Flooding

Yesterday was a bit scary. We had such heavy rain on Tuesday night that by 8am on Wednesday morning the water was already lapping at the side of the road on the roads near our house.

By lunchtime, it hadn't let up and I was starting to get pretty worried about whether or not I would make it home that night. Ryan's daycare centre is in a bit of a pocket - the suburb has the Brisbane River on one side and only one major road in (with one other minor, flood prone road). I rang his daycare centre about 3.00pm who told me that the major road had been cut. I left work about 3.30pm in a complete flap, worried about how the hell I'd ever get to my son and hoping that the rumour I'd heard about letting 4wd's through would be true.



Traffic was at a stand still most of the way - it took me 45 minutes to move roughly 300metres. At one point I had Tom's sister driving up the Ipswich Motorway, Tom's parents coming from Toowoomba & me heading through the western suburbs to see which one of us would make it to the kids first.

This photo shows the point the road was cut off. I'm not sure what time it was taken but thankfully by the time I got there most of the water had dispersed and 4wd's were being let through - although it was starting to rain quite heavily again and I'm sure wouldn't have taken long to flood again.

We ended up getting home shortly before 7pm. A trip that normally takes me 40 minutes stretched out to over 3 hours.

Luckily The Shack withstood the weather and we had no dramas with damage whatsoever. The backyard is pretty well submerged though and will no doubt take a few days to drain away.

Making progress

Look what my clever husband built me. Isn't he handy?

Much better than the old fence, I think. Not as likely to kill someone in a strong wind...

Not only that, he went above and beyond the call of duty by building me a gate down the side of the house which increases the size of our backyard by another 3x10-ish metres. Happy boys and dogs (well, they would be if it would stop raining long enough for them to get out there and use it).

Now we just need to find someone willing to put in a swimming pool so we can steal their excess dirt to fill up the ditch that runs along the fence. With that done, we should gain another metre of our land back.

Fencing update

I've had a couple of people make polite inquiries in to the state of our spectacular fence.

So for all your interested parties, here she is today in all her glory:




(Do please ignore the palettes - they will be made into framework for concrete very shortly. I hope anyway...)

The old girl seems to be a fair bit more rickety than my last photo, doesnt' she? The recent hailstorm we had was not kind to her at all. Would anyone like to make a small wager on how much worse it can possibly get before it's replaced?

Renovations - stage 2

And so it begins again. Retaining walls are being toppled to make way for a ramp to enable us to finally put the shed up. I am particularly excited about this phase as it means I will soon be the proud owner of my very own shed. No longer are sheds the exclusive domain of the man of the house. I can store all manor of crap up there without impeding on his territory. So happy.

It also means the old kitchen will be removed from it's temporary home right outside my back door.

Photographic evidence of our boganity...