Author Archives: zefiart

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About zefiart

Blogger, DIY-er, poodle lover, graphic designer, dog groomer, recycler, artist, wonder woman in my spare time.

rustic crate window boxes

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I thought I’d share something I did a few weeks ago now. I had meant to share it soon as I finished it but the weather got nasty, then I never seemed to remember to take photos while the sun was out, you know how it goes.
This morning while taking photos of the fallen tree I noticed the window boxes and remembered to photograph them.
When I saw these crates at the tip shop over summer I knew they’d be perfect for the driveway side of our house which is BORING. I wanted something to brighten it up and make the house look more welcoming. These boxes are outside the mudroom and toilet windows.
(Excuse the ugly pipe, it will be painted to match the house. Its where the sink went into the mud room.)
I just love these crates! I have temporarily put stuff in them, some plants really need to go into the ground, but for now they brighten up the place. I love seeing them as I approach the house.
Mainly I’m going to keep succulents in them. This spot gets late afternoon sun in summer and I don’t want plants to shrivel up and die. Though I think a couple of them are already showing frost damage.
And just cause I happened to take them, here’s a couple of panoramic photos of our place from up the top paddock. I had to stitch these together from a lot of separate photos and I have to include them very small but you get an idea of the land around our house. (You can see the fallen tree to the right.)
The casita is the one with the red roof, the house with the blue. The wonky little shed in the foreground is the woodshed. Not so pretty from this side. 🙂
z

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life in the windy lane

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We’ve had the worst winds for the last couple of days. Really really strong winds. Lucky for us, everything seemed to stay more or less where we put it. Aside from tarps, rubbish, the garage…

Ok, only joking. Though the poor chickens were pinned up against the fence for most of the day…

Alright. That was a joke too.

But the wind was strong. And this morning while we were out battling with a round bale of hay I spied a tree down in the top paddock.

At first I thought the tree had come down from the neighbour’s drive, down over our fence. Turns out we were lucky.

The good news: It was our tree. On our side of the fence. The fence wasn’t damaged. Neither was the water tank.

The bad news: It was our tree.

More good news: Plenty more firewood.


Notice the deep root system gum trees have. NOT.

A whooping tree came down and there’s barely a hole to show where it was.

The poodles enjoyed running around in the tree. Its not often they get to walk among branches.

And here’s a shot of Wally enjoying a munch on the new round bale.

A friend suggested that rather than just putting a round bale in the stable and letting the horses pull it apart and walk, pee and poop all over the hay, we should surround it with pallets and restrict how much the horses can pull apart at one time.

We’ll see how it works. The way our monsters eat it won’t be long before we need to lower the fences around the bale so they can reach the hay.

