Passion of our garden

We bought 2 bromlaids from a community function they looked as if they had just been stuffed in some soil with the hope they would sell I had my doubts about there future but for the price and the fact it was a community fund raiser I bought and they have lived under the lemon tree for a few weeks now, obviously they like being under the lemon tree and are now putting on a lovely show of pink and getting bigger every day.

Next door the passion fruit is enjoying its spot in the garden as I am picking up about 6 fruit a day that get sweeter as time goes by.

We have now pulled out most of the pumpkins and all of the marrows

this photo is of a harvest that we could not use so was taken to Auckland for distribution, the mass of leaves in this photo conceals about 20 more pumpkins that we are hoping will keep till we can use them.
The pumpkins had grown over the top of all the other plants but nothing seems to have suffered much and after a few days are stood up enjoying the sunshine again.

We have eaten most of our evening meals out on the deck enjoying looking at the wonders of the food producing plants, I don't enjoy looking at the cracked damaged foot path the old worn deck the awful paint job on the hand rail, and as I now have 2 weeks when I don't want to be making a mess in the house the deck replacement seems to be a good way to spend a couple of weeks, I expect it will be more than 2 weeks as I will integrate it with having some concrete laid between the house and garage, I have cut off the corner of the deck to see if we like the look and think by doing this it will give us more room to get the cars in and out, I plan on not
having the present stair arrangement so the next posting on this blog could be a whole different look.

To clean the outside

To clean the outside we use a shower as we think a bath is a thing of the past and who would want to bathe in their own dirt, and finally we have one that is big enough and I am not always bashing my elbows on the mixer tap.
As is usual I still have some finishing to do but I can see this room being finished soon, there are some bits of trim around the ceiling to put up and the floor to varnish, the floor has been a big job as I have used all reclaimed floor boards doing my best to clean them up, I have drilled out the nail holes and used them where possible to re fix with screws then use wooden plugs over the screws I have used a 12mm plug so I was able to drill out as much of the dirty stains left by rusty nails this means that the line of plugs is not straight as would have been nice but in an old house you can't have everything.
The white tile on the walls is a cement based board with a polyester coating in the form of tiles the sheet size is 2.4 X 1.2 and in most instances have not cut well so there is a lot of waste, the dark half wall matches the wall opposite and is a wood grain, the wall on the other side seems to have come lighter over the past few months since I installed it and now looks more red and less black and that I like.
In the last post I showed the brackets and steel inserts to carry the weight of the glass and it has all worked out to my plan, the glass sits about 8mm inside the shower tray up stand and is about 10mm lower than the top of the step so there is no water getting out as it runs down the glass and drips of into the tray, now the door is much further away as it is a slider that slides on the inside so there is a gap of almost 50mm and the water is bouncing up off the tray and the step is wet after a shower but not the floor its a small problem and overall is very successful.
I would like to think the dark wood draw cabinet will not be staying in the room as there are too many wood types and colours in the room it is at the moment convenient but one day I would like to use the off cuts from the wall panels and make a cupboard, that could be a way off yet.  

 

A working holiday

I think I am always on holiday and when on holiday I choose what I do.
I made a new door frame it has deeper rebates so I hope it is more draft proof come the winter I have made provision for some brush seals that I will install when I have given it a final coat of oil, it is another job that is not quite finished but so much better than what was there the door fits in the frame and the frame is well painted and to my eye looks pleasing.
Working on the door was a fill in job till I felt ready to get on with the new shower and have been slowly getting the shower tray ready for the big day when I will pull out the the old shower and I think we will be without a shower for a few days.

In this picture I show the stainless steel plate buried in the timber that the brackets are bolted to, there are 4 brackets to take the weight of the glass, the white plastic is s protective covering on the stainless that I will remove when all is finished you can also see the 20mm ply glued to the back of the stainless steel so it will be solid to stand on, the step will be outside the glass so should never get wet as the glass will hang down below the step and the water will just drip off the bottom edge.
In the background is one of 2 panels that will cover the top half of the wall above the toilet with the white tile on the bottom half, behind the toilet I have started to make a pattern that I will use to cut the sheet that will cover that wall I wanted to be sure I cut the hole for the window in exactly the right place as I have very little tolerance, I also have a bunch of floor boards ready to lay under the toilet that but up against the shower tray, in this picture you can see I now have the wall lining on behind the sink and above the window.
The old shower can be seen to the left and is a 900mm X 700mm tray the wall linings are also very damaged and past there use by date the new tray is 1200mm X 900mm and will have a sliding glass door.
I have had my last shower in that shower and am pleased it has only been 14 months since we moved in and it will be only a memory documented here.

