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

chateau le chookie: part deux

Our humble chook pen state of the art poultry facility is finally completed! After 10 months living here at Brindabella and the chook pen being (apparently) high on the priority list we thought it about time our poor hens have somewhere to call home of an evening. (We only got the chooks back recently, they were staying at Mr M's parents prior to that).

Last time you saw Chateau le Chookie it may have resembled something like this, minus the aviary wire which Mr M started doing before I got my camera out!

We'd rammed the posts in, strained the assemblies, put guide wires up for the netting and put a sloping tin roof on half of the pen. Next step was to dig the wire into the ground all the way around the pen to fox proof it. Even though you may think this wire looks fancy and new (and we had taken an oath of using only found materials on the farm to build Chateau le Chookie) this 10mm aviary wire which is usually used for, you guessed it, aviary's, was used to fence off my Dad's new pool area on the garden side to make it kid friendly. So there - we didn't purchase anything!

After the wire was dug into the ground to stop the sneaky Mr Foxsy Loxsy's Mr M screwed tin sheeting we already had lying about to the back wall, enclosing the chookies little house. He also built their raised platform where their perch and nesting boxes would be.

The nesting boxes we put on the outside of the overall structure, with a tilted tin roof to weatherproof and a lift top to easily collect the eggs. Mr M was busying himself making the nesting box extension and then in a panic called me over. "Can you reach in there and get eggs?! Have I made it too high?!" Ah the joys of being 6'5" and thinking the rest of the world is too. It was fine though, I can easily reach in and get the eggs.

After putting the nesting box extension together, fiddling with the lift top, dividers and finding an appropriate stick to be their perch we turned our attention to the door. We put down a little pad of old red bricks to fox proof the doorway as well and hung our old door.

Then the other weekend Mr M and his brother completed Chateau le Chookie with a hinged door into the nesting area and added a little ladder for the little ladies, as well as hooked up their watering system to easily get a drink by themselves.

We used hay straw in their nesting boxes and sawdust on the raised platform. The mesh wire under their perch is so their dropping fall underneath the platform and can be easily collected for my garden! We've noticed a marked improvement on egg production, but the silly chookies don't seem to be able to perch at night and we've been literally putting them to bed of an evening! Any ideas how to make them perch or are they a lost cause? Perhaps the perch is too high or not smooth enough?

Chateau le Chookie I think could just be our greatest construction to date!

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella

the curtains that were!

I'm back with the second installment in my curtain saga...(catch up here if you missed the boat).

So we had our fancy butterfly screws (due to the crummy fibro sheeting the dining room is built out of and worrying normal screws would just pull the wall to shreds), then upon measuring, measuring and re-measuring we realised the screws for the brackets would just be going into studs anyway! Basically I couldn't hang them widey-wide like I wanted to because these curtains were only just going to meet in the middle if we put the brackets on the edge of the window frame (i.e. not about six inches out like I had originally planned). So good-bye fancy butterfly screws, we don't even need you after all.

Up go the brackets. Then we have to measure the rods and cut to size using a hack saw. Because the windows are so wide I had to get two rods per window plus this crazy joiner thing-o. Bobs-your-uncle and rod's are in place.

Up go the curtains. Now, I tried to explain to Mr M that it's 'on-trend' to have extra long curtains that 'pool' on the floor but he just thought it was super dumb. I had to admit they were a tad on the long side, there's 'on-trend' and then there's just plain annoying when you're vacuuming and mopping around them...

I must admit though, things were looking a whole lot better in the dining room, long curtains and all...

But to the sewing machine I must go - hem, hem, hemming! So. Much. Fabric. I ended up cutting 10 inches off the bottom and then putting a one inch hem on them. Let's face it, for some of them I cut too much off (!!!!) and they ended up not skimming the floor. Oops. By this point in the months-and-months-long curtain saga I was over it and just pretty excited to have some curtains hanging, let alone less than desirable length.

Moral of the story? Don't sweat the small stuff, the curtains turned out fine, even if according to my list at the start they don't match up, they are still looking mighty fine! Making our dining room much more homely and cosy like our lounge room.

Happy days :)

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella