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July 14, 2008

Moving into our new home

We have just spent an exhausting but exhilerating weekend moving into our new house - transporting boxes, unpacking boxes and assembling much furniture.

All our good friends came around to visit and help. A particularly huge thanks must go to Doug and Claudia and Andreas and Ingrid who spent many hours helping us to assemble furniture. This is not my god given talent in life and without their help, I'd only be a quarter finished with much furniture screwed inback to front.

Ally was in her element - how she managed to immaculately pack 10 boxes worth of stuff into her lovely new kitchen I'll never know - a most impressive feat indeed. We are both still in the throes of huge excitement and have to keep pinching ourselves.

Thanks to everyone for all their well wishes and texts - we really appreciate it and can't wait to have you all to stay one of these days...

Our boxes ready to go - at Mc Mahons Point. We also needed to transport all our boxes from Cambridge and Willow Road that we have been holding in storage.
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Our cheerful and extremely professional "man with a van", Stuart. I love the name of his company "I like to move it, move it." Despite the amazing abilility of Stuart's van to swallow huge amounts of stuff, we needed to do to trips to move everything. It started at 2:30 pm and as you can see, it was dark by the time we finished...
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All the boxes in our new place. This was when things got rather exhausting - lugging heavy boxes up the stairs to their appropriate rooms. Believe it or not, we managed to do the lion share of this on Friday night! We were itching to start unpacking! There was stuff in some boxes that I hadn't seen for over 8 years.



The fun began with the assembly of the furniture which mostly arrived during Saturday. Each delivery caused new excitement - like Xmas it was. Here is Ingrid, our IKEA assembly guru. SHe has built two IKEA kitchens from scratch in her day and seriously knows how all this stuff fits together. We watched her in awe as she juggled massive piles of wood and turned hundred of screws into furniture. She was a master of turning chaos into order.
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Our new lounge suite - leather in "pebble" colour, and so very comfortable. We love it...
. Our wicker basket drawer unit under the stairs. Notice the beautiful orchids that Eva brought us and the family heirloom (statue of boy and horse) in pride of place....
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Our study area with book case and computer desk -lots of space
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Here is the spare room - the book shelves and small table are not new (we had them at Mc Mahons Point)...
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...but the camera drawer unit that holds all my realms of camera gear is new - and I love it.
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Our dining room table only arrives in a couple of weeks, so in the meantime we are using our "outside table" to do the job. This will move to the front courtyard when the dining room table arrives.
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Look how Ally has immacualtely packed the kitchen drawers! The kitchen is only two years old and Ally keeps oohing and aahing at the clever the ways the inner draws and cupboards have been designed.
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And specifically for all you girls out there who like the detail on these things, here is the inside of our fridge which we inherited from the previous owners. Lots of space as you can see - particularly the freezer portion at the top...

July 14, 2008

More photos of the Opera House

I managed to get up early again on a couple of mornings to catch the dawn light on the Opera House. Here are some of the results. The Opera House is now officially my most photographed item!
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July 14, 2008

Orchids Galore

We were very proud of our orchid that we had in Cambridge and the beautiful flowers it created. Well, we are delighted to announce that our Orchid plant here in Sydney has also just given birth to some beautiful flowers. Gorgeous they are...
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Much to our delight (and purely by co-incidence), Eva also brought us some lovely yellow orchids as a house warming present. So now our house is adorned in orchid flowers...
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July 10, 2008

Opera House Competition entry

With some photoshop assistance from Carleen (thanks Carleen!) in adding some white tones to the Opera House, here is one of my entries to the competition. What do you think?
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July 08, 2008

The sun sets on our Mc Mahons Point apartment - we leave on Friday

We are excited to move into our new home but will miss the epic views from our McMahon's Point apartment.


July 08, 2008

Back to the Opera House

There is a competion in Sydney at the moment - best photo of the Opera House wins big prizes. So I went back to take a few more photos of Sydney's most famous building. Some of them came out quite nicely but nothing award winning yet...

Dramatic stormy clouds
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Dusk
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Opera House at night
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Sydney Skyline
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Luna Park from yet another angle
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Looking back at our flat under the bridge
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A line of lamps
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July 07, 2008

Shooting the Opera House

I went with Charles to photo the Opera House at night. We captured a couple of shots, then the rain chased us away...





July 06, 2008

Cape Town family back from their holiday at Blanco family farm...

...looks like they had an awesome time. Aren't the clown suits great! They were part of a fancy dress party..
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