Our house.....

....is a very, very, very  fine house.

Well.... kinda sorta. The previous tenants it seems did not care for the house and maintenance was not a concern to them. So what should be a very, very, very fine house is somewhat missing  some love and care... Enter the W.A.lkabout Crew!!! We, or at least definitely, I LOVE this house and all its quirks and faults.  But enough of that, time for piccys :D Get your cuppa, since it turned out longer than i thought...

Let's start at the start - always a good place



The Garden Bed beside the driveway


When we moved in, ALL the gardens and yard were very overgrown, so much, that you couldn't see the rock wall, and you definitely couldn't see the little steps leading into the garden bed!! (near the carport post)
at the back of the carport - perhaps you can just see a shiny reflection? - is our pizza oven!! LOL, we have not used it for pizza yet...but it works well as an incinerator for burning the mountains of cardboard we had (and still have :/ )

I seem to have misplaced some of my purpose taken photos of the house, so I'll have to substitute with just the regular ones, but hey that's "keeping it real", which seems to be a favourite catch phrase in the blogging world :D

this is a little, very empty garden by the front door.

*sigh* after a VERY bad/sad/overwhelmingly frustrating day for me (not today), Samuel tried to help by 'fixing' the reticulation... as you can see he didn't succeed, and managed to soak Sophie in the process :/ His heart was in the right place though <3

To the right of this photo is some more of the front garden, again when we moved in it was a jungle!! and Samuel and Jamie managed to get it looking nice again.

apparently the very first tenant, put in a heap of roses.... well we have found 4 separate bushes that have survived, so we'll see if we can keep it that way. At the end of the garden there, you can see our neighbours driveway. The children introduced themselves when we first moved in, and it  turns out that he is the pastor for the local Christian church nearby, BUT in his "former life" he was an Irish Street fighter!! His wife is a retired teacher, but together they run a "private school" through their church using the ACE curriculum I'm a little weirded out by the ''school" philosophy to misbehaviour, but I'll spare you the details since this post is about my house:)
Here is another shot of the same garden, different angle.

My bedroom is behind/beside me here. So back on to the front door and in we go...

and yes that photo frame is STILL empty, even though i got it for my 29th or possibly even 28th birthday! on the right wall there, is our beloved snow globe/stubby cooler collection that we are still slowly adding too. Though I'm hoping it is only in this temporary location until we decide on something permanent to house them in (I'd like those shelves back for the little girls) Above them are our 3 clocks, with QLD time, WA time and NZ time.

To the left is the lounge..hmmm, now do i show you the messy one with the children sprawled about watching the "box" or do i go with the tidier version....

Tidier version it is, since i fortunately noticed an inappropriate view of my daughter's underpants :/

Yes, we decided tohave our Christmas decorations up, and even the tree after my post about it (oh, and some more empty photo frames) because the children have their own feelings about the whole Christmas thing, some very valid thoughts i hadn't considered and asked me to put it up. but some more on that another post. Through the doorway  is my GINORMOUS bedroom, I really wanted to put our school stuff in there, but alas, Jamie wasn't keen on the idea. Up the step, we have our library, which, since our books seem to be breeding, needs to be expanded. Hmmm, this reminds me they still need more sorting after our move.



Not a great picture, but you get it...right?
The Christmas tree is now in front of this window

So next up is my, as you can see, very messy bedroom. Taken from the ensuite door - or should i call it the main bathroom, since it is bigger than the 'main' LOL. Beside it is the WIR which is literally, a walk-in robe.... it even has a desk in there!!

well at least my bed is half made :)
Beside the treadmill are about 5 moving boxes with
 various and random School supplies and manipulative's

Don't you love my parquetry floor?? I do for now, but judging from the coldness from Spring and even now in Summer it is going to be FREEZING in Winter!! Brrrr, i almost put our 2nd quilt back on last night, it got down to 13 degrees i think..in SUMMER!! Through the glass door takes you to a little patio, remember the one i told you about with the pond Samuel found?? Lovely :D He has grand plans for this area.

 So a 180 degree turn will have you at the 'schoolroom' door. Hmm again, which version should i show you...



come in, come in, we won't bite :)

I'm loving how much built in storage this room has, where Samuel is, there is a desk/TV unit, next to the fire place * love!!* and at the far end you can see - where i am sitting as i type this - Lily's one and only window. I do wonder why another wasn't put in either of the two outside perimeter walls?? Have you noticed something odd about our schoolroom??
HAHA I'm not going to tell you until the end  Nyeh nyeh :-P

Up the step takes you to the kitchen/dining area. As you may have noticed, our big table is in the front room with the lounge, because the fridge would not fit in the fridge space, and we can't really justify buying another fridge, even if we were able to sell this one. Have you priced a fridge lately!!! OH MY GOSH!!!



