More House Improvements

So our house is quite old and run down.  It has survived many years though, so it must be tough.  Like trying to hammer the nails into the floor to sand and polish the floors.  We had to use a small sledge hammer and there was a lot of swearing and bruised fingers, the wood is all very old hardwood and almost impossible in some places to hammer a nail into. 

We have also been cleaning up some old furniture we have bought or found at the farm.  We want to have older more unique furniture to suit our house which is definitely unique in a bent, old sort of a way.  We have been sanding, paint stripping, reinforcing and nailing and painting.  The old furniture is coming up great though and is really starting to add to the feeling in the house.

The polishing of the wooden floors was a great success and we are really happy with them.  We would not, however, polish wooden floors again ourselves, we would pay someone else to do it.  It is a disgusting dusty hard job and is quite difficult to get right.

The old wooden floors, sanded smooth and painted with Cabot’s water based gloss floor paint.  We used a lambs wool mop to apply it.  I cut in around the edges and Corinne mopped, she is the one with the painting skills.  The improvement is amazing.

Corinne mopping on the floor paint, the end of a hard dusty week.  We actually went to a wedding up in Palm cove, NQLD at the end of this week which was a nice break.

The dining and kitchen with new white walls and polished floors.  The dust from the sanding though was very difficult to get off the new white walls.

Someone put bare copper pipes on the wall in our shower.  A few coats of special metal rust kill paint and the pipes now look more elegant.

A simple wooden frame around our toilet window adds to the room and makes it feel less like a jail cell.  Yet to be painted

This is an old home made wooden cabinet we found in a shed.  We sandined, cleaned and repaired the cabinet and then painted it with the floor polish.  The cabinet is huge and adds a great amount of storage.

polished floors, joins in the floor where there are holes and a lot mess.

This is a little stool we found at an Op shop.  Sanded and cleaned with a new coat of paint, a great $5 bargain.

More House Improvements

Half a cow

When we first got to the farm we had the idea that we really wanted to start buying basic food items in bulk.  We wanted to save time and fuel driving into Toowoomba and be able to put a meal together without having to go to the shops all the time.  Part of this is stuff like rice, flour, muesli, cans of tomatoes etc.  We also bought ourselves a second hand deep freezer, a 350 litre one.  With that in mind we rang a local butcher and ordered ourselves a half a beast or half a cow.  This is a lot of meat, the half cow weighs about 130 kgs and once it was all trimmed and cut up we got about 85 kgs of actual meat and a lot of dog bones for Mo.  So we have a freezer full of beef and all for about $10 a kg rather than the usual exorbitant price of meat. 

The meat quality and taste has been great and we have all the cuts including a lot of mince and sausages.  We have also been buying other meat too so we don’t have to have beef every night.

20 kgs of mince, all the rough cuts are turned into mince or sausages.

setting up our table to bag up all the meat into meal sized portions, you need a lot of plastic bags for that much meat.

Mince portions

Roasts, we have been turning some of these into billtong.

Big bag of T-bone steaks

Roasts, sausages, meat, meat, meat.

Bones for Mo, so exciting

A freezer full of meat

Half a cow

The Tractor

Back in June we bought a tractor for the farm.  We have a lot of grass and logs and dirt to cut, move adjust etc and some things are just too heavy to do by yourself or even 2 of you. 

So we got an Apollo 5504 which is a 50hp tractor with a 4 way front end loader.  We also got a post hole digger and slasher and a few other bits too. 

The tractor has been indispensible so far in clearing some of the long, rank grass, lantana, logs and building gardens etc. 

The tractor is great and not too hard to drive and adjust things on, though there are about 20 different levers and it needs a lot of grease.

The tractor being delivered and the guy showing me what all the levers do.  The slasher attached to the back.

Dawn tractor

Side view

Other side view with grader blade attached

Destroying the old dog shed, an arduous task completed in a few minutes with the tractor

The front end loader ripping the shed apart

Carrying a log away from the shed.

