Fixin' stuff

The last few years have seen us doing some hefty renovations - the kitchen, pizza oven, shed, solar hot water and then solar power, goat yard, other fencing etc.  So this year, we decided to take a break from big changes and building projects and focus on maintenance and repairs. Of course, that was before someone suggested a property to look at, before we decided to homeschool our kids and before this years bunch of 'great ideas' popped into my head!

But we're still trying to keep a lid on major renovation type projects and repair and care for what we have.  This has meant washing the weatherboards (all that dirt and dust was masking our pretty white house), touching up the chipped architraves in the hallways, cleaning the parts of the house that don't get much of a cleaning look in usually, pruning trees and shrubs that have grown too big and more. Our maintenance list was quite extensive when we wrote it at the start of the year, and it is, sadly, not getting shorter even though we've been working on it every week. 

It seems our house heard that we were fixing stuff this year, and with a groan, decided to show us a few older fixtures that needed replacing or fixing. Our water pump isn't working properly, the skylight in the bathroom decided (in last week's rainstorm) to pour water onto  the bathroom floor and the little old (really really old) portable room heater that carried us through last winter when our central heating had died, tried to cause a fire - so we had to make a decision about a new heater. 

So it's been a busy time around here, and looks like it won't be letting up for a while. But we have made the decision to stay here and each one of these little problems reminds me that if we had moved house, we would have been finding so many more problems and household idiosyncrasies than what we are finding here - at least here, we know what we're dealing with.