Chop...Chop...Chop...

Well, I thought my underpinning wall days were over!

But when the snow melted last week it came in through the gas heater vent and we ended up with water all over the front room floor...and it sogged into the bottom of the walls, which made for a wet and smelly mess!

Imre is onto it though.

We never expected that to set the front room tidy up back an extra 2 weeks..

He was to just sand back the old and flaky bits on the beams and walls as the way he does it, it ends up lovely and clean, smooth and tidy.

I wasn't going to get it done until later this year, although it was badly needed. But I was sick of the constant layers of dust everywhere and was just hoping for a tidy and dust free season instead. Hahaha...

That turned into a major project, so now as he's chopping away at the walls in there, I figured he could run all the water heating pipes to their installation sites and also run the powerpoint cables at the same time and bury everything in the wall while he's at it!

If it's tidy up Mary, it's tidy up all the way now!
This big job will get rid of all the heater cords, double adaptors and power cables strewn across the rooms all at once now, so it turned out well after all.

Who could resist this kettle? Love hearing it gurgle away on the stove. Very comforting indeed.

Would you believe roasted beetroot and roasted parsnips could tastes so good...with white cheese and toasted walnut halves?It was so good...The grated black pepper for photographic effect on the plate was supposed to look better than it turned out here...

Dog and her pups are outside now all day and night and I'm sleeping all the way thru the nights again.
The pups are growing fast, chewing on bones and eating anything I serve them.
I still daily cook a turkey carcass for them with veggies and rice and they also share a fresh full carcass a day too.

One puppy went on the weekend. Someone stopped by on Sat morning early and wanted one, so they took Yappy. I had just started the last of their worming tabs treatment, so that was good.

Am thinking I'll keep Cutiepie, a male, but is the littlest pup of them all, as a playmate for Dog.
He is sooo adorable and is such a cuddle bug, I can easily see how people have animals inside!

Am keeping Dog until the weather gets warmer and then review re keeping them, as Imre has offered to look after them whenever I go away. A good offer.

He will make them a real dog house and we are going to run a water heater/radiator to the kennel for winter for them both.
Don't laugh...

This is the type of gas fired water heaters that are being installed here this year...and a smaller and shorter one goes into Dog's house too.

Will show a few drama pics of the front room...nasty, to say the least!

Starting out it all looked good...until the melting snow came in thru the vent in that gas heater there...

That's just the excess from the beams on the ceiling that is being swept up! I never knew you could do certain things with whitewash here, so once I found out how good Imre is at this stuff, I got him to straighten up the holes and rough connections between the ceiling and where the beams join. It was filled and plugged with dollops of whatever for almost 100 years, so it was time for a big straighten out indeed.

Now he has to go around the bottom of the wall in the front room and dig out 2 bricks high and replace them when I dry it out a bit with the fan going non-stop for 5 days until he comes back to-day.

Yeah, it never seems to end!

It  does look like a bit of a train wreck now!...It looked so nice after the girls from OZ painted it all in July, but it was purely a temporary cosmetic job so things were bright and clean for them. I hoped I could get away with it until about mid year, but the big scrape off and fix-it-up again, came early!  Imre will coat it next week with his magic formula and when he's finished, it will be smooth as a baby 's bottom and yet still retain the bumps and wobbles in the wall that keeps it authentically charming...and whiter than white.  Sorta like a cellulite baby bottom!

...but I did decide to get it all done while he was working inside. So now, once this is done, it should be good for another 100 years. He scraped off the loose plaster/whitewash on the walls and ceiling and sanded back the beams to almost raw wood. 

You can see the damage Dog did to the door in the lower left of the pic, when she was left inside too long. Imre has to cut the piece out from the new door handle down and replace it with a new strip of timber. A new surprise job to fix almost every minute over here!

Snow almost all melted now...

Cutiepie drinking from their historic water container...hahaha...Check out how they demolish everything...my old shoes are a great toy, plus the little stool they love to tip over, so it stays down now!

Snow all melted, then it snowed lightly for a day and melted the next day.

A light fall that vanished in 24hrs...

Went to Debrecen with Eniko on Thursday and collected my 2 year staying Visa. Yippee! It was snowing up there and the city was still covered in a foot of snow in most places.

So wonderful...

Just so magical...

Like icing on a cake...well, sort of!

Maccas playground...a bit snowed in. McDrive, it is called here and the other one at the other end of town is called McDonuts!

The tables all looked like burger bun tops...Snow burgers anyone?

Wow, how utterly lovely!

The most perfect Xmas tree ever!

Went here on Friday with English friends...Awesome set up. About 50 klms away in a town that sounds and is very hard to pronounce!

I was fully dressed and could not get past the foot bath in front of me! hahaha...

In one of the spa nooks...

Under the massive shower/water falls! Now I know how it works, will go for the day next time and take my swimmers and a white bath robe! Everyone was waltzing in and out, wearing bathrobes and slippers out into the snow covered carpark....Looked so funny. . It's only about $7 for the entire day and a 50 min massage is under $20! There was a non-stop parade of people all afternoon. Amazing. Various temps in the pools too.

As the sun sinks slowly in the west, another perfect day draws to a relaxing close. From the waiting area in the spa complex. 

As I'm going for a few week long trips in April and May, I'll get Imre to paint all the windows and timbers while I'm away in Serbia, so by May, it should look like a million dollars, with power points, heating organised and even the flooring going down!

Can't wait now. It feels good at long last to be this close and have a beautiful job done too!

Now I have a real tradesman on the job, it's amazing to see the difference from my efforts and a real pro who knows the ways of  mud bricks and plaster/whitewash, plus a million other jobs I tried my hand at.

While it was passable, once I saw how Imre did his work, it was a simple decision to say...Start all over again Mary...and I will be very happy with the results now.

OKey, so that's this past week's happenings. Alot accomplished indeed.

Will catch you next week from a nice, white front room!

Take care in all that heat going on in OZ too...

Temp here at the moment is a delicious minus 1C, headed to minus 4 overnight.
This time next week, they predict  + 11C in the day and + 3C at night. Amazingly fast temp changes coming.

Bye,
M
xxx