Our formal garden…
This is our attempt at a formal garden. Looks pretty nice! We’ll put the bark on this weekend and also try to fix the lawns.

Dad’s Awesome Edges!
I decided to pimp our edges ‘Grandad-style’! It’s looking pretty tidy around the gardens now! Only about 50m to go!


Dad’s new office!
Here’s a few pics of the new office I’ve just setup in Auckland for our software co. Looking pretty swish!



Planting the entrance path
Sarah, Jack and I felt energetic so tackled the entrance garden today… Here’s the fruit of our efforts! We’ve just got to find two awesome plants to go in the planters and it’ll look great!



The entrance deck is done!
Just need the deck lights, fern garden up each side and it’ll be good to go. I needed a flagstone (Shist rock) for an initial step.
I did a contra with the stonemason… Two metre wide flat stones for two bottles of Bourbon. So I had to pop to the liquor shop for a few bottles. Typical dodgy country deals eh. Will look great though!



Some house updates…
Finally the shist wall is going up! It’ll lighten as it dries. Should be all completed in the next few days…

The kitchen (with tweaks) is going back in and looks good. We get the new bench top in the next few days…

Country fun–Firewood time!
We had a heap of dying trees and about 150m of willows that needed about 15 feet taken off before winter. We had a contractor chop all the trees, but me and Jackson were on firewood splitting and bark chipping duty!
Jack was helping me run the splitter. He loved playing with it! I think that day we got about 1/3 of my winter wood supply so we’ve got a bit left to go!
Only real problem was that these are pretty loud tools so it’s not helping baby Olivia get her beauty sleep!


House rebuild updates…
Here’s a few updates from the rebuild…
The builders are 98% done on the house, all internal/external doors and windows are in, and the tilers went hard last few days and got all the tiles done (grout tomorrow).
Next week belongs to the painters who will go hard all week. The following Monday is the stonemason as well as plumber, sparky and general fitout.
The painters will be using a ‘blonding’ solution (whitening) the walls rather than polyurathane so that’ll lighten it all up even more.
At this stage we’re aiming to move in on the 15th April and the office moves back on the 18th.
We’re all really looking forward to getting back into our home. The garage has been great but we’re all craving space now and with a newborn, it can get a little noisy with screaming etc… Will be great getting home again.
Some photos…
Lounge showing where fire wall will go (on left) and the small gib wall on right for the TV.
Taking all the middle section out not only saved money but make it more modern as well






I chose this tile edge as we’re ‘The Stones’ haha



I left the timber ceiling in bathroom. Saves on Gib and looks better

Bedroom wall below will be wallpapered…



