brindabella: one year on

Twelve months and two weeks ago we moved from our cosy little cottage at Ythanbrae to the ramshackle farmhouse here at Brindabella.

We have worked our tails off every weekend, after work, every spare moment we had between busy full time jobs and wedding planning, to make this little abode a home.

I thought I would share some before, during and after photos with you all. Get ready for an onslaught of images...

Before: The back porch (excuse dodgy photo)

After: The back porch today!

Before: The backyard, looking from the shed to the house

After: The backyard, looking from the shed to the house

Before: The backyard, down the path

After: The backyard, down the path

Before: The backyard

After: The backyard

Before: The backyard

After: The backyard

Before: The backyard

After: The backyard

Before: The front driveway

After: The front driveway

Before: The front of the farmhouse

After: The front of the farmhouse

Before: The western side of the house, paddock

After: The western side of the house, now yard

Before: Western side of house, cypress trees, rubbish, rubble and paddock

After: Western side of the house, trees removed, all rocks, sticks, roots picked up, ground levelled, ripped x 3, more rocks, sticks roots, sown and mown

And finally just some 'in progress' shots...

Although we've only been here for 12 months, looking through these photos it has made me think it has been a lot more! But then on the other hand, we do not have a great sense of 'home' here, which I think is so important. So many hours of blood, sweat and tears have gone into transforming Brindabella, and yes we will be walking away from all our hard work when we leave here after our wedding. I am so, so very proud of what we have achieved here though - if nothing else it has been relationship strengthening stuff! 

One day when we do have a place of our own we will look back and laugh at our funny old ramshackle farmhouse we lived in before we were married...

A new adventure awaits.

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella

our beautiful tree

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the big old horse chestnut tree in our backyard makes our house. Absolutely. When we first moved in 12 months ago we had no idea what it was - some sort of oak? A liquid amber? The family who used to farm Brindabella came to the rescue by informing us it was a horse chestnut tree. I'd never even heard of them, on my grandparents farm Ballina Park there are two enormous 80+ year old plain old chestnut trees, but horse chestnuts were...well a different chestnut altogether. My sister recently told me that in London the parks are full of these trees, but the Brits think that these are the real deal chestnuts and the 'regular' chestnut trees are quite the novelty? I don't know...all I know is that they are both beautiful trees. Big, beautiful, strong, shady in summer, crunchy in autumn - just the way I like my trees.

This beauty is estimated to be about 60-70 years old, the elderly gentleman who built the ramshackle farmhouse in 1938 told us he remembers planting it 'Oh sometime in the 40's, love!' It's towering limbs are bare all through the cold Thorpdale winters and spring into blossom come September. 

On Monday I got a phone call from lovely Lou - she lives an hour further away from Melbourne than me and was on her journey home from the big smoke, would I mind popping on the kettle for a quick cuppa and battery re-charge? Of course not! We had tea out by our beautiful tree, chatted about all things weddings and her own beauties - her girls Sunny and Scout - explored my garden and became professional egg collectors. 

Lou arrived bearing a sweet birthday surprise - these lovely roses. I am such a roses girl, and promptly put them in a vase jug to admire and ooh and ahh over (and have been doing ever since)...

But back to the tree...next to the tree stands our 'wishing well'. When we moved here it was covered in goodness knows what (moss, mildew, creepy vines and dead plants in it). We debated whether to push it over entirely but decided to keep it. We then discovered (from the lovely elderly couple who's home this used to be, a wealth of knowledge!) that the 'well' was in fact built to be a kiln. The former lady of the house at Brindabella was a keen ceramicist and would fire her pottery in the 'well' - there is even a vent on the side which made oh so much more sense when we found out it was a kiln! We considered making a water feature out of the well/kiln but ended up filling it with soil and planting it out with petunias earlier in the year, and now strawberries from my generous friend Amy. Alas I think the well/kiln is somewhat lacking in the drainage department and the strawberries are not thriving. We'll see...

The beautiful tree has shades us for spring and summer barbeques under it's branches and produces lovely crunchy leaves through Autumn. I gaze at it from the kitchen sink, play with Tessa beneath it and look upon it as somewhat of a guardian of the ramshackle farmhouse. I especially love the initials carved into it's big knotted trunk - I wonder the stories this tree would tell if it could talk?

Love you long time our beauty, we will miss you terribly also. So many things to miss, but so many things to look forward to.

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella

potato planting

The show must go on here at Brindabella, regardless of the fact we are leaving. And so planting time has rolled around again on the farm...

Mr M has been doing a lot of tractor work of late, early mornings and late nights to work around the rain, ho-ing with the big new fancy rotary hoe.

The idea of growing potatoes is fairly simple really. I'm always surprised how many people ask me how to grow potatoes. Well...you get a potato...you put it in the ground...you wait. Ok so there's a lot more to it than that, but you get the general jist.

We use certified seed (from seed growers, not ware growers like us who grow potatoes you actually see in Woolies and Coles and end up eating). First you can see Mr M in his tractor going along and hoe-ing the earth, preparing it to plant the little 'taties. Then our farm manager Rod goes along in his tractor with the planter on, filled with the certified seed potatoes. We use un-cut seed, meaning a whole potato is put in the ground, some people use 'cut seed' which we used to do when I was growing up (back in the good ol' days). Cut seed is now seen to let more diseases into the potato as they have exposed flesh, but a lot of people still use cut seed - some say pot-ah-toes some same pot-ey-toes! Next my Dad goes along in his tractor and 'moulds' or 'bed forms' the rows. 

Dad pacing out and counting the rows

This is on the south side of Brindabella, across the Narracan Creek - you can see the ramshackle farmhouse over on the hill there...

