Living my dream

The Perfect storm - what happens when you have everything converging in one week

By now, most of you know that we're in the process of moving due to a new build happening where we currently live. It's been a long time coming and we've been through many highs and lows and I'm sure more are to come. But this last week has lead to extreme pressure as we need to be out of our house to move into the rental so the house can be moved off site.

But as with the movie "The Perfect Storm" sometimes timing could be better. This previous week has been shall we say hell on earth for me. Just about everything that could happen has happened this past week. It's been a real challenge.

Let me tell you about it.

A bit of background, we move on Wed. This Wednesday. That means we need to be packing up a house. Working out what we need in the rental and anything else goes into storage. Not a problem. You know I've been working on things for a while now and it's been good. BUT, add in the following and it becomes a little more than one person can cope with comfortably.....

1. A sugar free diet. Mmmmmm, yep back on that for the last 2 weeks. Not the easiest for an addict, but something that needed to be done for my health.

2. Andy traveling. Yeah. He left last Sat, only back this morning. So I had to run the house, pack the house and all the normal stuff in between. Oh . my . goodness!

3. I designed and packed a scrapbook class (instructions still to be written).

4. Packing up my 'now' scrapbooking. It took 3 days. Flippin heck! Oh yeah, and I did this before designing the class. Hmmmmm, didn't think through that did you Trina! LOL!

5. Having my garage sale - thank you all so much for coming along! - And don't get me wrong. I loved doing it and maybe will do another again one day, but this week was bad timing Trina. Sheez girl!

6. Fighting off a cold. My voice is going. My chest has been getting tight. ARGH! I think all the vit C I've been taking this week has had a huge effect on it not progressing too much! Thank goodness! Although if it does eventuate it will be the first one this year which is a miracle in itself! Yes!

7. We said goodbye to Bertie our chook who died yesterday. She was meant to be female but turned out to be male. And there are lots of funny stories to go with that. We'll miss him. A very sad time.

8. Dealing with kids who know they are feeling weird and sad and nervous, and acting up because of it. But they don't know why. It's easier for us we can put those feelings into words for a start, and then work out why we might be feeling that way. Littlies don't have that luxury so are having to feel their way through all the mess.

Hmmmmmm. Is that all? I don't know. But as you can see a bit of a mission for me this week.

Thankfully I did have help in the way of my sister taking the kids for a sleepover this weekend. Yay! Thanks sis! And of course Claire helped me set up the garage sale. I literally could not have done it without her. Thanks Claire!

Bring on this Friday when we're all moved and hopefully settled a bit more. I think we all need to feel a little more settled.

Our House...

The other day on facebook I talked about houses and what we'd do for a rental. We're still working on that, but it made me realise how close we are to loosing our current house and getting a new one. I realised I needed to take some photos and write down some memories from this house. Our current home. Where my children have grown up. They will continue to grow here, but in a new way. So I wanted to ensure that the 'original' memories weren't lost.

To start.....

We moved into this house after a very short sale and settlement of our previous house and this one, when Dan was 6 months old (he's now 8, just), only 10 days before Xmas. From sight of this house to sale of ours, to moving in was all of 2 weeks!

At the time, we knew we loved this place for the land. The house was/is old and we would either rennovate or demolish and start again.

We gave ourselves a time line of 5 years to start the new plans, and were well on track until some stuff at Andy's work unsettled us and we put the whole project on hold. That was 2 years ago. Now we're ready to go again and hopefully in less than a month we'll be moving, as will the house.

This is from the front door. As I stand on the front door steps, I face out towards the road. Sarah's bedroom is right there next to me, and our bedroom is next to hers. To the left is our 'sleep out', more commonly known as the 'dumping ground'. It's roof is full of moss, and last year two wasp colonies made their homes between the sheets of tin on the roof. That shed is where I keep all my 'old' scrapbooking stuff, all my class stuff. It is horrible inside. Always a mess and very old. At the very beginning we did use it as a sleep out, but that soon changed as my 'hobby' took over.

Here are my crazy kids wanting to be in the photos. I love it.  You can see here how we've had to remove the original beautiful circular concrete stairs. We did this to get a digger past a little while ago. We put back these ugly, but usable stairs and our chooks promptly took to using the dirt underneath as their dirt bath. We tried to stop them (dust going everywhere), with the wood pieces, but they still keep finding little bits. I love it. Andy not so much. For a week or so, the chooks were laying eggs  behind that bush you can see in the corner by the chimney. Then one day a rat took an egg and they haven't laid there since.

Around the front of the house is our bedroom and the boys room. The boys got the biggest room in the house since they are sharing. It also gets alot of sun! It's a wonderful room. Where I'm standing used to be a carport, but we needed to take half of it down to get the digger through. You can see the big scrapes on the concrete where it drove. Often we'll find Andy sitting on that concrete deck, having a coffee and strumming on his guitar. It's a wonderful spot to while away a few hours. That sink has come from our boat shed down the back. We're making room and getting rid of things. Our landscape gardener is going to use it as a filleting bench. Awesome!

Once we started gardening as much as we did, I wanted to make this grassy area into those 1m garden spots and just fill them with things. But Andy wasn't keen. Instead, up against the fence we created a space for tomatoes and beans with wonderful railings for them to grow up against. It worked really well.

From across the road. Take a look at the fence on the left of the picture. It's such a muddle. In a recent big storm, the fence was blown down, so we have just stuck up any old thing to fill it in until we pull it down for the house to be removed.

Those gates where the kids are have always been a problem. They never seem to work properly even when we 'fix' them. Sigh.

The way this house is placed on the site means that it's really close to the neighbours, because we're starting from scratch, we're having to move over away from the boundary more.

 And that's our back yard. Or part of it. The chooks are running loose up here at the moment as their fence was taken down a while ago. I love having them close, but hate all the mess they make.

We need to take that orange tree down shortly. The big ole pohutakawa is beautiful and protects us from alot of Southerly winds. Alot of people suggest we should try and take it down, but we never would. We love it! When the house is done, we want to light it up. It'll look amazing.

And that's the back of the house. That huge big window is where I sit and scrapbook. It's part of the lounge and I can't wait to get an area full of great storage and space to work. Those big windows have no curtains. They look directly out to the city and the amazing lights so we've always chosen to leave the curtains off (even if it does mean some cold nights in winter!).

Oh and hey, because I can, here's one of our beautiful brown leghorns. I can never tell them apart. But it's either Ruby or Diamond. They are both laying at the moment after a long hiatus so it's nice to have their white eggs in our egg box again.

Our house has been so good for us. It's not flash. It's not anything special, in fact when we first moved in it was freezing and we had lots of condensation in that first winter. After getting the HRV installed it became a much healthier house with way less damp. But there is still little to no insulation so is cold. We sometimes wake up and the HRV will give an inside temp of 14/15 degrees. But we do have a beautiful open fire which for the last couple of years has worked through the pine trees we had cut down a couple of years back.

Even though it's not flash, I will miss it when it's gone.