A few pics from our weekend with John, Bec, Iao, Kate, Damian and special guest star Matty D at Mulwala in late March.
We stayed at Shoreline with the cockies, boarded the lake on Friday arvo and the river on Saturday, and had a couple of lazy nights at the campsite. Good fun.
It seems like whenever I write something about the garden it’s another story about us digging something up. Since last August we’ve filled two 4 cubic metre skips with unwanted and/or dead plants (and we need another one), pulled up half our balcony and railing and removed a pond. Well we’ve done it again. This weekend it was the lower bit of decking where our table and chairs were.
We were going to devote the weekend to the balcony (except for my excellent surf sessions each morning - nice and clean this weekend) but that required us to spend big $$$ on merbau decking and it isn’t pay week. So we decided to redo the lower area instead.
Job #1 was to move the table and chairs. As you may recall, they’re ironbark and extremely heavy. It took us some time, but we got there in the end.
Next step was to lift the decking. This is just after we started …
And about six hours later (across both days) this was the result.
The best bit was smashing the supporting beams with a hammer to loosen the rusty nails off. There’s nothing like a good bit of solid hammering on a Sunday afternoon to make you appreciate your weekend.
To be honest we’re really glad we pulled it all up. The support beams were starting to rot through (one broke when I stood on it) and given that we were asking them to support about a tonne of ironbark table and chairs we’ve probably done the right thing.
Next weekend we’ll flatten out the earth, put some redgum sleepers around the edges, fill up with some roadbase and sand, compact it all down, then lay bricks to create a sort of courtyard-y space. When that’s done we can plant some bushes and shrubs and landscape it a bit. The area will be about 5 square metres bigger than the decking, which is good, and the plan is to put a spa in the space where the table is (temporarily) in those photos. That won’t happen until later in the year but at least we’ll be building something new rather than just knocking another thing down!
Found out recently that Chrysler used to make boats as well as outboard motors. Check out this weird-shaped thing on the front of their glossy brochure from 1980.
Does that outboard motor look familiar? Yeah baby …. our Muchacha has got that 1980 style goin’ ON.
We took Maxy out on Muchacha this morning. He was amazingly good. I had to lift him into and out of the boat but he seemed to enjoy the whole thing, especially when we opened Muchacha up and the wind started rushing through his hair.
Don’t think we’ll take him wakeboarding though. He’d be straight over the side to fetch the rope as soon as we throw it in.
Finally.
On Tuesday, after many many months of inactivity, our real estate agent called me at work to say that he had strong interest in the block of land we bought in 2005. The buyer’s initial offer was $130k, which was somewhat positive, but we knocked it back as we were asking $140k plus and weren’t prepared to accept anything less than that, even if that meant turning away a serious buyer. There are only three other blocks larger than 800sqm in the area, all of which are $150k plus (one is advertised at $229k for 1000sqm - dream on!).
So the agent went to see the buyer on Wednesday to convince them that $140k was the lowest we’d go. They talked, the buyer said definitely no, the agent left. Shortly afterwards, the buyer called the agent back and said yes. Very soon after, the agent had a signed contract note, $1,000 deposit and agreement to a 30 day settlement.
Hooray! Hardball, I think that’s known as.
Our decision to buy the land in June 2005 wasn’t necessarily a bad one, at that time we wanted to live there and build a nice big house with a decent garden - even though the building experience we went through with our first home was painful. But we realised sometime in late 2005 that we couldn’t rationalise moving to a locality that was an hour from the beach and an hour from work (but close to family), when we could move somewhere that was 15 minutes from the beach, just over an hour from work and still reasonably close to family.
To put it another way, Geelong could offer us a big house, the beach, the bay and a country town atmosphere (albeit a large country town), while Wyndham Vale could offer us a big house (after another building process) and an outer suburban atmosphere. Mum and Dad, Rob and Nic and Sim and Bek are all happy in Wyndham Vale, Werribee and Hoppers, but their ties to the area (work, friends) are much stronger than ours.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that actually having a piece of Wyndham Vale helped us to decide that we didn’t want to live there. Sounds odd but there you go.
So bye bye 12 Glenmaggie Place. We mowed you once, paid someone else to do it the next time, and put a side fence up. May your next owners do far more with you than that.
