I have not managed much time here on the blog this past week as we have had my parents visiting from South Australia for 11 days, which was wonderful. The boys loved seeing them, and though we may live 2000km away, these kinds of visits are of great quality with plenty of time to catch up over a cuppa and home cooked meals. They left for home this morning and the farm is oh so quiet. It's just me, the dogs, the cat, Gwinny the neighbor's old horse and a few of their cattle which have decided to pop over for a visit.
There has been plenty of time hanging out in the yurt which whilst small, with plenty of work to be done before it's finished, is perfectly comfortable.
While my parents were here Mum and I spent some time in Port Macquarie having a look around, and the boys started on the yurt yard. We now have posts in and wires loosely strung ready to be tensioned. It will be a large yard with about 100m of fencing in total. The bottom of the mesh will be trenched into the ground and topped with cement to stop dogs digging underneath and the top will have two strands of barb wire to stop cattle pushing in. The yard will give us a place to keep the dogs secure, a safe place for the kids to play freely and an area I can garden to my heart's content without the concern of livestock eating it.
Our free new-to-us vintage hills hoist washing line and the new fence going in around the yurt, 100m in total.
We have been on the lookout for a second-hand kitchen for the past month or two, and quite frankly I’m astounded what people are asking for them in this district. We thought we had found one, but when Grant went to pick it up it turned out to be badly damaged by the builders upon removal. Needless to say, we didn't buy it. With places like Ikea and Bunnings selling cabinetry at such competitive prices, the price most of the second-hand kitchens we have looked are not worth the asking price. There is a lot of time and effort required in the removal and transportation of such a large item and then it would need adapting and painting to fit the space. Instead, Grant and I have devised a kitchen plan with an open shelving design that we can build ourselves out of recycled materials, using baskets and vintage timber boxes as storage. I have been browsing on Pinterest and come up with a plan which should be both aesthetically pleasing, functional and lovely.
An old vintage crate Grant found at work for free which is perfect for storing root veggies and bulky pumpkins under the bench.
In the meantime, Grant has knocked together a frame from scrap timber he salvaged and popped in a kitchen sink he got free from his workplace as a temporary measure. That means we now have running water in the yurt, and it feels like complete luxury. It’s not the prettiest of kitchen areas, but it's clean and functional. Currently, we have cold water only but we make do by always keeping a pot of water on the Aga which burns steadily day and night during this time of year. If the day is warm enough that Aga is not required for heating, I simply load it up with wood, shut it down and close the insulated lids. This contains most of the heat within the heavy, cast iron oven but when I need to stoke it up at about 3pm for dinner preparation there are plenty of coals and the plates are hot and ready to go.
Makeshift sink with some shelving Grant knocked together for me out of scraps lying around. It will make do while we build the actual kitchen.
In many ways, it feels like progress here is very slow, but bit by bit things are getting done. We have better plumbing now, the washing machine which lived in our neighbors shed over the last few months is back and plumbed up. Along with the hills hoist clothesline we gratefully received as a giveaway from our neighbors down the road, washing and drying clothes has become significantly quicker and easier.
Grants wood roach shed is secure and warm and the woodies are breeding well, as a result, and his little side business is ticking along nicely. He currently has an EOFY sale on the woodies, so if you know anyone who breeds lizards, please encourage them to look at the link in my sidebar. He can express post bulk amounts within Australia.
Grant also set up the water pump and a 1000L tank on our small trailer, so we now have a portable fire fighting unit ready to go come summer and the other small tank has been moved further up the hill, which has improved our water pressure immensely. These small things make a real difference to the ease and quality of our lives here. To have a good hot shower is certainly one of life’s little luxuries.
The compost heap is ticking over and slowly manure is being added to the first big vegetable bed in preparation for planting when the time comes. Grant brought in some free waste rubble from work too which we have put down as the base layer for future paths. This has greatly reduced the amount of mud around the yurt, and with four dogs and three children, it came not a moment too soon.
Seedlings.
All in all, things are good here. Progress sometimes seems painfully slow, but when I look back to how we started out on the farm, I’m reminded we have come a long way in just 4.5 months. We have come a long way from living in an old caravan with the boys in tents, doing laundry by hand, washing with buckets of water heated up on the gas burner and doing all our cooking on an old BBQ with a shoddy second-hand generator for power and no WiFi or phone access. Thank goodness!
Well, there is washing calling me and wood to collect so I best be off. What have you been up too?
xx
