Welcome

welcome to our blog! we are first time builders and home owners trying to make our new house into a home that we love! we are keen diy'ers that are trying to do what we can on our own and on budget...... be sure to leave us a comment, we would love to hear from you!! april & allan

Monday, October 31, 2011

A Splash of Colour

 its funny how just a little bit of colour can make a big difference to the feel of a room

we added a couple of these orange pillows to the back lounge room and instantly the room feels nicer, brighter and a little warmer

 we are working on a few projects (and finishing none!!) like building vegetable gardens, refurbing an old window shutter and planting up our raised garden bed but right now i am working on a project using these
love our kitchen stools but they can get pretty uncomfortable on your toosh so i am gonna turn these placemats into cushions......  stay tuned for an update
wow the weekends are going fast now aren't they..... another one gone but not much accomplished really.....

I had hoped to get the footstool for our bedroom all wrapped up but here we are Monday again and it is still sitting in our bedroom almost finished (sigh) maybe that's the problem, maybe i should move it out to the lounge room so that it is in the way and will make me want to get it done!!

and just to prove i am working on the footstool here is a little sneaky peek, the edging is proving to be a lot harder to get right on this one cause we have used much thicker foam...... sorry for the poor photo
hope you had a great weekend



         

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

How Does Your Garden Grow.....


since my last landscaping update we have seen a bit of growth on the plants through winter which can only mean great things for growth through spring and summer!!


the viburnums have come along really well through the winter months and makes the savings on buying small $2 plants even better! they have pretty much caught up to $10 plants in just one season..

the azaleas are really starting to bush up now but they haven't flowered yet, the variety we bought flower late in the season so we are expecting to see some nice red flowers soon....

we have also put some large magnolias in the raised garden bed out the back..... to buy these in a decent size can be pretty pricey but we managed to pick up some that had been left in a pot way too long and were looking a little worse for wear. we have dosed them up with plenty of fertiliser and water and hoping to see some new growth soon!! fingers crossed they take off....


in the front of the garden bed we are currently planting some miniature japanese buxus hedges which are very slooooow growing but make the garden bed look instantly better!!  i tell you though 60 plants later can be quite pricey.....  photos to come

we are thinking about these for mass planting in the rest of the bed....
they are called 'ivory prince' arent they pretty

we are also in the middle of planting the garden beds along the back fence with a mixture of ballerina apples and pittosporum green pillar...  photos to come

and hopefully by my next post I will have a washing line up!! wohoo! let me tell you I am so looking forward to hanging our clothes outside rather than in the lounge room.....

  


      

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Hallway Table Revamp


Ok so i mentioned in this post that we had bought a hall table from a recent furniture auction...... well we have finally finished the revamp!!

we debated whether or not to get a hall table for a while... although the entry is a nice open space, it is the first thing you see when arriving at our pad and i sorta felt like it was just a corridor when it could be a nice room of its own....

After doing a bit of research I found most hall tables come in the right depth but are usually anywhere from 1.1m to 1.6m long and finding one that was a good 2m long would mean parting with about $2,000 (i know lots of $$$ but they were so pretty!!)

we managed to find this table at a furniture auction and loved it for its turned legs, its nice long length (2m) and cause it was made from some beautiful hard wood, it would go perfect in our entry! now i am not a big fan of the colour myself while it is a nice rich colour it just wasnt what i was hoping for in the entry 
scuse the messiness......



first things first we stripped both the top of the table and the shelf back to their raw state. I really wanted this table to be in an off white but i wanted the top and the shelf to be back to the raw wood with some wax on it.

The stain came off pretty easily, and wasn't as messy as I thought it would be. We (allan) sanded and sanded and sanded the top and the shelf to get the remaining stain out.

once all this was done, i removed the old yucky handles, filled in the holes with some builders bog and sanded it back ready for painting. we gave the rest of the table a rough, quick sand and taped up the raw top & shelf.

next we gave her a coat of primer using our spray gun - i am impatient and a bit of a perfectionist so painting with a paint brush is not really a good thing for me, spraying is much better!! although noisy with the compressor it gives it a much better finish.....

1 coat of primer underneath and then a coat with the table standing upright only took about 30 mins but the compressor can get pretty loud and annoying after a while so you don't want to be going for tooo long.

after applying a 2nd coat, we then sprayed a coat of flat black over the table so that once the final coats were on, i would be able to distress the table and have some of the black showing through.

jump forward another couple of weekends (couldn't decide on which colour would be my final top coat..) we picked up a pot of colour from bunnings in what looked like a whitish grey colour but pretty much just looked white once sprayed...

over the next 2 weekends we did 2 coats of the final colour and couldn't wait to rip off the tape & sheeting covering the top to see how it looked....

i then took to the table with my sanding block to distress it a bit - i can tell you this is a little scary at first so I tried a few on the back to get the hang of it but didn't like the way it was turing out (pretty much like someone has just kicked the table with black shoes on....) so i changed my technique and mainly did the edges.

we still have to buy some handles for the drawers and pop them on, but here is how she looks today :-)


so what to decroate the table with......  am yet to add a lamp, a pretty clock, a mail tray and a few other bits and pieces but i don't want to clutter it up... am a bit stuck for what to put on the bottom shelf..... any ideas??

am also thinking about buying some nice hooks and screwing them into the side of the table to hang all of our keyrings

ooh plus a new rug to go on the floor and a nice big mirror to go above the table....

update on the footstool - it's coming!! just finishing the legs and making sure it won't collapse when we sit on it!!

happy long weekend :)


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