z

tackling the tack room

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Last weekend I tackled the tack room.
Actually I continued tackling the tack room – a job I started the weekend before. It was a mammoth task. Till now the tack had been scattered around the property: some in the small timber shed which we planned to use as the original tack room, some in the garage, some in the casita.
Every time we needed to do something with a horse it was like “Where’s the halter?” “You had it last. Where did you put it?” “Behind the door.” “What door?”…
This is what I’d like the tack room to look like:
Instead it looks like this:
Eh. We work with what we have.
(The saddles are covered to keep bird poop off them as well as to protect them from the sun streaming in through that window despite its liberal coating of grime. Yes, we have birds living in the casita. And mice, and rats. And a black possum named Siegfried.)
At this point I should explain. The casita is the original old cottage on our property. Not technically a shed, but a home in which a family once raised 14 children. When the original owners sold it, the new owners ‘built’ a new (relocated) house about 5.5 inches away on the other side of a tiny yard cause it made better sense than putting it further up the hill to have a view of the countryside and not of the old house…  But hey, its Tasmania.
Anyway, the council apparently said “sure, you can put another house there, but you have to make the old house unlivable”. So they did. They ripped out half the ceilings, removed some doors, exposed stud walls, then put in a fence, gate, sheep grid flooring in the big room, a stock ramp on the porch and made it into a shearing shed.
When we bought the place we replaced the sheep grid floor with flooring, which I sealed with white undercoat/sealer and never painted, and we’ve been using it for all kinds of things. There’s a toilet no one would want to use without a tetanus shot, a laundry, a chest freezer for dog food, the hydrobath and my grooming room, plus a musty dark room we avoid, a feed room for horse feed and the big room which used to be the shearing shed.
The right side of the big room is my workshop. I had to re-organise that side as part of my ‘tack room makeover’.
You can see Romeo keeping an eye on me over the gate into the big room as I shifted things around.
I’d been using the left side of the big room as a hold-all area for things I was going to get to one day. One corner was being used as the spray paint spot. Horse rugs would got tossed on the floor, feed buckets thrown into corners… It was ugly.
Last week I started by clearing it out and sweeping it clean. I think the feed room yielded a full bag of chaff from the floor… In order to clean and organise you first must make a bigger mess. That’s the law.
I started by sorting out the workshop area, took down the trestles and door I was using as a work bench which I never used as it was always covered in stuff, and moved the cabinets to different walls to allow access to the dividing fence rail. That rail is a built-in horse rug airer! I added a slat of timber between the posts to create a 2nd tier of hanging space.
I used the trestles to hold the two heaviest saddles (my stock saddle and Wayne’s western saddle). Then I used an old ladder and a post to hold a second hand hybrid Wintec and some very old saddles.
Another timber slat between the far posts holds the rack I bought to hold our bridles. That’s the only new thing in this makeover.
Another slat became a spot for girths and older tack, not so regularly used. Since I have no idea where the studs are behind the masonite wall I thought it’d be safer to put a slat of timber on the wall for my hooks. I used anything I could find as hooks. More photos of those later.
I had something which looks like the side of a playpen so I attached it to the dividing fence, its now another spot to hang a horse rug. We only have 2 horses right now but we have something like 6 rugs. They’re all in varying degrees of repair (or disrepair).
We’ll be buying new winter rugs for them soon, we try to recycle and re-use old rugs as much as we can. At least Wayne does. He’s the rug stitcher in this family.
Cas will be joining us soon, this weekend I hope, and I’ll finally be riding again.
Have I mentioned Cas? She’s an older girl, a 16 yr old appaloosa who I met a few weeks ago. She belonged to the family who bought Ben. We went down to meet her and Chester, I rode both and I decided I liked Cas best. I loved Chester. He’s such a gorgeous boy, but Cas was so comfortable to ride, sweet natured and, really, she’s what I need… an older,  sensible, quiet horse I can get my confidence back with.
I can’t wait!
z

rusty wire wreath

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I did mention that I’d show off something I’d made for my new louvre door ‘hide the hot water cylinder’ contraption on the front porch.
I made this little wreath out of some very very old, very very rusty wire I found in the dirt in the back paddock. I’d collected it for just this purpose but never got around to doing anything with it till last weekend.
This photo shows the colour of it better than the one above.
When I first pulled it out of the ground and weeds I put it on the picnic table out front, which was a good thing as it turned out. The rain washed it clean for me so all I had to do was put on gardening gloves and start moulding it into a circle. It didn’t come out very even so I added some pieces of ready-to-snap bits of rusty barbed wire we found on the beach last time we went to Opossum Bay.
The plan had been to weave it all together and hold it in place with new thin wire if it wasn’t strong enough on its own, but it seems to be working well as it is.
The heart is a wire heart given to my by a friend. I think it suits the wreath perfectly. No need for further embellishment. Its one of the first things you see as you step onto our porch from the driveway.
Welcome to Wind Dancer Farm where old things are good things!
z

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a post about nothing

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This is a post about nothing much. Things have been going on as normal around here: busy and busier.

We get up at the crack of dawn every day (actually we get up before dawn these days as winter creeps in) and get home as the sun goes down most nights.

My office still looks like a team of burglars went through it. Even the dogs avoid it these days, no room for them to lie at my feet any more.

I do plan to tidy it up. I do. I have big plans for it. Once I list a million things I need to get rid of on ebay.

As part of the tidy up and organise project I got rid of an ugly set of plastic drawers I had and bought this groovy little cabinet from Shiploads (a cheap and cheaper store). Its only chipboard but its so darn cute. I can forgive it being a fake. I made little labels for the drawers and sorted things into them, like ‘pens’ and ‘more pens’ etc. I love my little cabinet.

Now to bring it out of hiding by actually getting rid of a ton of crap from in front of it.

We do have some huge news actually. I went shopping today. (Nothing new there) Only this time I bought a car.

Ok. I didn’t just go out and buy a car. Its something we’d planned to do over a year ago. The plan was: when I sell my house we’ll buy a new car. Of course, who can afford a new car? We sure can’t. At least not the kind we wanted. A dual cab ute (truck to my american friends), preferably with a canopy, diesel, 4×4, powerful enough to tow a horse float and carry wood from up the hill on our property.

