nat and i spent the long weekend in st helens. and in case you were wondering, it was the king’s birthday – not his real birthday of course, he sort of inherited the date from his mother, and from what i understand it wasn’t really her birthday either. anyway, it was a day off so we weren’t massively concerned about the details.
we spent most of the weekend moving furniture form the garage and the shed to the house. part of it was to see how it all comes together, part it’s to ensure the mice (or whatever critters might live in the shed) eat our stuff, and frankly i would like to have access to my shed again, thank you very much.
most of nat’s room has also followed us all the way from frankfurt to sydney to st helens. the bed is new: it has been made by a local craftsman from locally sourced timber. oh, and i made that table a few years ago. it still works, so why not re-use it?
we don’t really have all that much furniture, and especially not new things. these pieces that will now live in the study have been with us for more than 16 years; we bought them in germany and they moved to australia with us.
this piece is new. to be clear, we liked the old one, which was very similar to this couch. however, it appears manufacturers use leather sparingly when they build what is supposed to be a ‘leather couch’. basically all you touch when you sit on the couch is leather, everything else just pretends to be related to cows. this is unfortunate because real animal skin i tough, and plastic is not; as a result the back of the old couch started to disintegrate and that is not a pretty look.
we have a coffee machine for kris & me, a fridge that makes ice cubes for nat, a television to play zelda on, a wood heater to keep us warm (hot actually) and of course internet. what else could one want; it’s the simple pleasures … 😉
the granny flat is also starting to look inviting. this bed fits in fairly well with all the ‘tassie oak’ we have going on throughout the house. i have made the observation elsewhere that i think we should not pretend this timber is something european, when we could be proud that it is really local gum. nothing wrong with that.
we got rid of most of the packaging material (only the cardboard of course) as well, since we already had a burn pile going. lighting massive fires is one of the things rural kids get to do that city kids can’t (at least not legally). nat loves it.
and finally the pavers in front of the house are being layed. this will be a very cosy spot in winter.