Bruiser

I was given a gift on Mothers Day.

And it wasn't your run-of-the-mill chocolates and flowers most mums find when they wake up that May morning.

It started out so normally with the school/preschool made presents, the offers of a cooked breakfast and offers of housework help.

Bang on dark the farmer returns and says. "Got a mothers Day present for you"!

He brought me home a beautiful little calf that had lost it's mother. The little one was done for a drink, but very strong.

I found a tin of sunshine milk in the back of my cupboard, so that was enough to tide the little one over until we bought a bag of calf pab the next morning. We named this one Bruiser, due to the strength and go in her.

It appeared that she wanted to live, and she is a fighter. She got a cough, we give penicillin for coughs, and she perked up no end!

She is a bit bigger now and is a beautiful heifer calf. She will always look "poddy", but survival is what we are looking for in a poddy.

We are lucky we found her.

Power upgrade

We are upgrading our power....... and here are some pics!

The old transformer is only an 11 KVA. The goverment has a requirement that power supply to domestic homes must be at least 16KVA.

We are putting in a 25KVA transformer so I will be able to put in air-con and also an oven upgrade.

It has been a long time coming.

We are required to put it underground so that we minimise poles (no poles, no maintenence). So we are ripping up my garden and lawn to put it in. We will have to concrete our path again too as it crossed it as well.

We used a bobcat to dig so many trenches. We cut water lines, we crisscrossed all over the place and hopefully we will be able to get heating/cooling now. That is rather important when the mornings have been like this.

We have a Jindara wood heater, but the house is so huge it is freezing cold. We have many doonas on and I have nearly worn a beanie to bed it is that cold. High ceilings = cold house.

Trenching that goes everywhere....

We had to shift my greenhouse away and I am not sure where I am going to put it yet. So will post pics when it is in place somewhere.

So this power upgrade has been 6 months in the making. 6 months ago I applied for it and it probably will be 3 weeks until it is finished. Such a big job. I am happy that our pumps won't break down due to our crappy power again.

Sorry for the cliffhanger post and many days between updates!

No one has actually read anything on this blog yet so it feels funny speaking to an audience that isn't actually there......

I will now reveal the first thing we did to the house.

The roof.

We had to do the roof first, and we were rather worried about how much it would cost as it is such a massive area to re-roof. I love my roof! It is beautiful and white.

The colour is called "Surfmist" by Colourbond. It was a bit of an agonising choice to make because a roof is so final and hard to change colour when you change your mind. I was keen to keep a colour on the weatherboards, but my husband wanted a white house. I thought it would be too much white, and I thought I would go with a grey roof and white walls possibly.

I got my way, and decided that in our hot climate we need a white roof to reflect the heat. Surfmist is the best colour to reflect rays, so therefore the best choice for us.

We installed whirly-birds to let the trapped heat out of the roof too and got rid of the evaporative air-con, the old TV antennae and the Pay TV dish.

My husband is a bit thingy about anything on the roof as it will damage it in a storm and the weight can buckle the iron  - leaks galore.

Once we did the roof it looked like a million dollars (Without looking inside the house).

Another pic.

This is our new TV antennae. We were devastated that we had to put it on the roof so it would get a signal. I think it is Ok though. We painted the vents and the fascia as they were in desperate need of paint. The colour is Taubmans "Iron Gate". This is what I will eventually paint the exterior too.

The colour is pretty close to the original, except it is more grey.

One the weatherboards it is painted a colour called "Agapanthus". It is now discontinued. I wanted grey for ages and agonised about how dark I should go, but the painter was able to steer me in the right direction Re: fading of the paint over time.

I am so glad I picked it.

You will notice that we changed the flue on the wood heater. It was not fitting well in the chimney and there were gaps that rain could get in. So we ordered a new one and it seems to work much better.

I know very boring talking about flues and antennas!

Promise to write something interesting once I get my head around the blogging thing!

The house

I thought I had better put a picture of my renovator's delight so you know what we are dealing with!

Here is my house.

Great canvas isn't it!

The house is fairly large (much larger than my last home). and it hasn't had anyone live in it for 6 years so it looks a little unloved.

We weren't going to move here as my previous house was a lovely house. It was well looked after, and done-up too, so I knew we would need a hell of a lot of cash to bring this one back from the brink of caving in. A house unattended is a house that falls apart quickly so there was a lot of damage to rectify.

We were just happy to maintain the pool and live in our other house - less worry and financial pain!

But of course the gods led us to fix it up.  Once we had a third child our nice smaller home felt a wee bit cramped for us. So off we went to raid the piggy bank to save this old girl.

Can you guess what the first thing on the reno agenda was?

First Post

Well, here I am.......

Starting my very first blog post. I have no idea what I will write about, and if anyone will find the things I do interesting at all.  I have wanted to document the transformation of my home for a while. And I will use this blog as my diary of sorts to look back, and see how far we have come. I hope I don't bore anyone too much with the mundane!

Let me introduce myself.....

I am a 32 year old living on a property in North West NSW. I am married to a farmer/grazier and we have three boys. One boy is very sensible. Second boy is very wild and free-spirited. And three is a mix of the two (so far).

We love our farm, our cattle, our life in the country. We have a pet poddy calf called "Bruiser". We moved into our new (old) home 6 months ago after a year of renovations and our reno's are still ongoing.

The Cattle in my blog title is representative of our farm, and our country life. The cushions are representative of my love for all things interiors and design.

Pretty Basic!

I do hope that I find enough blog fodder to keep posting regularly. And I do hope to entertain and inspire as other blogs have done for me too!

Feel free to give me any tips you may have, I am as new as the first green shoots of wheat sprouting through the soil after an inch of rain!