'Good Life Wednesday'

Hello, it's a Wednesday, and it feels like a pretty good life right at the moment!

So what's prompted that statement?

Well, there's this British girl called Sarah who has made the same move as me to this wonderful country.

She blogs about living in a beach cottage in what she refers to as 'the lucky country'.

Sarah reminds me to appreciate all that is around me and to take pleasure in this good life....

She has transformed her home on the Sydney beaches to a fabulous family cottage in a creative, thrifty, and stylish way, oh, and all with a wicked sense of humour!  You can go and have a nosy at her blog if you click here. (Warning - you may be a while, there's a lot of stuff to drool over!)

So in the spirit of Sarah's Good Life Wednesday, here is my take on what I'm appreciating at the moment...



lavender from the garden in a water bottle from my wedding reception

 

As we draw to the end of Winter School holidays I have loved being at home with my girl.

We have relaxed, spent time outdoors, baked, cooked (we even made pasta), been crafty, watched a few movies, played outside in the sunshine, spent time with friends, had sleepovers and generally had a jolly good old time.

Last Saturday was the highlight.
My ballet dancing rugby loving eight year old and I headed into the city to Suncorp Stadium to watch the semi finals of the Super 15 rugby competition. We were so excited! Sibs usually gets to go to the rugby games when they are played in the afternoon, but this was an evening game.
Mother and daughter caught the bus and eyed up all the fans (including the teenage boy that Sibs informed me in a stage whisper was "wearing red undies"!! - I hasten to add that he was also wearing rather low slung jeans!)

getting into the spirit

We had such a good time. Sibs cheered and chanted and was thrilled when the Queensland Reds won the match. We headed home on the bus and her eyes were still taking it all in, even though this bus ride was full of families, kids and the somewhat older generation of fans..

Within ten minutes of being home she was curled up in bed asleep.

Last Saturday was another sign for me that my little girl is growing up.

 I'm treasuring these days.

 

4 years on, the before and afters.(part 1)

Every now and again I like to look back.

To reflect on what has happened during the last year, the last five years, the last decade and so on. I can get lost for hours trawling through some old photos that can evoke so many memories. I like to go back to the same month over the years. (We are pretty organised when it comes to storing photos and each one is carefully saved by year and month, so it's easy to do this).

Anyhow, it was exactly 4 years ago that we moved into this house and I thought it would be interesting to go back and see what we fell in love with....and what we have changed.

Let's start at the street front.

When I was doing the rounds of house hunting one day tucked away at the corner of the cul-de-sac I spotted a pretty blue house. Most of it was hidden behind trees and a tall white fence,

but I must admit I liked the look of it almost immediately, and to cut a long story short we bought it.

On the left is what the house looked like a few weeks after we moved in.

The front garden was pretty overgrown and by the time I had taken this photo we had already chopped down quite a bit of the shrubs behind the fence

That window overlooking the front garden is the study

and the bush outside was so big it covered the whole window!

After a while we decided to open the whole area up, remove the fence and lay down a lawn.

If I show you the back garden you'll see why the front lawned area became an important improvement.

It was Neil's dream to have a pool. When you live in the cold wet climate of the UK you never really think that this dream will materialise, so when the opportunity came to live in sub-tropical Queensland this was straight on the house buying agenda.(I think the dream was a huge lap pool, but hey, life is a compromise!)

The patch of grass at the back of the garage was the perfect spot to build a pool, but it did take away the lawn. We wanted somewhere for Sibs to play, so that's the main reason the front garden also got a makeover.

Whilst we're outside, I should show you around  a bit more...

This is also at the back of the house, outside the guest room. Just like the front garden it was overgrown so we tidied it up and then replanted. It now looks pretty green and is full of native plants.

The next set of photos show where we have made the most improvements.

 

1. Just after moving in. Some lattice has already been removed to the side of the wall. This hid the whole of the lawn area, and made the undercover eating area very dark.

2. The walls were painted as a temporary tidy up.

3. When the pool was built we then removed half the wall. (only half as we believed that it was supporting the retaining wall. )

4. Once we found out for sure that this wasn't the case the rest of the wall came down and now the whole area is light and open.

Looking back reminds me what we have achieved in the last four years.

So that's some glimpses of the outside areas.

I'll share a few of the changes that have happened inside the house soon,