It has been brought to my attention that I have been somewhat remiss in sharing progress pics. Therefore, I present pics of our progress:

The kitchen benchtop was installed

It has fossils in it 🙂

The painting in the lounge room, kitchen and hallway was done and the floors were finished.

We moved our stuff back from my mum’s place

Filled all the cupboards

Had a splashback installed

And I’m completely thrilled with my new kitchen and can now not imagine how I survived 11 years with the disaster area we had before.

When the downstairs laundry/bathroom was finished Adam and I kept going in and just standing there looking in amazement at how well it had worked out. What had once been an open space at the bottom of the stairs in which the washing machine and dryer did not quite fit, next to a half-finished bathroom with a leaking loo, a concrete floor with holes in it, pipes for a shower and vanity but no fixtures (and no room for those things had they been put in) and a stupid bifold door alongside the loo into the next room, now looks like this:

It is making us very happy, especially the bit where we now have a shower on the same floor as our bedroom and no longer have to drag ourselves upstairs to go to the loo in the middle of the night.

The upstairs bathroom was the next project. It has gone from this

Via this

To this

We were a little worried about whether it was wise to try and fit so much into a fairly small space

and there’s not a lot of elbow room as you walk in past the shower, but it seems to have worked out ok and the bath, oh my, the bath! Our old bath was narrow and shallow, and when I got in, the water got out, but the new bath, well 🙂

Adam has been slowly working on getting the rest of the doors stained and varnished and all the architraves and skirting boards done. The hallway to the kids’ rooms, once like this

now looks like this

and Adam has spent a good few hours of Fathers Day doing more of the same

A few weeks ago work started on the backyard landscaping. This coincided with me getting the flu so I failed to take any proper before pics. We said goodbye to the cubby house, it has gone to live in our landscaper’s yard I believe, his kids being a good few years younger than ours.

The enormous and still growing rapidly Norfolk Island pine in the back corner – of which I don’t seem to have any photos, other than its lower branches showing up in photos of other stuff – was cut down while I was at work so I didn’t get any cool in progress shots of that either.

Lower branches and trampoline spot lurk in the background of this fabulous shot of me taking aim (sort of, don’t know what I’m looking at!) with a red bird, an act of concentration that apparently requires my tongue to poke out.

The transformation of the backyard:

Next up putting some green stuff around the place and sticking a shed on that concrete slab.

And that, my dear readers, is where we’re at now. Still LOTS to do but the most stressful stuff is over and done with and we’re very, very happy with the results so far.