I always do my research. We found that the Mazda and the Ford Ranger kept coming out at the top of the comparisons, too close to pick a winner between them.

I don’t know what the price of a new Mazda ute is, but the Ranger was somewhere in the vicinity of $45,000-$poop-your-pants range.

So we decided to do what any sensible person would do if they have a healthy respect for their hard earned money… we decided to buy 2nd hand. Something newer than my car and with considerably less klms (wouldn’t take much. I think my poor old car went around the world a couple of times according to the odometer reading).

We looked around. We compared what kind of prices we’d be looking at. We looked online. We looked locally.

Then on Thursday we went to a dealership in town which had 3 cars in the lot which fit our requirements. Two Mazda’s and one Ranger. We test drove them all. We took one home one night, one home the next night.

Freaked the dogs out no end, coming home in a different car every night.

We talked about it. We talked about it more. We weighed up klms vs year of manufacture. We compared the minute differences. We compared the added extras or lack of. We discussed practicality and our needs. We looked online some more.

Then we decided that everything aside, we could NOT live with a brown car. That narrowed it down to two, one Mazda and the Ranger. Same engine, different cars.

This morning we were no closer on making a decision than we had been on Thursday evening.

Basically the Ranger was cuter, sexier. I love the look of the Ranger. Its ME. Its a newer model but it has a lot more klms on it. And the seats are lushious. Its more expensive by a couple of thousand and it doesn’t have a canopy or a cover on the back, both would mean spending more money as we need at least a cover – we carry stuff in the back all the time. Moisture sensitive stuff like horse feed.

The Mazda is not so cute. Its the difference of a ute that looks like a ‘ute’ and one that looks like a truck. I’m all for the truck look. I like chunky. Big. High. Tough.

Nice.

But the Mazda had a canopy. It was cheaper. Older in years but less in klms. It has spotlights that can blind oncoming cars 5 towns away. Exactly what you need when to spot wildlife when driving at night. Its a smoother ride, quieter inside…

This morning I left home with Wayne’s blessing to pick the one I wanted. Either one would suit us. He’d be happy with either.

I had no idea when I got to the dealership. They offered me tea with ‘say yes’ juice in it they said. I was planning to say yes anyway, but not sure on which.

In the end practicality won over my heart. I love the Ranger, but the Mazda is what we need. I called Wayne and he was surprised. hehehe. I can still surprise him. 🙂

So, next week we do the paperwork and get a new/old car. Maybe not the sexy one I hoped for, but one which will suit our needs better right off the bat.

Gotta share this as I still laugh when I think about it. Both Wayne and I are clowns which may be why we get along so well. Well, most the of the time…

Anyway, whenever I answer any questions of the “I need to ask you some questions before we can sign you up to a 224 month contract on a new phone” or “I just need you to answer these questions before you apply for this job” type, I channel the Blues Brothers:

“Do you have any convictions?”

“Convictions? ………..ummmm………….. No.”

Wayne did way better than that.

When asked if he had any photo ID on him he asked, “Will the Wanted poster at the Post Office do?”

I’ll leave you with some gorgeous antique poodle photos I found.

z

felted poodle hair necklace

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Remember the Poodle National I went to at Easter and the dogs I groomed there?
Well, as I scissored I collected the hair and, instead of putting it in the bin, I felted it!
Did you know that poodle hair felts? Well, it does. I know someone who weaves it as well.
Anyway, I’ve never tried this before but a couple of years ago I did a workshop on wet felting and I love felt ball jewelery, so the decision to try it was easy.
The dogs I groomed at the show were all different colours: a black girl called Tango, a blue girl called Jackie, a blue boy called Tyson, a silver girl called Britany and a white girl called Zena. The necklace has a felt ball or two from each poodle I groomed.
Luckily I’d made plenty of felt balls so I was able to make a necklace just like this for Iris. Hers doesn’t include a black felt ball since the black poodle belonged to someone else.
I think this is the best way to honour and remember a poodle. I wish I’d made felt balls from Pagan, Scooter and Billybear’s coats. I will from Montana and Romeo now that I’ve done this, that way I will always keep something of them with me.
z

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collecting junk on the porch

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On the weekend I finally got a bit of work done on the porch.

I had planned to have the entire porch (and house) painted by now, but oh well… them’s the breaks. I only got so far (to the high bits) before winter set in. Now its too cold and too damp to paint outdoors.

Oh gee…. guess I have to stop, huh?

So this weekend I moved everything back to where it was meant to be, instead of pulled out into the middle of the porch so I could paint.

