25/52

A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2015.

Sofia and Otto: snow!

We headed up to the top of the mountain Saturday morning to check out the snow. So, so cold, but lots of fun!


Thanks to Jodi for hosting the 52 project at practising simplicity. 

You can click on the button (here or in the side bar) to see all my 52 posts.

24/52

A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2015.

Sofia and Otto: in The Hothouse




Thanks to Jodi for hosting the 52 project at practising simplicity. 

You can click on the button (here or in the side bar) to see all my 52 posts.

Slab

Our house now has a slab. The preparations took a while but it has now all come together. We took the kids around on the day of the pour to see some of the action from our neighbour's driveway. The concrete trucks were pretty exciting!

The driveway is a bit difficult for such a tall truck so they parked a concrete pump at the bottom of the drive and pumped it up. The poor pump looked like it was barely coping but it all seemed to work.

Here are the concreters at work. It was difficult to get a good spot for a photo as access was restricted and we were wrangling children.

And here is the finished product a few days later. The brick wall that currently has a little window in this photo will be cut away to extend the hallway to the new room once it is built.

Inside the house there was also a slab poured in our new bathroom. You can see the circular bath drain on the right hand side and the shower drain near the far wall.

The builder has also been working on the old house and a lot of the wiring has now been done with the plastering also underway. Here is an example of what they have had to do all over the old house - chasing in the wiring - a bit of a step up from the old style wires tacked on the outside of the wall.

We knew the brick work needed to be redone around the back door but I was a bit surprised by how much they pulled down.

This is the same wall from the outside a few days later and completely rebuilt.

This door to the kids' bedroom has been stripped as the paint was very old and cracked.

And finally, one of my favourite things this week was finding a large whiteboard covered in calculations to work out how big all of the pieces of wood need to be, especially for anything which is on an angle.

23/52

A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2015.

Sofia: mermaids in the sand
Otto: always keen to get that last bit of milkshake froth out of the glass (and usually ends up with some somewhere on his face)

Ian and Sofia are visiting Adelaide at the moment - the photo of her above was taken (by Ian) at Glenelg. Last summer we had a bit of beach holiday at Coles Bay. Even though the weather was unseasonably rainy we spent some time on the beach and made a number of shelly mermaids in the sand. It looks like the tradition is continuing.

Thanks to Jodi for hosting the 52 project at practising simplicity. 

You can click on the button (here or in the side bar) to see all my 52 posts.

22/52

A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2015.

Sofia & Otto: a last minute photo shoot

I am absolutely in the habit of taking photos on a Sunday to meet the Sunday deadline I have set for this project. Better than not taking any, but it would be nice to take some more considered shots. I thought I had some lovely ones from a visit to the park this week, but I took them on my iPhone and when I looked at them closely the auto-focus had zeroed in on the tree that Sofia and Otto had been climbing rather than the joyful faces I had wanted to capture. It is tricky finding that balance between just enjoying time with the kids vs sticking a camera in their face at every opportunity - I fear I have swung too far in one direction and need to correct my course a little.

Thanks to Jodi for hosting the 52 project at practising simplicity. 

You can click on the button (here or in the side bar) to see all my 52 posts.

Renovation - ready to pour

The work continues on the renovation to prepare for the concrete to be poured this week. These photos show the room that will be our new bathroom being prepared for the slab to be poured with sand being molded and then covered in plastic. The new pipes are dug into the ground underneath the sand.

And this is a bigger view of the room. I think the big drain on the right is for the bath.

Outside of the house the formwork is in place to pour the floor for the new kitchen and dining room.

There are more changes happening inside too with the old toilet having been removed. The hallway will extend through the end wall which will be cut out to give access to the new kitchen.

Here is a temporary toilet in the old bathroom.

In the main bedroom the skirting boards are off and it exposes some brick that we hadn't seen before. We had a heritage architect look at the house on Friday and he gave us some very interesting information about the age of the house which will be the subject of another post. Interestingly, these bricks in the old house look machine made yet the bricks in the oldest extension are hand made and appear older. This is not the only confusing thing in trying to work out how old the house is.

21/52

A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2015.

Sofia: chasing seagulls
Otto: I think he was worried I would scold him for eating too many chippies

We spent a sunny but very cold morning at the park this morning celebrating our friend Charlie's 2nd birthday. Otto couldn't get enough of the party food :)

A bonus photo - Otto waiting patiently for his piece of birthday cake.

Thanks to Jodi for hosting the 52 project at practising simplicity. 

You can click on the button (here or in the side bar) to see all my 52 posts.