Hello!

well, work is finished on the house!

We started the outside work at the beginning of May. So, just the end of autumn. It ( as usual!) turned into a much, much bigger job, partly because so much lovely soil clay had to be removed to make the area under the house flat for the new room, the council takes FOREVER, and also some wee bits and pieces were changed. In the end pretty much the whole back garden had to be relandscaped, a retaining wall built and the whole area of grass reseeded! For me this was actually more stressful than the actual building work. The building all went really smoothly, passing each council inspection with flying colours. Our builders were great. Lovely guys and not a problem to have around the place at all.
So, plan - widen the deck substantially, build stairs down to the new room and build a new room and bathroom under the house.

The digger arrived and the digging started. More and more dirt piled up...

Pretty early on it was clear that we'd have to come up with a plan for what we were going to do with all this muck!

While the digging was going on, framework for various bits and pieces started to go up. Some for the stairs, some for the deck extension... the concrete pad was prepared.

Posts for the deck extension were concreted in.

Then the concrete was poured and after a few days it was hard - we had a floor! Lloyd celebrated by jumping for joy...

I, on the other hand, had a skate!

It felt like we were flying along. It was all going to plan and nice and quickly at that.

The deck was going up

The ships railing worked perfectly

I thought my painting balustrade days were over - I was wrong.

My raised beds went in, which was great, but time was marching on, we were heading to the UK for a few weeks and had hoped it would all be finished by then. But that was not to be. Things had slowed down a smidge. But, bit by bit we were still getting things done. The rain wasn't helping much! Where oh where had the garden gone!!

We went on holiday, it was Lloyd's dads 80th birthday, so we planned a trip around that and disappeared for almost 4 weeks. Our poor house sitters had no garden whatsoever, but they didn't seem phased at all. When we left this was where we were at. Room walls up, I'd got the first coat of paint on. Deck pretty much finished. Garden trashed.

So, we went to the Uk, caught up with friends, family. had a lovely time, went to Kuala Lumpur and then came home. Some work had been done while we were gone which was great. It was all getting there.

Now the floor needed to be prepared for sealing. I spent hours scrubbing it. Not that much fun actually!

worth it, though!  This back wall is a cinema screen.

The work was on the final stretch now.

After a few weeks the grass started sprouting - we threw bag after bag of seed around!

The veggies are growing...

And this is what it's all about, Christmas Eve, friends round, Love Actually on the screen and good food. It was SO worth it.

And...6am Christmas day. View from the new deck.

bliss.