Mr M on the left ho-ing, Rod on the right planting

With a little bit of luck these spuddies will be poking their little green shoots out of the ground in no time, given some spring showers and sunshine. Then they will grow big and tall, flower and die, we will harvest, work the earth again and sow down to pasture before the whole process starts again.

All in a days work. Ok, enough of the tractor photos already...

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella  



construction destruction

Amidst all the painting going around here our handy man on the farm, Woody, has been getting busy around the farmhouse also. First stop: the carport roof.

Oh dear. Here you can see the new corrugated tin Woody is putting on instead of the older tin which had zero drainage. To begin with we thought we were going to have to put a whole new slant on the roof (meaning bit of a bigger job) but with the corrugated tin instead of the older flat style tin and without the cypress trees next to the carport to drop a heap of leaves, branches and gunk on the roof we decided no bigger slant was needed.

Here's how rotten the wood was though after zero drainage. Poor Mr Woody nearly went straight through the old roof!

And here it is mid-construction. New roof (left), old roof (right). Aaaahhh new roof...

Due to the carport roof drainage issues we had some serious problems in the storage room at the back of the carport. We had three buckets in there to contain the leaks but with all the rain this season it was at times fruitless, which kind of defeated the purpose of having a handy storage room if all the furniture and things were going to get wet anyway! So Woody fixed that with the new roof, no more buckets - hurruh! 

A few months ago Mr M picked up a cheap window from a nearby town's old supermarket (he's nifty like that). It was almost the perfect size to replace the carport storage room's old louvre windows, half of which were smashed so basically the whole window needed replacing anyway. Woody was all over that job too (he's nifty like that).

Next stop: the back porch. Once upon a time our back porch had a little skylight, I'm sure in it's hey day it looked a little like it does now, but when we arrived at the farmhouse we hardly even knew it existed. The laser-light was black with grime and slime and filth - totally defeating the purpose of it being above the kitchen window to allow light into the dark cave of a room. It also had some drainage issues, making the surrounds rotten and harbouring some serious water. Woody cut me up some brand spanking new laser-light and popped that in too. I can not tell you how much it has brightened my cave-like kitchen. Amazing.

Next stop: the front porch guttering. Drainage issues again. Guttering basically doing nothing, falling off and needing replacing. So rather than having the painters paint bad guttering we had Woody fix 'er up. Inevitably, Woody pulled it apart and found it was a much bigger problem and ended up having to replace most of the front porch bearers and framing due to all the rotten wood. But at least it's done now.

Notice how the house colour closer up looks more taupe than grey?? It's weird. Driving up the driveway I kind of don't like it, it's far too grey, but up close and next to the white windows it's exactly what I wanted. My mum thinks it's because I don't yet have much garden up against the house. I think it will look different again when the painters finally finish and the base boards are the darker double strength to 'ground' the house. What do you think?

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella

an update

Now that you're all up to date with the wedding plans, I thought you might like to see how things around the ramshackle farmhouse are progressing. Be warned this post is photo heavy so have you got a cup of tea in front if you? Go and get one, and settle in over the long weekend.

Here is a look at the front of the house not long after we moved in, close up and a bit further back...

 

The jungle. Thigh-high grass, rickety old fence, absolute wandering mess of a garden, mostly all dead or half-dead shrubs, about five trees where only two should be and ivy creeping everywhere. Not to mention what was actually lurking beneath all that grass (concrete, scrap metal, plastic bags, general rubbish, ugh). 

With a lot of elbow grease, weekend after weekend of demolition and back breaking root-pulling and rock-picking-up, it now looks something more like this...

The addition of the 'west wing' has totally transformed the property. When we came here the western side of the house was actually the boundary of the paddock (i.e. no fence, just sheep rubbing themselves up against the house, and we'd have to keep that little garden gate near the tanks closed to avoid meeting a ram at the dining room window for breakfast). There was a stand of 14 cypress trees, amongst other dead fallen trees, which we demolished along with the little brick hothouse. Here is a view of the western side of the house soon after we moved in...

After ripping out the cypress trees, pulling out the 38 (!!!) tree stumps, spending hours upon hours of picking up roots, rocks, concrete, and metal, and then finally spraying it, ripping it, picking up more rocks/roots/rubbish and ripping again, then sowing...well you get the picture but just in case you don't here's a play-by-play of the action. Oh and we erected the mother of all fences somewhere in there as well. In 40+ degree heat. Around the entire house yard perimeter. Bah!

 Until we ended up (eight months later) with something that looks like this...

*Insert ooh's and ahh's and huge sighs of relief from me and Mr M*. We finally feel as though we are starting with a clean slate - things to do now are new things, not fixing up old mistakes or generally cleaning up other people's mess! I cannot tell you how happy this makes us - we did a little happy dance once the western wing was finally 'completed'...for now anyway.

The front yard has also had a bit of an overhaul. Here's what it looked like after we moved in, after we had battled our way through that thigh-high lawn...

And this is it now....

Here is the backyard the day we moved in...

And here it is now, after pulling out the fence, cutting off the piping around the wishing well, making the garden bed twice as big with extra rocks and topsoil, pulling out all the dead ferns and jungle-grass from said garden bed, mulching said garden bed, planting pretty plants and giving the camellias and lonely rhododendron a prune...

Some progress shots of battling through the jungle....(yeah that's Mr M mowing a strip of lawn in order to get our furniture in when we moved in)

And here is a shot of the backyard looking back towards the house from the sheds, across the garden bed which we doubled in size (originally it had the fence along one side, which we pulled out and added more rocks to make a bigger garden area).

We easily forget what the place was really like when we first moved in, but looking back through these photos has really hit home just how much we have done. But there's still so much more to do!! These first eight months are just the beginning...

To see more garden progress posts you can go here. 

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella