Seating for the porch.

Hello there

We’ve  all been busy working and so not a lot has been happening around our house but Mr F (lets just call him Fred) has the  school holidays off, perks of being a teacher hey!!.

He’s been busy building us a wonderful seat and cupboards to hide the shoes!!

Here is the porch area before.  The  old Shell boxes were holding the shoes.

The boys gave him a hand.

Doors for the shoe cupboards.

And finally a couple of coats of paint!

We’ve ordered framed micro lattice that will slot nicely into the space at the top.  It’s going to be white and will just give us a little bit of extra privacy.

A nice example of micro lattice.

The cupboards are brilliant and hide all the shoes away.  We don’t wear shoes in our house so the new seating is a perfect place to put on or take off your shoes.

The final thing to complete this area is to decide what to do with the concrete pad.  I’d really like to tile it with some black, grey and white Encaustic tiles but as we’re not very happy with the way dirt and grime sinks into them (despite sealing them TWICE) we’ll have to look for an alternative.

 

 

The extended family members living in the kitchen!

Someone described the suburb we  were about to move to as a “Possum’s paradise”.
Knowing this should have prepared us but what sounded like a pack of dogs running on the roof scared the crap out of us on our first night in the house.

Rosebush and Possum

We have two and only two cupboards in our kitchen and we don’t use either of them. Why? because the insides are gross and had a weird smell, so we just put an old ‘meat safe’ in front to use as a pantry and pretended they weren’t there.

The top cupboard

The substitute pantry hiding the yucky bottom cupboard

I’m not sure which member of the family opened the top cupboard to investigate one day and discovered a possum sitting inside. The top cupboard has the only access to the roof.From the state of the inside of the cupboard it looks like its been a home to many generations of possums.
Now at this point in most people’s stories about possums in the roof, a trap would be borrowed and the possums evicted!

It just never happened. In fact they’ve become part of the family.
Its gone from asking the middle son “have you feed the cats?” to “Have you feed the cats and the possums?”

So one day in winter when we were opened the cupboard ( you have to climb on a chair and stand on the kitchen bench) we discovered that Possum had become a mummy. For the past six months we have all watched  ‘baby’ grow. It’s been really quite special and we’ve enjoyed being able to hand feed and stroke them.  We’ve learnt that they’re actually very clean animals and also very friendly. (they’re not idiots – they get feed).

I’m sure there will be someone reading this who thinks we are doing the wrong thing and interfering with nature and prehaps we are. It’s just been really special being able to share this with my children and its something that I know they’ll remember for a long time.

Until we know what we are doing with the house, we are happy to leave them be.  Apart from coming home every morning around 4.30am and making a bit of a racket.  (I wish we could teach them to tiptoe)  They’re not bothering us at all.