The Tractor

The House Renovations

 

Hello,

After our return from the Alice, we moved to the farm. We wanted to do some renos and a bit of a clean up on the house before we moved in.  We spent the next 5 weeks of quite a cold winter sleeping in our tent, in one of the carports.  The weather was invigorating and we were both wearing a lot to bed including beanies and had a couple of blankets and doonas etc. 

The house is an old workers cottage that has been edited many times over the years and is around 100 years old.  It is wood on old tree stumps and has luckily survived without any termite damage.  The house though is old and looks it in many parts.  There has been a lot of movement in the stumps and so many parts of the house like the walls, windows floors etc are bent and curved.  This off course only adds to the character of the house. 

We have nice hard wood floors under our old stained smelly carpet so we planned to sand and polish those and paint all our VJ walls and ceilings. 

The renovating of the house and the cleaning up of the farm and garden have turned out to be very rewarding but also extremely hard work and very time consuming.  Everything has taken us longer than we thought and we have learnt so many new skills getting everything done.

A view of the kitchen and dining, note sickly yellow/cream walls, lino and dirty carpet, all remedied now.

The kitchen looking into the office.

The office, not a bad room except for the carpet

Kitchen, dirty roof and luckily ceiling fans throughout the house

Dining looking into the lounge.  The carpet is gone now and the walls are painted, Antique white USA – a type of white, of which there are many.

The lounge with 3 patches of white we were looking at, all quite white.

Corinne, sugar soaping the walls pre paint.

Sanding down the walls to reveal a previous pretty blue/green paint.

Corinne on her trusty ladder developing her upper body strength with a lot of cleaning

We have a lot of beautiful old metal locks on the doors which we have removed and are buffing up.

Dirty carpet and trusty leather gloves, essential for not destroying your hands on all the nails and splinters and broken glass and other sharp stuff

A painted door lock in need of a good grinding and buffing

The gorgeous lino that was under the carpet.  Under the lino is masonite and 4000 nails

The lino, quite old i would think.

Corinne painting the ceilings in the office.  That is the roof access hole.  I spent a day up there with the heat and rat poo insulating the roof.

The House Renovations

Mo

 

This is our first blog post we have done in 3 months or so.  We moved back to Queensland from Alice Springs back in June.  We had an uneventful 3000km drive back from Alice.  The scenery was great, drier this time, lots of Brolgas and country pubs. 

We have since done soo much and been so busy and had so little time and such poor internet that we have not done any blogging. 

We are a bit more settled now and have a little bit more time and so we have started to edit photos again and write blogs. 

We spent the first 5 weeks back in Queensland at our farm, Puzzling Gully, renovating the house and cleaning up around the house.  The house is about 100 years old and needs a lot of TLC.  There is a lot to write about the house and the garden etc but firstly we have to mention the latest addition to our small family.

MO.  Mo is our 4 month old Black Labrador puppy.  We got him when he was 6 weeks old from up in Toowoomba.  He came from a nice looking place out at Highfields.  He was a friendly, little, relaxed fellow right from the start and has since blossomed into a real little character.  We have been very firm with him and he is quite well behaved and learning every day to be a super well behaved little man.

He loves his food, walks and swims in the dam and he also likes sampling any type of poo he can find, and there is a lot on a farm.

He is a great little guy and we look forward to him growing up and having a great time with us on the farm.

Mo, When we first got him at 6 weeks he was a little fat round 3.6kg ball.  Now he is a lean 16 kg poo eating machine.

Mo’s first bath in a bucket, so unimpresed

Mo, surveying his territory

Mo’s second bath, in the laundry tub, he now bathes in the dam.

Cute and perhaps a little scared

Mo is already really good at fetching stuff, as per his breed.  He is a happy little guy and completely useless as a guard dog as he loves everyone he meets, strangers or not.

Mo