Now that the sun isn’t an issue (lack of it might be soon enough) I could move some of the potted plants to the front of the house. They spent the summer cowering under the shadow of the casita. Seriously… the only thing that survived the heat on our front porch is a cactus.

I collected the rusty, galvanised and just plain old bits and pieces and put them near the front porch where the ground is uneven and ugly. Now its just a collection of junk covering an ugly spot.

I am not above some fake greenery till the real stuff grows!

I also to around to putting the louvre doors I bought eons ago (and painted to match the house) on the porch to hide the hot water cylinder.

I hinged them together, put a hook on each side to hook them to the wall to keep them in place, and to keep the wind from blowing them into the dam. Now I have a huge big louvre door ‘cupboard’ on the porch instead of a smaller round hot water cylinder…

Maybe I should have just painted the water cylinder.

Still, I’m nothing if not stubborn. I planned to put it there so I will darn well put it there and LIKE it.

I have tried to make it interesting by adding some more of my old tool crates (collections of old hand tools on shallow old crates). And hung a few interesting things on the louvres as well… More on that in another post.

Meanwhile we now have 2 separate sitting areas on the porch. One is for eating – hence the higher table… sporting another rusty item with fake greenery (heheh).

The other is the bright/navy blue adirondack chairs with their small table. These are for sitting and relaxing. If its warm enough. And not windy. And not rainy and windy in which case the rain gets blown right onto the porch.

The birds meanwhile are still here. They haven’t gone south for the winter. Or is it north when you live in Australia? I doubt they’d fly to the South Pole for winter.

Their presence has given rise to a new name for the porch – the poop deck.

z

everything looks better with numbers (I finished the wardrobe room!)

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Its been weeks since I last posted. I’ve been busy. Life just got out of hand. I’d come home from work and most nights I didn’t even want to turn on the computer and check emails. I think I had something like 144 email notifications from the blogs I follow.
When life gets too much, reading blogs is the first thing that goes. 
I’ve also been feeling a bit ‘ordinary’. My backs been sore and so I haven’t felt like doing much out of work hours. Just reading and watching TV.
And shopping.
I don’t even want to THINK about the money I spent on clothes lately.
To be fair, I don’t buy clothes often and I’ve really wanted a wardrobe makeover. I’m tired of looking boring and want to look nice, even if I’m not the weight I’d like to be. In fact I want to look nice despite the weight I am right now. No use waiting, right?
Speaking of wardrobe makeovers, however, I did a bit more wardrobe making over in Wayne’s wardrobe room this weekend.
I’d bought another 3 industrial type shelf units and was itching to get the room finished for him. Naturally I when I got the room ready I discovered I didn’t have a paint roller. 
So I skipped the painting part of the makeover and went straight to the wardrobe part. I figure I can paint later. Sometime. One day… maybe.
I did the same as last time, I had two 5-shelf units and I put two rods between them to create a double layer hanging space. This time around I added 5 canvas ‘crates’ for storage (socks, undies, etc) and, because everything looks better with numbers on it, I used a stencil to number them.
The numbers might help Wayne find things too… 
“Zefi, where are my socks?” 
“In box no. 2.”
So the room is finished now (well, other than the paint… and perhaps a blind where the curtain is right now, cause roses are just so masculine…). There are shelf units and double hanging space on both sides, a chest in the middle to hold sleeping bags and other such items, and shoe storage behind the door.
I had thought that if I’d made this room into a wardrobe room I could even put my own clothes in it.
Dream on.
Its chock-a-bloc.
I swear, if Wayne vacuumed I’d have to question his sexual orientation.
I moved the boring old pine wardrobe that was in there before, and the boring old pine chest of drawers, into our bedroom my my own clothes.
Cause now I have nice clothes I want to hang up, not just jeans, T-shirts and sweaters.
Naturally every night before I drift off to sleep now I’ll look at them and think about what I can do to pretty them up.
I wish we had bigger bedrooms….
z

wire light fitting

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Over the last 2 weeks I’ve been working on this light shade for the wardrobe room that I posted about here.

I wanted something more industrial in feel to match the hardware shelves I used in the room so I looked around at what I had.

I found this fuddy duddy lampshade I’d picked up from somewhere. I’d already ripped off the granny pink frilly cover that came with it and was left with that glued on ribbon.

Have you ever tried to remove that stuff? It sets like concrete. I tried cutting it off and broke a small pair of scissors. I then tried slicing it off with a scalpel and broke that. I tried a stanley knife and cut myself.

