard.

Similarly, the big hardware stores told us we wouldn't be able to get the hinges we wanted, but there they were at Paddington Hardware. I love that shop. I wish all my shopping experiences were like that.

I'm off to have a look at a book a friend of mine gave me today.

I don't know much about Katherine Hepburn, but I'm an extremely impressionable person, so don't be surprised if this time next week I've taken to wearing pleat-fronted trousers and head scarves.

P.S. the bride and groom from our recent wedding are in Brisbane News' Sum of Us column this week. The groom is v. funny, it's worth a read.