Ignore, my badly 'installed' phone cabling ;)
But you can adore my shiny new dishwasher,
you can adore the not so shiny one at the sink also if you like :D

Oops, got myself off track there, So because the fridge doesn't fit, it needs to be in the dining area, which in turn means the table doesn't fit. So in the meantime the children and I eat at the little picnic table. I have a 2nd hand one lined up on Gumtree just as soon as they give us our bond back from the Hocking house - yes we are still waiting nearly 9 weeks later -  there have been some disagreements on the condition of the house :/
Through the left doorway is back into the lounge, behind me is to the childrens bedrooms,

Samuel's to the right

His bed is missing because the previous night (12/12/11), we had a huge lightning storm which caused his window to leak again all over his bed,(like the day we moved in) it was so bad this time, that it also came through the front door frame and *sob *sob, all over our library books!

Thankfully they dried well and surprisingly flat. I was on the phone with the insurance company straight away and the books would have been covered by the contents policy, but the excess was $500!, I'm not sure if there were $500  worth of books? $300 maybe? thank goodness it doesn't matter. Lesson learned. No matter how convenient it is, never leave books or anything important for that matter, near the front door! :) I think I also learned, that I don't think the landlord will be very forth coming with compensation to us from any damage caused from the fault of the house :-/

So back to the hall way, opposite Samuel is Kaytie,

a VERY deceiving photo! - normally you cannot see the white rug
for the amount of clothes strewn across the top of it :)
Love our awesome name flags from  the wonderful Melissa

At the end of the hall is Sophie and Claire. For the longest time they were sharing the same single bed, à la Little House on the Prairie,  but recently we were able to gain possession of a RED bunk bed for the very reasonable price of FREE. Claire's favourite colour is red.  The little girls 'moved camp' with the intention of turning it into a 'ladybug' bed with the help of Grandad's black circle stickers from the lightbars . For a while they were still sharing the bottom bunk, but after some midnight hokey pokey from Sophie, Claire has had enough and moved to the top bunk.

An amazing amount of storage in this room also, yet you would not now it from the quantity of clothes and toys that are daily across this floor :/. I believe it would have been the Master bedroom before all the extensions were completed.

I might stop here for a second, and get a cuppa, what do you think??? Meet you back here in 5 mins???

I'm back how about you?? did you have a bikkie too? i didn't :( we don't have any :C

Anyway, at the opposite end of the hallway is Lily's room, oh? you want to see the tiny "main" bathroom??

well if you insist



see the bath tub taps on the wall??? weird huh?
there is no bath tub, in case you hadn't spotted it.
oh and in case you were wondering,
 there is only one toothbrush in the holder
because all the TB's are in the laundry
since these taps need replacing and run constantly unless
tightly turned off, which the children are not capable of

So as i was saying at the opposite end of the hall is Lily's room, Still filled with pandas :D just more...



her view back into the 'schoolroom'



In between Lily's and the other bedrooms are the laundry and toilet, but I'll spare you those photos.

Outside is my favourite part of the house, even though I rarely seem to be out there.

Oh I'll show you inside the shed, now that Jamie has been home for more than 2 days :) It's not quite so bare.

Jamie built himself (and Samuel)

the work bench in the middle one day,

while Samuel put his birthday workbench together.

Outside the shed is our flat lawn (and my wonderful full size clothesline!!)



oh, you can't even see my clothesline :(, it's off to the left near the shed.

now turning to the right...


and from the other side of the raised section....

and now looking back towards the house...

and last but not least, the section of the yard  (behind the shed) we have not dared to venture into often, since it is an overwhelmingly big job....


The Chook Yard <3 can't wait for when we do fix it though <3




you can't even SEE the proper chook yard at this point!!

we are inside the fence now, do you see it yet?? nope, not on the right there.

Here it is, tucked in the corner, hiding behind the overgrowth...
*sigh, see what i mean about a big job!!
It will be worth it in the end, especially with the cost of eggs!!
I don't enjoy paying $5 a dozen for around minimum 4 dozen a week!!

So that's a tour of our new home ( see I'll call this place home - not Hocking ), I hope you liked it, Come back soon ya hear :)

OX(OX)oxoxoxoxox
B(J)slkcs

Oh yes, did you figure it out?? what's weird about our schoolroom??

There are no ceiling lights!!! I bet you scrolled back up to look right?
there is a small down light over each desk area and that's it?? As i mentioned previously Jamie's workmate grew up in this house before his parents sold it to our current landlord, and he says there were lights as they had a pool table in there. So it is a mystery to us and the owner as to what happened to them. The owners swear there were some in when they bought the place...
This also explains partly why we eat dinner at the little picnic table. but with sunset creeping closer to around 7 :30, my 'excuse' of it being to dark is fading fast and we will probably need to pack up the school table instead....well at least until we get our 'new to us' table ;p

OXO B