They said it couldn't be done, concrete countertops, it can !

When people say it won't work , don't listen.
 So if you see it on Youtube it has to be possible
 that's Ivan's moto anyways !
Along with the new idea he needs to spend 10 mins each day grounding
in other words walking in the garden with no shoes ???
And everyone thinks i am the weird one.

  I will list the people who said we were crazy and making concrete countertops was  just impossible.'
The builder, our architect friend , the staff at the the garden center, bunnings , masters , the concreter on the island and a lot more people, so many I can't list them all. Well i think i even said it, but Ivan said " babe, what have we got to loose $300 and some time, let's try it"

We had a mammoth shopping day that involved yet again a ferry, a barge, a Car, a truck and a lot of shopping.  We stocked up on 30 bags of 20 kg bags of concrete. melamine , tools on and on .



Here we are at Bunnings, not that we like Bunnings cause,
we really love Masters !!! Too bad it's going out of buisness.
I think it's the lighting there.  

The plastering was finally finished the exciting day arrived . I was so excited, minimal sleep for me.

 The  melamine mould for the concrete took all day to be built and concrete only got poured the next day.

 We had bought 3 pieces, 2400 mm by 1200 mm of melamine as we had three separate countertops to make .  We would use one for the island , the other one we cut into strips to make the borders and the last one would be for the last two countertops .  

We started by covering our Ikea island cabinets with 9mm plywood 

 and putting in the sink, (which will be undermounted.) We caulked it,

                             and drilled a hole for the tap.

.

We drilled our precut 70mm strips of melamine  to the melamine board and

                       into each other at the corners  we covered the outside of the screw with tape .

We then created a makette of where the sink go, remembering that the bottom of the mould was going to be our top surface of the countertop  

We built up  a border where the sink would be and a piece of the a vaccum cleaner because we couldn't find a piece of PVC piping, this is where the hole for the tap will be . 

making sure to caulk .

We then caulked all the edges 

We  vacuumed and cleaned the inside of the mould and then oiled it with olive oil,

any oil will do.

  We then added aggregate ( Limestone ) to the bottom of the mold which would flip over and be the top we thought this would add interest and make the tops sparkly when polished. Unfortunately this did not work well and we actually left it out in the two next countertops . The stone was too soft and sorted of melted into the concrete.

   

Luckily we borrowed this baby from our neighbour , it saves a lot of back breaking mixing and makes things go so much faster 

We used concrete Super Strength 55 from Bunnings at $9.50 for 20 kg

 We poured water into the mixer, turned it on and then added our concrete 

1.9 liters of H20/1 bag of concrete  we mixed it 3 minutes  and added h20 till it fell away from the  back of the mixer and looked wet with no dry patches.

We poured it into a bucket and then used a shovel to shovel it into the mould 

 We used 18 bags for a 2400mm by 1200mm by 6mm countertop  

 We made sure to pack the concrete into the corners.

               We used a heavy hoe to pack it down and spent a lot of time smacking it down

 We vibrated the edges with a rubber mallett

 We only filled it half full with the concrete , then we laid Rebar carefully so as not to touch any of the edges with the rebar . We then covered it with concrete so that the concrete was flush with the melamine edges 

We skreeted it, so it was flat

We made sure it was flat and then let it dry out for 4 four days covered with plastic , we checked it twice a day and kept spraying it with water.  

 We broke the the mould off and luckily it was perfect and came off easily. We then hired 9 guys at 50$ each, to help us lift it onto the island. after alot of debate it got lifted with ease , so they all said onto the island . the island did some serious creaking when it went on . but it didn't buckle of crack and there it sits .  

Installing taps on the countertop

 So here it is , I don't think you can understand how happy we are here. We couldn't stop jumping up and down , It's not finished yet , We have let it dry and then we will finish it off with slurry, sealer, and then wax . stay tuned for the finished product

Dancy pants on Beelong.

So much has happened it is hard to know where to start, and the more I haven't written, the more I have procrastinated about it.  But here's to a fresh start. There is a lot to blog about  coming up, as we will be making concrete countertops, painting and putting down a laminate floor. I'm sure that will require some photos  and blogging. So there  definitely will be more to follow on these pages. Stay tuned!

I have adapted to my new life on the island with flying colours.  It seems I am cut out for Island Life After All! I Really seem to enjoy the community spirit of this place, it is awesome to know that you can go to your neighbours house and they will give you plants and cuttings. I know a lot of people now, I'm not saying I know everybody but I I sure know a lot of them. It's a nice feeling going to the supermarket and seeing people you know.
sitting by the bonfire. I've never had this kind of small town life .

So we're still really in beginning phases  of our part now and  we have just started the painting, the builder is still in the finishing stage and things are getting finalized. Things have been progressing really well. We are really happy with our builder who has been really easy to work with and everything has gone exactly as planned ...

Everything should be happening in the next few weeks and all coming together...
The house will be painted with the colours we have chosen... which I must say was a very difficult decision... because you can't change it so you better get it right ...We have gone with a modern  dark charcoal on the body of the house and accent walls of orange and green it might sound a little weird but I think it should look pretty cool...

The Tiler should be coming this week.  We actually  spent an endless amount of time trying to find somebody to do our tiling only to find out that the cost of the Tiler was actually included in our contract... that was really a huge relief.. I am super excited about seeing the beautiful tiles I have chosen installed.. as you may not know about me I actually worked for a short while in a tiling shop so I absolutely love tile. We have chosen a  light grey wood imitation floor tile and glittery silver tile in the shower in the downstairs bathroom. The paint colour in this bathroom is going to be a dark grey so the floor and the shower is really going to pop.

The upstairs or is a more subtle sort of tile that almost looks like marble it will go up two walls and be on the floor as well.. the shower will have the same glittery silver as downstairs and we will carry through the theme of a dark paint colour on the walls.  Hopefully it will look super glam!

One of the other challenging things we had to do, which proved to be a lot harder than i thought was choosing a paint colours. Ivan and  I did it together. I think I must have been in a very liberal and generous mood because I have chosen some pretty weird colours...
Believe it or not Ivan wanted a very soft pink in our bedroom I am almost doubting his  masculinity... he must be very metrosexual..

The Electrician has come and we have set out where  all the fixtures that we have already bought  but need to go..so they should be installed pretty soon I hope.... it will be great to get the lights on then we will be able to paint at night and we love painting.

I will include some photos of the different things that I had talked about and you can see if you can imagine how these things will look when put together... it's a challenge, see it's so fun reading my blog. 

Happy@beelong.com

This post centers around settling in on the island and about the excitement of seeing the house actually go up.

 The question is, what does it say about you when you start getting asked to join the bowls club and you go and talk to the neighbor because you really want meet his chickens. Have you gone over to the dark side, have you gone from being a city person, to an islander? Maybe you are a vegetarian just wanting to eat an egg, who knows? This is what i am still trying to figure out, but one thing i must say is  I am happy.  Happiness is the goal right?
  Job wise things seem to be going ok and I am hearing so many people tout the advantages of not having to commute to the mainland for work, I guess I am beginning to believe it myself. There is a lot to be said about extra free time, and I do have it, just how i choose to spend it seems to be a little confusing. Does watching 6 episodes of millionaire matchmaker or 10 episodes of  Dating Naked sound like a good way to spend one's time, especially when one really has so many things that they should be doing and thinking about. Ivan is busy studying how to change the air filters, replace carburetors on his scooter, so he can find new ways  to try to injure me. He is so productive. In retrospect yesterday, I did come home from work early and clean the bird poo off my car and give it a little hose down. That was fun.
 Our daily ritual on working days is now to have a little walk in the morning before work and  inspect the house. We then, have a chat with the builders who always arrive at 730 AM, there is Mozzie, Wazza, Greggie,  Scottie. Everyone in Australia's name has to end in "ie", except Phil, i didn't mention him at first cause it didn't fit with the rest of the crew.  Anyways, we have to act like we are not checking up on them, cause we aren't, but we don't want them to think we are and I have to make a special effort to not ask them if the like our house and think it is the most awesome house, they have ever built. From what our builder friend has told us builders couldn't really give a crap, what your house looks like, they just like cigarettes and a case of beer. Supposedly you have to give them a case of beer when the roof goes on .
 We then go off to work , work , come home inspect house progress again, take photos , being sure to email them to Paul The Sargent, my father, who is creating an album, and worrying. We eat dinner, Dating naked,  then it goes a bit like "  Eat Sleep Rave Repeat  " without the rave !

 So we have thought of the name for our house, "Happy@beelong.com". everyone on Beelong Street names their house: beelongatsea, Ibeelongtothebank, webeelonginjail, ibeelongingtobefishing, beelongditude, youbeelongtous, ect.....  so Happy@beelong is us!

If you say to yourself, this is probably a bad idea, it probably is.

Our purchases from our shopping day in Stra ya ( as they say )

the slab for the garage/Ivan's mother's room 

The base of the house 

The redlands bay jetty 

Out with the old and in with the new , nurse that is !