Preparations

The side of the carport has had some attentions and is looking all that I hoped it would, there will be a gap at the top and there are still 2 more pieces to be painted and screwed in place to add some protection to the car this may not happen for a while as I would need to remove it when I do some concrete work but then it is looking so nice I want to get it finished, the corrugated tin is what I have rescued from the garage roof and cleaned up hoping it will last a few years, the rusty top side I have put to the inside after grinding and priming the rust areas so the good under side is out to the 
weather, the 2 opening windows came from one of the house windows and has been fixed in the wooden framing, this enables me to see out into the garden and monitor the rapid growth of some of our veges, we could not eat the marrow fast enough and gave many away we have plenty of pumpkins so we hope they will keep into the winter.
While I waited for the shower tray to be made I thought I would touch up the new secondhand door for the back of the house, the weather had got into the coating on the bottom of the door and thinking I could touch it up started to give it a light sand around the affected areas only to find the top coat just flaked away leaving a very hard first layer, I knew that top layer would just keep falling away as it had not adhered to the hard first coating so I set about to strip the whole one side including making a new shape on the panels as the original profile was to difficult to clean up successfully, its an 8 panel door that I spent about 8 hours scraping and sanding and that is only one side, I now have a new door frame that has some brush strip down both sides, the wood leaning against the door is matai and was the window sill to the window in the front of the garage till a year ago it is a lovely rich piece of wood and must be very old looking at the growth rings and the window it came from was old it will be clear coated the frame

will be painted white and the door will match the beams over the deck.
The shower tray has a protective white plastic coating over the stainless steel, I have embedded 6mm stainless steel in timber and filled up the step then glued triangle ply panels to the back side of the tray and created as much fall as possible towards the water drain I have bolted stainless steel brackets on the step for the glass panels to sit on, there will be a fixed side glass panel and a fixed front panel then a sliding door about 600mm wide.
More on this next time.
 

My Cmas present

The Christmas present to myself is a completed carport roof, and thanks to my supplier it did happen before the 25th, I did not expect they would be able to get the roofing delivered at this time of year and felt cheeky asking but was told it would be there in store on the 23rd mid day and having my sons help we had 2/3 fixed on by the end of the day leaving me to fix the 2 clear sheets and 3 sheets of tin on the 24th next year I will need to get some cappings for the ends and think about how to close in some of the side.
By having the clear lite over the garage window I now get more
light on to the work bench in the garage that has been much needed.
I think I was snapped doing a celebratory dance and the other one was laughing at me as he is unaccustomed to seeing me dance or was it my fancy dress?
I would have liked more head room, I did manage to lift the high side about 70mm, I didn't want an internal gutter or to have the side too open so without lifting the garage roof this is what we have to have.

Rather than put a 75mm X 45mm over the top of the rafters I have put 140mm X 45mm between them these came from the old roof and are still good timber by doing it this way I have gained 45mm more head room and while that is not much in this case every little helps and I was able to use the timber that we pulled out of the old construction and at the same time cut out a lot of the bad parts.
The view from the kitchen window is now much more pleasing.
Have a enjoyable Cmas, and best wishes for 2016.

Carport roof

It was a dirty rotten mess that has been added to over many years much of it using second hand materials, the roof had holes in it and leaked I had covered it up with tin from the garage when I roofed that and it still leaked it was a sore sight from our kitchen window.
I have lifted the high side of the roof as much as I could and the low side is the same as much as I would have liked it higher, the steel posts at the front part are still good and strong and one post at the back there is an area that I will fill in and as I write this I think steel posts may be an option, for the side I am thinking I will use the tin that came from the garage roof and house roof there is a few good sheets and I will only go two thirds high and leave the top open on the front area, there is new tin coming for the roof today and it will have 2 sheets of clear plastic towards the back that will let some light into the garage window.
The steel post that were set in concrete many years ago are not in line and look as if they moved as the concrete was poured I have tried to pull the top of the post straight so the beam looks right, there will be no gutter as the ground is so porous the rain off the garage just soaks away and we hope it soaks towards the vege garden the passion fruit is too far away to feel the effect but as can be seen is doing very nicely with the water we give it, some are not as green as they were but eating days are a way off yet, we are getting a strawberry each most days and I have had 2 tomatoes the courgettes have been a bumper harvest to many to eat and there is a lot of pumpkin swelling up out there.  

Red better than Blue

We have changed the blue curtain for red ones that slide so nicely, the blue one is neatly folded away ready for the next mission, the lounge is finished and a pleasure to use, the carpet will one day be a pale grey or something, I still have some painting to do outside around the new door, the wall with the portrait needs painting and there is some skirting missing, why dose this sound like its not finished another job not finished, but then more finished than it was before and clean and usable for the day I intend to have off on Cmas day.

My son looked as if he wanted a project I only had scraps of jobs to do we are having fine warm weather and the carport looks ugly and dirty the roof is rotten and leaks some of the wood is rotten it has been a good carport and it could be better, we started late in the day but by the end of the second day it has all gone into a pile on the lawn and the side of the garage has 3 new sheets of ply on it, I am told I can have new roofing iron in 5 days time that I hope is about all I need to get some new woodwork up to fix the new iron to,
5 days and that will be just before everything closes for the Cmas holidays so here is hoping it is sitting here waiting for me and that I am not sitting here waiting for it to arrive, looking at how the carport has been constructed tells me it has grown over the years until it is as long as the garage the back portion being used as a wood shed for the house fire, the ground around here is very soft and porous allowing water to soak away very quickly and the idea of the pebble path is that we won't have any gutter to the roof.
It is very nice having a helping hand.