In the end I soaked it in hot water for about two days and went back to scissors and eventually got it off.

Then I put it on the coffee table in the living room where I would do a bit of wiring when the mood took me. I had planned to add beads to it as well but only got as far as adding some small black ones randomly. I used a thicker black wire and thinner silver wire. I’m not sure if I’ll add crystals to it later or not.

I put it up on Sunday and I love the way it looks when the light is on, the pretty shadows it casts on the ceiling.

Meanwhile I’m suffering big time. I spent most of the day on Sunday gardening as I had to get some new plants into the ground before winter. Having problems with my right arm (RSI, carpal tunnel, arthritis, whatever) I tried to spare it and used the left for the heavy work: digging out gigantic weeds using a pick, taking the weight of the shovel, etc.

I put 2 blue plumbagos along the fenceline to hide the water tanks, 2 purple salvias to fill gaps along the front of the porch, 2 white gauras on the porch corner, 8 seedling snap dragons in a narrow bed on the driveway side of the house and 2 mexican orange blossoms on the ends of the trellis. I still have 2 pale yellow double banksia roses to plant and to relocate one of my hydrangeas. When they all grow (thinking positive here) it will look gorgeous.

I also put up some crates as window boxes outside the mud room with Wayne’s help cause by then my hands weren’t working that well.

As a result of all that work I have thumbs that are refusing to work. They’re sore and have no strength to grip much of anything at all.

Ugh.

Remind me never to garden again. Its bad for my health.

z

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signs of life at long last

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Yes, I know you’ve been worrying about me.
Where am I? What am I doing? Am I alive but lying in a ditch somewhere?
Well. I’m right here. Doing my Superwoman immitations again. 
I’ve been trying, unsuccessfuly I might add, to stretch every one of my hours into three. 
The theory is that if I could stretch one hour into three I’d be able to get three hours worth of work done, then I could snap the elastic back and still have 2 hours up my sleeve to use later.
Its not working well for me at all.
I keep telling myself that I need to be more organised. And I try. I do try. But in the end my mind still feels like this …
There is always so much to do, so much to remember, so much to organise.
Firstly some news: the sale of my house in Fentonbury has finally gone through. What a huge relief:  a few less bills to pay, less commitments on my time in terms of maintenance, less stress over good-for-nothing tenants.
This is thrilling news for me as I’ve been wanting to go back to Greece to visit family, mainly my mom. I’ve booked my ticket and I’m on my way in TWO months! (happy dance)
The other news is that I’m currently working 5 days a week instead of 4 for a ‘short time’. The word ‘short’ has yet to be defined.
That means that I’m now working 6 days a week as I also groom dogs on my days off, thus my weekend has dwindled to two days with chunks taken out of them for grooming.
I feel a bit like this…
But I’m valiantly trying to get it all done.
The sale of the house meant having to chase up paperwork in time for settlement to go ahead at the scheduled time. It meant cancelling home insurance for Fentonbury and notifying others that I no longer live there, don’t send my mail there (after 3 years some people still haven’t got the message).
Next I’ve got my trip to plan, my ticket is booked but I still have to read through websites and get travel insurance. Not to mention SHOP.  
Naturally.
Then I went and did something really stupid. I mean I know better. I do. Yet, cause a friend recommended a site, I went and gave them my credit card details. Then I cancelled my card. That means more notifying people and changing my automatic bill payments.
I got a quote to have someone else finish the house painting for me but we just can’t afford it. The house painting is not as urgent as, say, the drainage issue on your driveway which channels water under the house and into the casita. So it looks like I still have house painting to do during my ample free time.
Some things had to give. I had planned to have another stall at the next Shabby Market but I just had to pull out. Sorry ladies. I feel bad, but there is only so many hours in a day and I haven’t yet figured out how to stretch them.
Its getting cold, wet and miserable here lately. It doesn’t take long for the weather to go from hot and sunny to miserable, does it? A couple of weeks between summer and winter is all we got. I get home these days and all I want to do is crash out under in front of the fire.

But there are chores to do. No rest for the wicked.  I’m so tired by the end of the day its all I can do to watch TV from under a pile of throws, with a poodle pulled up on either side of me.

In fact that’s how I’d like to spend my weekends. Warm fluffy socks, TV or a book and a nice fire. And coffee in bed.

But I have 6 weeks in Greece coming up! I think I can cope till then. Then I’ll have 6 weeks of lying around on the beach. I shouldn’t complain.. 
z