Backyard - Stage 1 - Weeds, weeds, weeds

The problem with weeds is they take FOREVER to get rid of. We've been hacking away at our backyard since we've lived here and it was only quite recently that I feel like we've made a breakthrough. Above you can see our wire fence down the side of our backyard absolutely covered with weeds. The right hand side fence was lush with green weeds whereas the back fence had so many weeds on it they'd competed and competed and killed each other off. Fabulous. Less work for us disentangling them from the wire!

Ta Da! We finally finished the other weekend! Now you can see the fenceline all the way down. A number of people have asked me why I want to be able to look straight into the neighbours yard (and vice versa). The fact of the matter is that while the weeds were a pretty good screen they were ugly. They were also so over run that nothing was ever going to grow. Ever.

My favourite part is being able to see through our fence into the bush reserve behind our house. One of the many reasons we bought the house in the first place. You can see here where we had a bonfire to burn out a tree stump right in the middle of the back part of the yard.

So let's talk about The Vines. Unbeknownst to us when we first started weeding was the incredible amount of vines running through every square centimetre of the yard. Here's what I'm talking about.

Every handful brings up tangled vines that criss cross over each other and require a whole lot of muscle to pull out of the ground. Here's one section of our backyard complete with side fence.

And here is the pile of vines that got pulled out.

I kid you not this backyard is going to take forever to fix up. But at least we have a little helper to eat the clover!

Dining Room - Stage 1 - Painting in Teal

It's a funny thing choosing paint colours. All the colour pallets and colour swatches in the world can't prepare you for what your final wall colour is going to look like. We spent a whole lot of time looking at colours online and taking fistfuls of colour swatches from Bunnings every time we visited (and we visit a LOT these days). In the end it boiled down to one conversation while sitting in the dining room trying to put into words what colour we wanted. At the time there was a pile of junk mail on the dining table and we flicked through to match the colour we were trying to put into words when we realised our perfect colour was sitting right in front of us on our mantelpiece.

We received this as an engagement/housewarming gift from a friend of mine. It's a sort of money box where you're meant to put in only gold coins and smash it open once it's full to spend it on something really nice for your house. We loved the colour of this bottom stripe so much we took it on an excursion to the paint shop to match it. We came back with the following two shades knowing that what we wanted was more halfway between these colours. We let it dry properly overnight but still weren't super confident the next morning when we stared down the wall.

So off we went again to get more fists full of swatches when, just as we were about to leave to go buy paint for another room, I found this colour and fell in love. It was exactly what we wanted. Not too green, not too blue and brighter and deeper than our test colours. We knew it was the right colour as soon as we painted it on the wall and the rest is history.

Teal Vortex - Taubmans Endure

So what did we have to do to get our Dining Room ready for all this? We sanded down the walls quite vigorously and then sugar soaped them.

Josh realised just after this that we couldn't actually sand our ceiling back because the paint just wanted to flake off and fall to the ground. So that's what we did. Got some scrapers, stood up on the tall ladder and scraped every last scrap of paint off the ceiling until we were left with the plaster underneath.

Thanks to the guy at the local paint shop we were recommended a sealer to paint on the plaster so the paint would actually stick and not be sucked into the plaster. So it was at this stage that Josh sealed the ceiling. We let that dry overnight and the next day did a coat of ceiling white and let that dry while we started painting the feature wall/s. It was a bit tense because it went on as this milky blue but slowly it dried into this deep, vibrant teal that was exactly what we wanted.

We ended up doing 3 coats of ceiling white, 2 coats of the teal for the feature walls and 2 coats of duck white quarter on the other walls (not pictured here). It's a nice neutral colour without looking too white.

In the end we managed to get a perfect contrast to this orangey/red artwork that hangs above the fireplace. Josh's grandfather developed poster design for a local supermarket in the 1940s and we salvaged this poster from Josh's grandfather's garage the last time we visited. We couldn't be happier with the colours.

And look what we got for buying all our paint! Woohoo!

Stay tuned for the next exciting installment - making a light fixture for above the dining room table...or maybe making blinds for this room? Let's see where our decisions take us shall we?