A House of a Different Colour!

THE PAINTING HAS BEGUN! After a month of more of scraping back the worst outdoor area of the house (the ugly room and kitchen) we painted it with undercoat two days ago, and then today A put two coats of our chosen mustardy yellow on. It looks amazing! it took all day to do just that area, although he did do two coats which rather effectively doubled the time it took.

I spent the day trying to maintain some semblance of order indoors, which is complex when you have a teething baby and you haven't slept well for 6 nights. Nonetheless I managed to wash and fold lots of clothes and completely reorganise the system in the boy's wardrobe.

The chooks are slowing their laying now that the weather is cooling down, but today we got an extremely long egg, and a small one. I think the phantoms are living on borrowed time now, they both look rather elderly and haven't laid a single egg (today withstanding) for a month or more. The emus are laying less, too. We have plenty of insulation on their shed but apparently they're quite hardy in cold weather and it's hot weather that they dislike.

Summer is in death throes at the moment. Yesterday and today were so lovely and warm, but you can feel the change in season is coming. Soon we'll have the doors on the hothouse closed tightly!

A climbed up on the roof to clean the chimney because we weren't sure if the fire was working very well. Turns out ... we were right. He stuck a rope to both ends of a chimney cleaning brush and he and Dad pulled it up and down, but in the process A dislodged the flue. It was a very dicey procedure to get it back in, it involved unscrewing the top plate on the inside of the fire and wriggling it around lots until it wouldn't wriggle anymore. Finally it went back in though, and A decided that it might not have been in there properly to begin with, which would explain why the fire wasn't burning well. We suspect the last people who lived here tried to clean it, dislodged the flue and didn't know, or couldn't work out how to get it back in place. Now it's burning beautifully! We have plenty of firewood to last winter, and that's largely due to the fact that A bought a raffle ticket and we won second prize which was 3T of wood.

I keep meaning to update on Vinnie! He is finally settled in and for the most part behaving himself very well. He's toilet trained, and is still learning to walk on a lead but doing better.