Sorry i have not written in so long , i guess the whole question is, is this a bad idea or not? Do I like island living, or don't I . Who am I ? Who will I be.  Will I self actualize?

  So what's not to like about living on a small island ?

Don't i like birds and nature, peace and quiet ?? 

but it sure is quiet. Almost too quiet, eerie, haunted quiet, Curlew screeching and wailing through the night  and then as if some evil joke that Kookaburras start their maniacal laughing before the crack of dawn. How on earth, is a perimenopausal woman supposed to get any rest ??/

WHEN WE GO FOR A WALK AT 8PM EVERYONE IS LIGHTS OUT!

I think I am still adjusting to this so I am not going to form 

any judgements, yet??!

So Ivan bought a scooter .. another first for us. We have also realized we have never had to put the garbage bins out : wednesdays regular bins  and recycling every 2nd wednesday... 

So back to the scooter,  he bought ride it to the ferry and back, not that he has but he might, So that's a good thing...

I guess the bad thing is when you decide to go to let your husband take you for a ride, with a bicycle helmet, at night, when there's no street lights, and your husband has no experience riding a scooter.

So basically we came to a sharp turn and Ivan didn't think he could slow down  or turn quick enough so he basically drove off the road towards the ocean down a steep slope..

I saw my life flash before my eyes as you do ... yelled WE'RE FUCKED  ... quickly thought,  I knew this was a bad idea... and rolled off the scooter onto the bushes slash gravel.  

I must be quite good at falling , because I did this awesome roll... Ivan plummeted down the path slash road slash death trap towards the ocean but it was actually a road of some sort and he managed to stop the bike turn back around  and come back up to see me lying on the ground....

 He was quite shocked and said,  i turned around and all of a sudden you were gone.

The alternative to me looked too bleak so I bailed I said.  Don't worry though for an old bird. i am fine just a little bruised and non impressed with Ivan's driving skills. 

The other interesting thing that has happened is I have started a new job as  the local Island Nurse....I will not say where I work for professional sake, but there is only one nursing job on the island , so it is pretty easy to figure out where I would be working ... but to be on the safe side i will only say positive things about where I work. I guess I can say though, I work in a very very small building . It is actually a house that has been changed  into a GP practice.. the break room is sitting on the toilet. The work is interesting a lot of needle sticking in people related stuff... you know what I'm saying. 

 The other thing that is very different is everybody knows who I AM.  Has heard that I'm there and knows what I'm doing... like the other day a lady came in and told me my slab had just been poured on my block and mentioned that i had a very big cat.  this was quite interesting to me... must attempt to be more reserved and private.   Must remember not to mention diva cup or other weird things. ALSO my nice work college told me I should wear a name tag stating my nationality.

It seems to be the hot topic in that place .

 The house has started now and the slab has been poured and they are starting on the frame .  Very exciting, crazy how big it looks.  I thought it was quite a small house, it is alot bigger than it looks on paper.. 

We had our first weekend excursion off the island to do weekly shop...It was really quite nice, the ferry ride was beautiful, it was a rainy day and the ocean was really quite still and peaceful.

We actually saw some new friends ... We had met garage saling one morning and stopped to check out their project.  The are camping in their garage while building a 70,000 $ kit home. They have been at it for 2 years now they have quite a nice setup in the garage.

signing off till my next adventure !

Frame arrives.

House Hunters International

Sometimes it really does happen like on TV, except today nobody was filming!

Now that I have a job on Macleay Island, I guess I have to really live THERE! My idea of Seachange has to actually become a reality. So we set out to find a rental property to live in until our house was built. Which might  be October. ..

We looked online and we found the perfect property it was just what I thought we needed, it was a  house with 3 bedrooms walk in closets, 2 bathrooms big open space kitchen I put an application on it and I thought that was the one we were going to live in , but that's not what happened! Ivan kicked up a fuss and decided he needed to live by the ocean..!

My house hunter international experience all started that day, when we saw three properties .We saw; Bush Land hideaway, Expensive ocean front house, and Practical cheap house in the getto (as Ivan calls anything on the island that does look out towards Straddie.)

Practical cheap house in the getto, was perfect it had 3 bedrooms, easy to move into and great price but Ivan said the neighborhood was ghetto and that the neighbours were less than desirable.

Expensive oceanfront house definitely had the Wow Factor, it was a cute house with 2 almost identical LEVEls  with a beautiful  balcony that overlooked  the ocean. I would like to say it was out of our price range but it wasn't, really anything on Macleay would be cheaper than on the mainland but for tv sake I will make this the drama Factor!

