I fell in love with an Australian, moved there from Norway in 2011. We got married, bought a house and a dog. Now we travel the world together, one country at the time.
Hi all, just time to give some more renovation photos, as you seem to like them.
Can I just start by complaining a little bit? And YES we all saw this coming, EVERYONE complains a little bit when renovating. The previous house owners really didn't care about their walls. We have to patch and sand hundreds of small holes and dents, before being able to start painting.
Which you can imagine, is starting to get a bit of a pain, as there are plenty of walls in the house. You can look at the photo which shows you one wall that I have patched. Can you see how many spots that needs to be fixed before painting? And this is just one part of one wall!
We are aiming to paint the 3 bedrooms this weekend; hopefully we will have prepared the last bedroom before then. I have fixed all walls in 2 of the bedrooms, and painted an undercoat, so it is ready to be painted. Just wanted to post a before and after photo of one of the rooms, looks way better with an undercoat hey?
Before:
After:
Looks much better already, and this is just after removing the horrible wardrobe doors and with one undercoat.
As you know all of our walls need to be fixed and patched before painting.
My amazing fiancé has been fixing the big holes and errors with the walls while I have been patching over 100 small dents in the walls. I just thought it might be fun to give you some photos of before and after of Lukes’ work :)
This is how it looked like before Luke started. Clearly we do not want to paint over such a poor plastering job.
This is after Luke had cut out the poorly plastered bit and it is now ready to be fixed.
This is a fixed wall, ready to be sanded before putting on new power points.
Last week the settlement came through and we are officially house owners. As it is a renovation project we need to work on it as much as possible so that we can move in as soon as possible. So hope you like renovation photos, because it's going to be a lot of it from now on.
We started renovating this weekend, and I can tell you right now, it is hard work. The house needs so much work and it is hard to know where to start. It's almost impossible to calculate when it will be ready for us to move in, and we might have to move in before it is in the state we want it in.
We decided to focus on the bedrooms, for us to move in quicker and we started on it straight away. We started fixing all the holes in the walls and preping it for painting. We decided on the wall colour after a bit back and forth to the store. We ended up buying 3 colour samples and of cours 3 was our lucky number.
I took a photo of our sample wall, although it's hard to see the different colours on this picture.
Please keep in mind the photo makes the colours look lighter than they actually are. And the horrid colour around (the yellow) is the clolour the old owners had in their living room.
The first colour we tried was a bit purple and it's the sample on top right. After that we tried a green ish colour which you can see on the left side. The colour we ended up choosing is a cold white, with a bit of blue in it. You can see this colour underneath the first colour on the right side.
If you look closely you might si a TINY square with a blue colour just left of the tile, which will be the colour for our feature wall behind the TV in the living room and behind our bed in our bedroom.
We already had purchased the tiles before settlement day, risky but it worked out. In order to see how they will look like in this house, we set them up in a corner. Looks nice hey?
Since last weekend we started to research where to get a Westie and it turns our out it is very rare at the moment. We found one male pup in Queensland, and a couple in Victoria and New South Wales.
Wallace the dog!
As we live in Queensland we chose to call up the people with one pup left and they invited us to come around and have a look. The lady on the phone said they had a lot of people interested and one lady to come and have a look tomorrow morning, which is why we went to have a look straight away. We drove for over an hour down to the Gold Coast to have a look and both Luke and I loved the parents of the pup so we decided to put a deposit in for the dog until we get to pick it up. We bought a dog! A Scottish breed should have a Scottish name, so of course we will name our new family member Wally aka Wallace.
As most of you will know, I had to give my dog away in order to move to Australia and live with Luke. And as you also might know I have been wanting to get a new dog since.
I had set my mind on a King Charles Cavalier but I have now changed my mind. A couple of days ago I found the perfect breed for both Luke and I, West Highland White Terrier.
Decription from a website:
Known to many people as the "Westie," this breed is a small dog but is very well balanced and hardy.
The Westie is a very intelligent dog who loves human companionship both indoors and outdoors. Happy, curious, and always trying to get into the middle of everything, they are considered one of the most affectionate of all the terriers with their also demanding personality-yet can still feel jealousy if their homeland is threatened. . Due to a high need to stay active when awake, sleeping about 13 hours a day is required by the little Westie when they finally collapse.
Intelligent as the West Highland White Terrier is, it is important to understand the whole concept of the Westie personality and essence of who they are. One article says it all, "The Westie is really a big dog inside a small dog's body." The dog has the personality that is spunky, intelligent, bold, independent, lots of self-esteem--and stubborn. These varied qualities of the little Westie terrier breed in mind, will help prepare a person for the beginning "fun of training a Westie."
See a funny movie below, of the little terrier playing with a German Shepherd.
