The continuous ironbark handrail was built in situ, requiring lots of patience, deep breaths and delicate massaging (we’ll get to that in a bit). Finally the staircase was capped off with the installation of the LED strip lights on the underside of the treads. A giant jig was made for the assembly of the balustrade, […]

Bar one… the tiles for the bathroom had eluded us for the entire project so far, everything so far had missed the mark and didn’t fit the aesthetic we had in mind. Finally, after a year of searching, we had a breakthrough and finally found them… full credit goes to Holly on this one, what […]

As the fire season ended I hit the ground sprinting around 120%, cup of tea in hand, thanks to Holly. I figured if I wasn’t going to be able to see dad as often as I wanted to, then I was going to hold up my side of the agreement and make him as proud […]

Once again, the start of the fire season rolled around just as fast as it ended. This time we approach the 2019/20 season, which can only be associated with the most overused word of 2020, “UNPRECEDENTED”. Multiple mega fires spread across Eastern Australia, Covid-19 began running riot across the globe, and yet neither of these […]

AAAND BREATHE Even after achieving so much in such a short period of time, I remember being somewhat disappointed with where the project was at and how it was progressing. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see where the time went. I had established this incredibly high standard and quality of finish from […]

Finally I was able to reap the rewards from all of that hard work spent in the tent over winter thicknessing the floorboards. These were installed on the kitchen wall & ceiling, then on the mezzanine floor upstairs. We stood up the spiral staircase king post, which was welded and bolted to the floor and […]

A good friend Sammy is a fridge mechanic and spent a day plumbing all the pipes through the walls of the house to the future locations of the two indoor split system units. The legendary Serbian concrete magician, Jovan Jovanov, arrived with his unique set of diamond encrusted tools to cut and polish the slab. […]

The bushfire season ended at the end of May 2019 and I hit the ground running. Now it was time to focus on the work inside the house, the space where I felt my skill set was most suited, that of finer woodwork. During the fire season I had spotted a deal on facebook marketplace […]

It was a rather prolonged and drawn out application process that left us in the lurch for months, then, out of the blue and on my birthday, we were both offered interviews. Two months later, the two of us waltzed into the Halls Gap Parks Victoria depot reporting for training and ready to start our […]

For the next month and a half I was like a 10 year old boy frantically playing on a set of monkey bars at the local playground. Undoubtedly the lessons I learnt from this were to embrace the power of modern technology but never neglect that which is tried and true. Conveniently I was still […]