Bushland Hideaway had so much charm, it was this cute little old Queenslander that had been done up really beautifully, sporting all the beautiful features a Queenslander should have, of course Ivan hated this one the most!  When we came to the elimination segment of the show this was the one we got rid of first , we put a big x on it.

So back and forth it went, it wasn't actually like it was on TV, there was a whole lot more drama, some yelling, some crying some hair pulling, but finally  the decision was made!

Commercial break.......
............

We chose the expensive waterfront property! We did a high five and then called the property manager TO FINALIZE THE DEAL.  It was quite a day. 

This is expensive ocean front house.  

Hook a brother up

Finding a great work life balance that's the question, how much money do you actually need? Yes, so I am going to have more expenses, that's for sure, taking on a mortgage is a big responsibility for an adult or a child. So what does a person do to make MONEY..? Unfortunately we do not live in a society where people realise,  there is not enough work for people to do. Automation has taken many jobs away from people and it is no longer feasible to consider that there is enough work for everybody to have a good quality of life. So basically we need to find a new system but that's not going to happen so I've got to be reasonable and figure out how to get MONEY! And of course you can never have enough, or can u?

SO,  I had some pretty good IDEAS so I thought, a lot of people found them kinda  of funny but I was serious. There must be another WAY, besides working for the man..

I liked  my idea of HOOK A  BROTHER UP,  which wasn't really my IDEA,  it was kind of my friend Christina's idea but I claimed it as my OWN. I mean what nurse doesn't dream of a business selling beer and cigarettes from a truck.

I wasn't allowed to have a coffee van or a food truck because we live on an island with  a very conservative council and you are not allowed to sell anything from public lands.  So that rules about everything out.  

I thought about buying the pet store business. I like animals especially cats, I don't really like lizards and snakes, I mean I like them in nature but I wouldn't really like to have to feed them mice and stuff, anyways back to the point. I'm really not sure what kind of profit I could have turned anyways, but basically Ivan said no! He said it will be better if we paid our mortgage first and then after we paid it I could do whatever I wanted...

I also considered a business in Driftwood. Driftwood is very profitable it seems.  A piece of Driftwood can sell online for a lot of money a small piece can COST $40 or so. ALL you need to do is walk around pick it up, soak it and sell it. Maybe I'll still get the Driftwood going on......

I really dreaded the idea of having to commute to work, it was a burden on my brain.  It meant getting in a car,  parking a car,  getting on a ferry, traveling a half an hour,  getting off the ferry,  getting in another car,  traveling to my destination and then doing the same on the way back. This would have at least cut into 2 hours of my life everyday and then what job would I do would? I be an agency nurse. Would I have to do shift work,  it all seemed very depressing.

Luckily for me, the Stars must have been aligned one day,  when I talking  to Jo and Trudy,  my awesome neighbours,  we were just casually talking about how, to make turmeric capsules,  when Jo mentioned that she heard they were hiring people for the new medical centre they are building on the island. 

So a few days later I tried my luck, I called the number she had given me, it was for a real estate agent who was supposedly building the new Medical Centre, he gave me the number of a pharmacist who was actually the one who was actually building it,  of course he knew nothing about it but  gave me the number of another lady to call, who would know about a job.

I called that day and talked to a very nice receptionist, she said that I was one of the luckiest people she knew  because it just so happens that their nurse was retiring.  NOW,  There is only one nurse on the island, I had planned on other ways of trying to get rid of her but luckily she decided to go on her own ACCORD, now all I had to do was get the JOB.

I was actually quite a professional at doing interviews as I had just interviewed the week before for a position as a clinical work nurse at the place where I work and I had been the successful candidate imagine that? So I knew I could ace this one job. I actually did some preparation which is quite unlike me!

Unfortunately all my preparation  was all in vain. It wasn't really an  interview but it was more of a 'did I look normal' and if I did I could probably have the job kind of thing , so I am fairly normal looking, so I aced it!

So now, I have made the decision to become the islands nurse. I don't really know the full implications of how my life will change. Of course I will know  SOME very intimate details about a lot of people that I will see on a regular basis this could prove quite INTERESTING.

I do feel sad to leave my current place of work because I have an awesome bunch of colleagues and really do enjoy the work I am doing but I have decided on this Sea Change and this is just a little part of it! Sometimes you have to give something up to get something NEW!

HERE I GO INTO THE VOID!