making hay

whilst the sun shines, well kinda. The verandah construction is continuing and we have worked madly in the spare time we have when not at work and it isn't raining. We have made significant progress thanks to family and friends; in particular dad and the favourite brother. We didn't get quite as much done as I had hoped this weekend, as I had to work yesterday and it rained heavily around 2pm today which put an end to today's efforts. Given we are in a drought I can't believe how much it has rained over the last few weeks, since we took the back guttering off.

Next weekend we should have the roof on. If I hadn't worked yesterday, we would have had the roof batons on for sure yesterday. Instead whilst it stormed last night, I was undercoating them in the garage and at 7am this morning back there giving them an enamel topcoat. This was not the smartest of moves, nor was giving the rafters a second topcoat, as neither dried all day, and created a sticky hazard for fixing the batons, and was a painful waxing technique for knees, trialled by the favourite brother who volunteered the job of fixing said batons to the rafters*.

We had aimed to have the verandah completed by the end of February, although the universe has clearly conspired otherwise. Apart from the rain, this month we also replaced the hotwater system, and will replace the oven. So in the sparetime we didn't have for constructing the verandah, we also did a fair bit of appliance shopping.

We won't know ourselves at the end of next week once the new oven gets installed (Friday), and the roof goes on. I might actually have time to do some craft, that is if I didn't have a work trip to Melbourne. So hey, you might not see us for another week!

*this task involved being up on the roof (ie the beam, rafters and batons), kneeling on the tacky paint, and hammering nails into the batons to fix them to the rafters. Hence waxed knees.