Building permits received from Council

GOOD STUFF!
We have now got our building permit from Council and found a person to help build our extension. Andy is an alternative house builder who thinks like we do.
Andy will start with the porch out the front and then move onto the Dining room. I am now in the process of listing all the [...]

Front Garden update

 
 

Kevin carpet laying in the front garden

The front garden progresses. After a futile wait for the various tree loppers in the area to come good with promises of  delivering woodchip mulch a whole 30km’s out of Launceston we finally found a landscape supplier that had a variety of wood mulch products at reasonable prices that [...]

Native trees planted

Emma planting trees

In June our friend Emma came down from Northern NSW to the cold of Tassie to help out for a week. Part of what we wanted to achive was the planting of some native trees and shrubs in a corner of the garden.

Luckily just up towards the Great Western Tiers at Liffey is [...]

Manners meanderings from the Meander Valley

 
 

Wow it is nearlythe end of May and I have not updated the site for a little while. This is not because there has been nothing happening but because there has been so many small things going on.
 

Where to start. Well the insulation we had put into the walls along with the draught proofing  and [...]

Painting the first part of the house continued.

 

First section of the house to be completed

 

I have now completed the painting of the first section of the house. The Rockcote Ecostyle topcoat went on really well, two coats and that was that. We used a British paint colour called Lemon Souffle for the weatherboards,  Manor Red to match the gutters around the windows, [...]

Painting the first part of the house

 
 

The paint arrived from The Designer Paint Company in Melbourne. Mandy & I decided to use Rockcote for the weatherboards. Rockcote is made in Queensland and is non VOC and as environmentally friendly as an acrylic paint can be. After much research we decided on this compromise for the outside as we could not find [...]

Strippers !!!

 

Not what you might think though.  These strippers were environmentally friendly and were being tested on our exterior weatherboards to see which one worked the best before we bought large amounts to remove many layers of paint.

We trialled three different strippers.

Peel Away, a product that you layer on and then cover with a plastic sheeting. [...]

A Swedish Stripper from New Zealand !!

 

The stripper saga continues!
 
After trying various strippers I came across a different kind of stripper from Sweden.  A redhead in fact.
It is called a Speedheater and uses two infrared elements to heat up the paint. Invented in Sweden it is designed to not heat the paint enough to release the plumbic gas which is given [...]

Swedish strippers tale continues

My lovely swedish stripper’s tale is ongoing. I have started to strip a section of the front of the house and it is saving alot of time. With the rail set up it is very easy to use on long runs of weatherboard. While one section is heating I strip the one that has just [...]

Swedish Stripper finishes first act!

 
Well finally I have finished stripping the first section of  the house. I had to use a heat gun on the corners and under the eves. The I-Strip worked really well on the long runs. Being on rails it could heat up a section whilst I was scraping the area that had just been heated. [...]