Wednesday was a day of very wet showers, that kind of drizzle that soaks you too the skin. With the showers came the rainbows.
Our house is over there somewhere behind the trees. I am hoping that the pot of gold might be hidden in our garden.
Alas not be, no pots of gold in our garden. 
We are halfway through the study makeover - at the moment it is a spare room for our guest. That is not a ghostly apparition through the window. Just Peter and my middle son moving furniture. 
Soon the bed will be stripped out, the floor varnished, shelves in and desks built. Or at least I hope so.
We had a visitor staying with us last week. We tried to show her some of the Hawkes Bay sights.
The view from the top of Te Mata Peak is one that should not be missed. Peter usually does the trip, I am a coward. But Peter was working, and I knew the weather was going to change. So I decided we should just go for it, and the view is so worth it.
You also see some strange sights up there.
Buddist monks and people just running and jumping off the edge.
The other day, while hanging out the washing, I noticed a very large bird in the gum tree. At first I thought it was some large bird of prey. So I got out my trusty camera and sneaked up for a closer look. It was the largest pigeon I have ever seen in my life. It was fatter than our cat Buffy. Apparently the New Zealand Pigeon is a very large bird.
The walls of the study have been stripped, filled, sanded, primed and painted. The curtains are back up. And a new lamp shade has been installed. A lamp shade with cut out daisies on it - how could I resist. Now when the light is on there are daisies all over the walls.
All I need to do now is sand down the bed and repaint it, before our visitor comes next week. The study is going to be a spare bedroom for a week, before being converted back into the study.
Do you remember the lovely door that I bought that was a little too short. Well I have been clearing out and selling the doors I did not want. I really did not want to part with this one and was hoping it would end up somewhere where it would be appreciated. Not in my wildest imaginations did I think it would end up going to the place it headed off to today. 
Do you recognise the building at all ........... yes my lovely door is heading down to Wellington to be part off an exhibition in Te Papa the national museum. They are setting up a display of life in the 1940's and wanted a door, and bought mine. I was so excited about this, not only will it have a good home, but also it can be admired by lots of people. The exhibition will be on for 10 years. I want to go down to see it when it is installed, and will sneak some photos of it in postion.
What I was meant to be doing was rubbing down the walls to get rid of some of the bumps and removing the small lumpy, lose bits of wallpaper, ready to fill the tiny gaps and rub them down later. As seen in the above picture. Well that does not look to hard you may be thinking. Unfortunately I got a bit carried away, Peter was a bit surprised when he came home.
Over the last few mornings I have been struggling to wake up. Peter gets up at 6am then comes back to bed, and says to me its just after 6am you can go back to sleep for a while. So I do. But I forget to do the waking up later bit, until too late. I now have a lovely new alarm clock installed at the side of my bed. Hopefully tomorrow I will be up on time.
The large lump of rimu we bought yesterday has been cut, shaped, sanded, oiled and installed in place. Another finished section and another section that looks even better than I thought it would. And thankyou to Julz for her comment on the tiles. The whole idea has now been reject. We will just have to wait till we can find some more lumps of rimu on Trademe.
Of course now the end is in sight in the kitchen I have started eyeing up the next project. The study/sewing room/spare bedroom. We have lots of plans. It has taken me weeks to remove all the junk from the room and it is almost clear. Maybe this weekend I will start, and be glad to get rid of the dark green at last.
Its looking really good don't you think, one side finished at last. I am pleased at how it looks after so many months of planning and waiting. We managed to buy another large lump of rimu from TradeMe. The bidding went right up to my limit and stopped, thankfully. This bit was a workbench from Hastings Intermediate. We are going to use it as benchtops for the island unit and the bit beside the stove.
The tiles below are a mad idea I had for the rest of the benchtops. What do you think. At the moment I am veering too no, but may be swayed. Please leave a comment.
Now that Winter is here and along with it, lots and lots of rain, its good too remember how beautiful Autumn looked.
The kitchen makeover is still going on. Very slowly, but still moving. We bought the two cabinets below, secondhand very cheaply, flipped them sideways, added some shelves and they will form the basis of the units. The bench top is recycled from the old kitchen cupboard shelves. I like the fact that our new kitchen is made up almost totally from recycled bits of other kitchens. All we need now are the doors and the drawer unit in between and we are almost finished. Horray, I will be able to clear out the spare room at last. Three months later, and I thought it would take a weekend to get the new kitchen in.
The pumpin harvest was a bit small, on the other hand there were so many apples some of the branches on the apple tree snapped. The fejoas are starting to drop from the tree.
And the leaves are about to change colour on the Liquid Amber tree.
You will be glad to know I now have a new washing machine. It was cheap and is very ugly. But it does the job I need it for very well and it is out in the garage so it does not really matter what it looks like. No fancy dials, just a basic few buttons. And when it is finished it plays a tune.
When I am not working, running around after kids, washing and ironing, cutting the grass, sanding doors, painting walls, blogging - I like to spend the odd 30 minutes swimming up and down, and up and down, and up and down. Opposite the place where I work is this lovely swimming pool which I visit after work, forget everything and just swim. Another few weeks and it will be Winter here, I don't know how much longer an outdoor swimming pool is going to be feasible. But as long as I can cope with the cold getting to and getting out of the pool (the pool is heated) I will be there, three times a week, swimming up and down.
I have used one of my collection of doors at last. This used to be a very ugly door with horrible green glass. Now it is a beautiful kitchen door. Unfortunatly while installing it Peter dropped it and made a hole in the larder door. Horray, said I, I really want to get rid of the larder door. I have filled the hole for now, but I am keeping my eyes out for a nicer one without a large hole in it.
I have another two doors, one for the lounge and one for the shower room, sanded and ready for installation. Then next doors to go in will be the french doors for the kitchen. It will look amazing once they are in place. I can't wait. So far I have sanded them down and filled all the holes. The glass is badly scratched, so we are going to replace it with laminated safety glass, which also will reduce the heat loss. I will post pictures as work goes on. 
I am also going to attempt to sell off all the other doors I have aquired over the years, or maybe do a swap at the re-cycling yard.
On the way to New Plymouth we drove through the town of Bulls. Some clever person has come up with an amusing idea. Lots of the local businesses have signs that advertise the town. I think you can get the idea from the sign above outside the used house and house removals yard, Moove-a-bull. I did not manage to catch all the signs, here are a few I would like to share. Restack-a-bull outside the local dairy (corner shop to non-kiwi's). Comfort-a-bull outside the local B&B.
Forgive-a-bull on the local church.
And my favourite Knowledge-a-bull on the local school. Whoever came up with this idea was inspired, I loved it.
Last weekend we had another trip over to New Plymouth and the beautiful mount Taranaki.
visiting the local museum.
Watching the waves
and the sunset.
Just as we were leaving we caught another glimpse of Taranaki through the clouds.
