The great outdoors
Although we have lots of loose ends to tie up inside our house, our attentions are also required elsewhere. We now have the task of turning our mudpit yard into a dazzling horticultural masterpiece.
Once the painters have finished we can have some topsoil delivered, followed by turf and thus begin establishing our garden.
My father is an extremely good gardener. He even crosses different plants to make new ones, in fact, there is actually an orchid named after me which he made when I was a little girl.
I have been waiting for my green finger gift to kick in, but nearing 40,  I fear that it may never blossom. Never the less, I am ambitious when it comes to gardening projects.
Our block is 604m2 or 24 perches. Most of the houses in the surrounding streets are on 12 perches, so we have a bit of room to play with. Our house really just takes up half the block.
I have always favoured more formal gardens, clipped hedges, conifers, urns, etc, and I still love that style. Like this sort of thing below.

 However, I am investigating a more 'tropical' flavour with palms, gingers, cordylines, heliconias, jasmine and frangipani, plants that are heavily fragrant in the summer heat. I think tropical, or subtropical, gardens are romantic and so suit the Queenslander house.

Ideally, I'd like to combine tropical plants within a more formal design. A little like these below.

I'm having trouble finding some visual inspiration though. I may have to go off to the dreaded council library in the name of research.

The garden must be reasonably low maintenance and waterwise.

I also want to incorporate a sizeable, and hopefully very productive vegetable garden, and some citrus trees, and any other edible plants I can slip in.

This is going to take some planning I think. Time to hit the books!

Does anyone know any handy gardening websites or blogs?

Blue and green should never be seen
It's a rainy day here in old Brisvegas. My younger child and I have just returned from West End where we partook in a steamy bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup.
We were passing through West End from Sunnybank Hills on our way home from the cushion lady. A friend of a friend gave me the name and number of a wonderful lady who can sew my cushions. She does a fantastic job and is very, very reasonably priced.
I bought my fabric this morning for the new cushions for the living room chairs.

The green will go on a single cane chair I have. The blue patterned fabric is for a pair of cane chairs in the same room. The 'ribbon' is actually the piping for each.  I wanted the living room to be predominantly green and blue. It took me forever to decide on the fabrics because the green is actually also available in a brilliant canary yellow, tangerine and electric blue. I found a plain thicker fabric in a beautiful hot pink, but I think I'll save that for the daybed on the front verandah. It's awfully hard to focus on one thing when you're in the 'retail environment'.  I see so many 'notes to self' to keep in mind for future reference.

I got the fabrics from Spotlight would you believe. They have a lot of terrible stuff in there, but if you're willing to look, you can find some roses amongst the thorns. The green fabric was about $13/metre and the patterned blue was about $15/metre.

In the last day I've also managed to finally get a quilt cover for our bedroom.

We have a lot of pinks and reds at the front of the house, then more blues and greens at the back near the pool. This is quite a temporary cover, but I like it, it's red, and not too feminine. I only have a few more things to do in our bedroom and it will be finished...more photos to come.

Meanwhile, downstairs, I found a few more ditties to deal with.

This is a beautiful mirror, very large and very heavy with a black and gilt frame. We've had it for years, but never really put it anywhere fetching. It's more or less just been stored. I'm thinking of putting it inside the front door in the hall, but I'll need some sort of hall table to go with it.

I think this may be a colour lithograph. My husband's parents gave it to us. It's very, very big so I'm still trying to find the right spot for it. I'm very cautious about hanging things on the wall at this stage, until all our furniture is in place. This may go above the piano if it will fit? It's really lovely, just needs a bit of spit and polish on the frame.

This old floor lamp with table was in the house when we moved in. It's still got the original wiring in it. I think I'll need to have it rewired and then find a lamp shade. The lampshades I've seen for this size lamp have all been around $450! I'm going to have to be extra resourceful to find one that will fit the budget. The timber is a rich dark colour which just needs a polish. I think this will end up in the living room or dining room.

My husband and I have had these since before we were married. The colours in them are lovely and the pink and green will make them perfect for the living room to go with the pink and green glass windows. They also just need a tidy up.

P.S. Good news! I found the extra ball for my curtain rod. I feel more peaceful now.

Projects 1 through 99, 100!
We are making progress. We are making progress.
We had a productive weekend. My husband put the shorter bullnose roof over the upstairs bifold doors to stop the weather damaging them.
This was before.

And this is now. It also stops some of the afternoon sun which is a bonus.

However, everywhere I look I see something that needs doing: a window that needs a blind, fabric waiting to be made into a curtain, a piece of furniture that requires cleaning, polishing or painting.

This, above, is Gwennie's little timber sewing box with timber inserts. It still even has her sewing paraphenalia in it. I think all it needs is a clean-up and positioning somewhere worthy upstairs.

I don't know how many of these old souvenir teatowels I have, but I'm going to make them into pillowslips to go on a daybed on the front verandah. Not the most original idea, but I think they'll look fab.

This is another little timber box which only stands about 30cm high. It just needs a clean up too. It was in the house when we bought it.

These two old medicine cabinets need a tart up also. I'm thinking of painting one of them in Resene's metallic paint called Proton. Resene make unbelievably good metallic paints.

I've had this dresser base for years. I paid way too much for it in an unrestored condition, and then way too much again for it to be french polished. It got quite the scratch in it when we were moving, so I'll probably paint it. I'm thinking an olive green?

I had this chair repaired at And Woven Cane just down the road, and now I have to paint it too. The new cane under the arm rests sticks out like you know what. I had another motive for getting the chair repaired, I really want the corner store that And Woven Cane operates from ,as a cafe - my new project for next year? I'm not making much headway getting the shop. I think if I go in there again Mr Twaddle will call the police.  He's made it very clear he owns the store and he's not going anywhere soon. How selfish! What about me!!

