Silver Birch

 

The departed birch grove in winter as painted by author.

Oh Bother!

'Oh bother' and other words, we have neighbours, it was expected but the beautiful garden created by the previous owner has been 'strip mined' by the new owners, who have sliced and diced and sold off the bits.
The only beneficial thing is they are going to be very nice houses so the local valuations will rise, mmmm....
A pity the grove of Silver Birches have gone, as they made quite nice subjects to paint.
We have been planting trees to disguise and soften the outlook and have planted a Leland Cypress hedge and a few Blossom trees together with about 50 Hornbeam's.
Now all we have to do is wait, the good thing is as long as you can keep up watering, trees in this area grow very quickly, well relatively.

Progress

A reward, for a day of  gardening, was sitting on the deck at 7pm surveying the fruits of your labour.

Code Compliant

At last the house building has had it's final tick of approval, with the building inspector giving us the final pass on the barn and house.
For the last few days we have been finishing off all the little jobs that have been waiting for the "I'll get around to it".
Well it's now all done!

Oh, So Slow!!!!

The refitting of 'the boat' is moving really slowly but the head lining is now almost finished, only a couple of finishing trims to be fitted.
You can see it now looks a bit better than the original state that I received it in, the old porthole surrounds have been reversed and used to finish the inside lining.
I have to keep looking at the original pictures to remind me that it's getting finished, if a bit slowly...

Who Do You Think I Am?

Your a dog!
Yesterday Mr & Mrs DIY needed to take the van/truck to collect some gardening stuff from the plant shop, Oscar (dog) who normally is the first in line to go for a ride, was told to get in the back.
Normally he's allowed to ride up front, decided that the back was not the right place for him, sniffed, walked away and sat on the front step to wait our return.

What Happened To Global Warming?

We have had Summer, then Autumn which with a few exceptions was very mild, then an early spring, the blossom has started to come out, the daffodils were blooming, and we seemed to have missed winter altogether.
Then just as we were thinking about the arrival of an early summer, NZ, was hit by a polar blast, direct from the Antarctic for the past week.
Almost all of NZ was covered.
A big surprise, this is the first time our little village of Martinborough has had such a dump of snow, the last was over 70 years ago according to some locals.

The Big Jigsaw

Trying to remember how I was planing to reconstruct the cabin lining, that I had cut out and fitted, deconstructed, then painted over 4 months ago, was a little like putting a giant jigsaw together,
I had numbered all the pieces so it would be a simple matter to rebuild it but in the rush to get it finished, 'someone' had painted over the coding system, oh bother!
Many hours of crawling around on the floor and the lining is back in some sort of order.
Luckily I have the gallery to set it out. I only had just got it back after emptying all the stored furniture. and now it's once again changed from a gallery to a boat building workshop.
Mrs DIY is 'really pleased' with the change.

Back To The Project

Well I've decided to redo the electrics again, didn't like the way I had done the original fix.

The cabin head lining problem has been solved, I'm using wooden T& G, this will make sure we won't have the the return of the Westerly sag!I think it will work better than the original vinyl lining, plus it will give some extra space to run the electric cables to the mast and the main cabin lighting.

The NZ $ is very high at the moment, which means all the imported bits have come down in price, so had a big spend yesterday and purchased the 2 radios, one for communication the other for music.

Had a call from the 'nice man' from Volvo letting me know that the new motor was now on 'special' sometimes things do go in your favour.

Electrics

The progress on the boat has been a bit slow, over the past few months but I've started the 'interesting job' of new electrics.
The wiring has been all stripped out with all the bits that had been added over the years removed, installing, new board, wire, switches and lighting system (LED).
The LED lights in the boat, if they are all switched on will draw less than one of the original lights.