Then and now

Each time I see this picture I wonder if I should have looked further than Whakatane when I moved from Auckland, this is such a magical scene, as I was driving through Karetane I took a walk by the harbor and just so peaceful, we are so fortunate in this country to have such a choice.
That was back then in December.
Now we are May and I have been so busy for 11 weeks getting this bathroom and bedroom ready, I am now wondering how to keep busy to keep warm as our weather has cooled and at the same time take it easier than the past weeks have been as I am feeling some what worn out and could do with a few days laying on the beach above however it will be a bit cooler now than it was in December, if you look closely I still have some trim to put in place around the top of the walls, another coat of varnish on the floor and shelves then a cupboard to build to finish off the bathroom.
It has happened much faster than the first bathroom as we now have a long term boarder staying in the house and I wanted some sort of comfort in the house and not a building site atmosphere with a layer of dust settling through out the house each day even though I kept the doors closed.

This passage and the bathroom were once a small bedroom, now the bedroom that was created by by extensions to the house in 1984 feels very large with room for a settee in the corner on the right, the ceiling in this room is the only one in the whole house that was worth leaving in place I did replace the hall ceiling and in the process dropped it down to 2.4 meters high the result was I had to hide the discrepancy this I did by taking the ceiling cove across and butt the hall ceiling into the back of it, doing this reveled the ends of the ceiling cove in the hall this was made to look good with a bit of sand paper wrapped around a pipe, all that remains to be done is to re-carpet the whole house, its not the whole house as 2 bedrooms have exposed tawa wooden floors as do both bathrooms, someone has told me tawa used to be known as poor mans pine, I think the grain of tawa is far more interesting than pine and the colour has more depth and variety.