Ah yes, another project, securing ourselves a proper clothesline. This is what we're operating with at the moment and it's not really cutting the mustard to be honest.

The piano that we 'inherited' with the house ended up on the front verandah during the renovation. It was then in the painters' way so we moved it into the living room on the weekend. It really should go downstairs, but we'd have to get professional piano movers to get it down there. It has a cast iron frame. It's nice to have around though and I love the smell of pianos. Yes, they do have an aroma, sniff one and see.

I gave it a once over with O-Cedar and jazzed up the top with some pretties and it looks great. I'll get it tuned one day, and I stress....one day?

It's hip to be square
My husband has just taken the children down to the park and I should be making use of the spare daylight hours to go for a very brisk walk (still trying to shake my reno kilos), however I've decided to do a quick post instead. Such devotion!
This week I've been trying to track down some sort of rug for the living room. In leiu of being able to afford a beautiful rug, I decided to try and get a 'carpet square', for want of a better term. I didn't want to spend too much on that either because it will be relatively temporary....famous last words, I know.
I managed to find a guy on Ebay who's selling cheap carpet out of a warehouse in Salisbury. For me, going to the southside is like going to another country, I know nothing about getting around over there.
After navigating my way over there like Captain Cook, I eventually picked out something which I wasn't made about, but I thought it would be ok. My husband went to pick it up this afternoon, but 'Frank' was nowhere to be seen. No one there seemed to be able to give us change, and so needless to say, the carpet is still at the warehouse in Salisbury.
I think that's a sign. I think I should just press on with the living room and forget about the rug for now?
The trip to the farside wasn't completely wasted. Whilst at Salisbury, I drove past another carpet shop and decided to drop in since I was right there. They had the find of the week.
Here's a hint: what's two words that conjure up the 70s immediately? That's, right. C-A-R-P-E-T  S-Q-U-A-R-E!! I picked up 372 of them at $1 each. That covers 93m2, enough to do our downstairs area. They are normally between $4 and $6 each, but ours are the last bits and pieces of various patterns no longer in stock.
Our new chequerboard floor is great for the children to play on, and it's excellent at controlling the dust. The floors upstairs are so much easier to keep clean now.
See the before and after below. I can see these being really handy for people who rent. And...there's more. When a tile gets stained or is showing it's age, you can just swap them around. I'm telling you these things are so out, they're in!
Now all we need is a pool table, a lava lamp and a bar.

My sister was tossing out this mirror so I grabbed it. It goes really well in the ensuite.

I don't think I've shown you the lights on the front and back verandahs yet. The ones below are hanging on the front verandah. I can't wait to see how they'll look once it's all painted and furnished.

The wall mounted version of the same style is on the back verandah near the concertina doors.

The painters put the first top coat on today. I ended up choosing a last minute ring-in, it's called Resene Alabaster and I feel happy with my choice. For the trims I literally closed my eyes and picked out two true greys on the Resene colour chart. I can't even remember what they're called. Fingers crossed for that one too! 

Inside I have been pottering around. I did this little arrangement thingy on the side board.

I put my wooden cotton reels and clothes pegs into a glass cannister, and Gwennie's old golf balls into another.

Below you can see an old Sadler teapot that my parents got when they were married in 1873. There's also a couple of beautiful blue Bohemia crystal glasses, that I found in the house. They get used regularly, they're not just dust collectors. The floral arrangement was given to me by one of the children after their afternoon walk with their father.

If Red Hill had an emblem or symbol I think it would be the Bush Turkey, also known as the Scrub Turkey or the Brush Turkey. Not one of Mother Nature's prettiest beasts.

This one was snapped at our front gate.

Yellow, white, pink and black
I've got a lamb roast in the oven and it's got about 10 minutes to go, so this post will have to be snappy.
While I am on the mend, my poor husband has the dreaded germ. Now I'm back on my feet I have been busy de-cluttering. My intention was to Ebay through it, but I'm impatient and I've mostly been giving away or throwing away.
I thought you may like to see these.

They may look like a pair of spartan white curtains, but they are in fact a pair that I made myself, with my own bare hands. They are actually a cotton/silk blend, beautifully sheer fabric. They may not be too testing in their design, but as any non-sewing person will appreciate, they involved me having the intention, planning, getting out the machine, actually starting and the most difficult part of all, the completing. I'm quite happy with them. I've got more to do for another room. The only hitch was that I lost one of the timber balls on the curtain rod.

We had our second dinner party on the weekend. My friend Jane brought her 'new' boyfriend, whom she met last new year's eve, in the morning. She was walking home from the gym when she dropped her ipod and it went down a drain. This man stopped to help her, and as he was driving away she was berrating herself for not getting his phone number. When she looked up he'd done a u-turn and came back to ask her out for dinner. Now they're moving in together! Big sigh.

Before they arrived I decided to try and tart up the livng room. Our decorating budget being a big fat nil, I decided to break out some new pillows I'd bought way back before the renovation. They added some great colour.

Who knew that yellow, white, pink and black would hit it off so well?

I've got a good feeling about that room. I think it's going to come up top of the pops once it's done.

View from the pool area...painting is in progress.

Have been trying to hunt down a fab rug for next to nothing. It seems the only rugs I love come at the cost of a Hyundai Excel. Question. Has anyone ever seen artificial grass used as an indoor rug? Don't panic. Just workshopping some ideas.

Roast is done.

P.S. Does anyone know someone in Brisbane who can stitch me up some new cushion covers for the cane chairs (pictured above)? I can't do zips, and I wanted some piping too?