Floors!

Hip hip hooray, we have floor coverings!  And mighty fine they are too.  Please allow me to assail you with many photos of our lovely floors....

 

Our living area floors are timber-look vinyl, we went for a good quality one from here.  As much as we love the feel of carpet underfoot, judging by the amount of dirt and dust we accumulate on ourselves from working outdoors, we decided it was foolhardy to carpet throughout, so we have only carpeted the bedrooms.

The floor colour is lighter than it is showing in the photos, but such a variety of grain, knotholes and saw marks on these amazing vinyl planks, it is really beautiful.  And the thing I love the most is the sound when you walk on it - pad pad pad, not clonk clonk clonk like on a real timber floor.  And it is waterproof so no warping if we have an unfortunate water leak in the house. We have invested some money into an Enjo floor dust/mop thingy, seems a good idea to keep the planks looking lovely.  For those that are interested, did you know you can now buy Enjo products online?

I especially love the colour scheme in the kitchen, the floor fits in really well with the cupboards.

 

Now that we have floors down, we have started bringing carloads of bits and pieces from the storage unit where our stuff has patiently sat since January.  Don't the stools look nice at the breakfast bar.

 

This is the carpet for our bedroom - hard to photograph carpet to make it look interesting, but believe me, it is wonderful to sink one's toes into it when for months the only floor surface has been concrete!

 

We are madly madly madly painting as much as we can so we can try to move in to the house some time next week.  We had thoughts of not moving in until all the painting is finished but we can't wait any longer!!  We wont be able to move our big furniture in for a few weeks as we need the outside concrete done first (try lugging heavy stuff on a trolley through a quagmire of soft sand!), but we can shift enough stuff from the shed into the house to be able to settle in in a spartan way.  It will give me a chance to learn how to use the oven before Christmas!

Whilst all this painting stuff is going on, our poor vegie garden has been somewhat neglected.  We had a day of harvesting the broad beans however, there were so many!  These are most of the pods.

And after shelling, 3 1/2 kilos of beans!  We blanched and froze most of them, but I used some to make a nice dip using broad beans, feta cheese, garlic and mint.  Yum!

Steve was dying to pull up one of his garlic, he has the most enormous looking globes of garlic growing, which are getting close to harvest time.  When I said I needed garlic for the dip, he trotted off to the vegie patch and pulled one up, along with some mint for the dip and some carrots for dipping into the dip.

 

 Fresh, new garlic, what a wonderful sight!

 

Our friends Anne and Ian popped in for a visit so they were dragged around the house whilst we excitedly showed them everything that has been going on.  Lovely to see you both!

Our house now has a sparkly new TV antenna.  A man came to install it, on a nice tall pole, with a booster so we get a good signal from Mount Barker.  We went to the storage unit and fossicked around until we found our big tv, which we brought back to the house so we could check the stations.  One autoscan later and we now have all the digital channels hooray!  As of next week we will be able to choose from the crap on 20 odd channels instead of the two occasional and then snowy channels we have had with our one bunny ear hanging off the water tank.  Bliss!

On a final note, we get all sorts of bugs in and around our shed, I have learned to tolerate them.  Including the most enormous beetles, which I don't mind except when they fly at me and scare the hell out of me.  Steve saw a huge beetle in the middle of the floor and picked it up to put it outside.  On closer inspection he was thrilled to discover it was a Rhinoceros Beetle.  Steve was an avid insect collector when he was a lad, and the one bug that had eluded him was a Rhinoceros Beetle.  Here it is posing for a photo before we let it go, kind of cute in a creepy sort of way.  I knew you would be thrilled to see this...