Ingredients

• 2 tsp chilli sauce
• 1 tsp wasabi paste
• 2 Tbs dark soy sauce
• 1 Tbs teriyaki sauce
• 1/2 tsp ground chilli powder
• 350g firm tofu, sliced in 4 portions (I tend to cube it though - nice large cubes)
• 1 litre vegetable stock
• 400g fresh udon noodles (or if you get the high-end packet ones, you can use the flavour sachet from these also)
• 1 bunch spring onions, finely sliced
• lime halves
• Optional extras: onions, mushrooms

Method

1. 1. In a bowl, combine chilli, wasabi, soy and teriyaki sauces and chilli powder. Spread this mixture over tofu and leave to marinate in a ceramic dish for 20 minutes.
2. Heat a large non-stick frying-pan with a little oil and cook tofu over a medium heat for 2-3 minutes on each side until golden brown.
3. Meanwhile, bring stock (and flavour sachet contents if you have these) to the boil. Add noodles and simmer for 2-3 minutes.
4. Divide noodles between 4 serving bowls and cover noodles with hot stock. Top with cooked tofu and garnish with green shallots. Serve lime halves on the side.

Serves 4 people.
Recipe source: NZ Herald’s Viva supplement (and extra commentary by me)

We headed over to our local Kings Plant Barn to get premade raised beds to install into our front garden first thing Saturday morning. Originally we were going to build them but decided to actually make the most of our fairly limited time (weekends don’t actually give you more than 10-12 good hours at most) and buy them. We also got some tomato plants and various kit for the beds, like weed matting and some potting mix.

Our tasks of the weekend went as follows (links are to photos on Flickr):

• install two raised beds in the front garden
• make progress on staining the inside of our fence around the property
• stain the “unclaimed” bit of fence between our property and the people behind us
• fill in the part of the driveway that the neighbours behind us keep driving on so the grass can grow back
• remove the old herb bed by the deck steps which is awkward to take care of and generally disused - we also want to put some kind of bark/yukka thing there maybe
• re-pot grafted tomatoes and put them in place by the trellis nailed to the deck railing

We also did a bunch of general maintenance, tidying and weeding around the place.

One of the really cool things about working in the garden is that our neighbours actually stop and talk to us, both from down behind us and next door. We met one of our neighbours from 4, our neighbour from 2 who we don’t really ever see and chatted a bit to our next door neighbours (the shared driveway hoggers!). It was awesome!

It was pretty full on - and definitely a lot more physical than sitting at a desk Monday-Friday so we’re super sore now - but we are really pleased with the results. Next weekend we hope we can plant some veges into the raised beds, see some grass growing back along the driveway and FINISH THE FENCE STAINING!

In the meantime, we’re thinking about projects for the exterior of the house as soon as the good weather really hits. We are going to:

• finally finish the fence staining (ETA: next few weeks)
• build a raised garden bed
• knock out the Hardie baseboards which are cracked and look crap, and put wood in instead
• cover in the bottom of the deck and make this a nice storage space
• do a bit of landscaping around the side of the house (like this house we pass by a lot).

In other words: a busy summer approaches. Anyone who wants to help with the garden work is most appreciated - we pay in beer and food.

A few people had suggested getting another cat to keep her company (and for double the awesome/cuteness factor) and on Saturday we finally decided it was time. We knew it would need to be a kitten so Ziggy would be more likely to accept her and we went up to the new Kingsland petshop which has just opened. They had two very cute little kittens who were bouncing all over the place but we weren’t entirely convinced.

We then went out to Animates in Henderson and it was love at first sight for me and a dark tortoiseshell kitten (Darren is not as soft as me, though when he held her the love came quickly afterwards). We decided to take her home right then and there, naming her Zoe to keep in line with the Z names we seem to have for our cats.

Zoe is 5 months old and a skinny but long wee thing - we think she has some Burmese in her makeup. Very quiet when we first got her home she now purrrrrs like a motorbike and is very insistent on being cuddled and rubbing up against us.

Ziggy hasn’t reacted too badly so far to another cat in the house. We have Zoe sequestered down in the study like Ziggy was when she first arrived. Ziggy knows that there is someone else down there (especially when Zoe is whining and wanting to come out into the house - and poking her paws underneath the door!) and is very watchful of the door. I think it’s going to be a few days yet until we try out a bit of a face to face meeting because when we’ve tried to mingle smells so far by patting Zoe and then patting Ziggy she hisses. We’ve been lavishing her with attention and encouraging her to sleep on our bed to make her feel better, and we’ll probably let her explore the study full of Zoe’s smell while we put Zoe in another room.

And yes…photos to come!

However, I have this fear that someone is going to draw something obscene in the cement while we are at work or drive through it despite the fact I warned the neighbours that this work was coming up. This is for three reasons:

1. Our neighbours don’t seem like they would care about our cementing even though for the people down the back who share our driveway it’s their driveway too. For the next door neighbours they care even less as it’s not their driveway - our request to them was that they not park in their driveway if possible right by the hole so that the people down the back can edge around the cement and go down in their cars.

2. The next door neighbours actually have an obscene drawing in some patched cement outside their house. It’s an outline of a penis. Potentially it was there when they moved in but despite their lax attitude to their property/mowing etc why would you not want that filled in? If anyone is going to draw in our cement, it should be us!

3. The tradesman who is coming to do the job seems nice but a bit vague. I am hoping that he will at the very least put a little fence thing around the cement so that people in their cars can see that it has been done.

Friends have suggested that we should have stayed home with deck chairs to watch over the cement. Now the more I think on the subject it does seem like a good idea, if not a bit on the overkill side. However, with a perfectionist attitude to DIY (I know, almost an oxymoron in this city) I can’t help fretting about the whole thing. Hopefully it all goes smoothly and I don’t spend the weekend guarding over a drying patch on the patch.

Yesterday a year ago was a Friday. We had the day off work and moved from our one bedroom apartment (man I did love that place) to a 3 bedroom house! We were confident in our mortgage paying abilities, but not sure what challenges the house would bring.

In the last year, we have made our mark on the house & it is well on the way to being COMPLETELY awesome. We still need to write up some of the projects we have done but we have:

• installed an HRV system
• ripped up scummy old carpet and installed carpet tiles
• adopted a cat
• had a bogan housewarming and a Mexican Day of the Dead alloween party
• renovated the spare room
• painted the front steps
• gotten into the garden
• laid the way for a new vege patch this coming summer
• renovated the bathroom
• turned the hallway cupboards into a laundry
• rewired the bedrooms/study and had downlights installed
• stained half the fence on the inside
• done a bunch of random fixings and mendings

Yay!

Outside of these, we’ve done a couple of smaller projects - making a bookshelf from bricks and premade shelves and getting some prints framed and on the walls (thanks, Factory Frames!).

We’re also preparing for winter. It’s been almost a year since we moved into the house, and this time last May the weather was pretty wintery. We’ve been lucky so far this year though in the last few weeks it has gotten terrible - time to bring it all inside, and tidy things up in the garden.

So far we’ve:

• rearranged the lounge for more indoor living and less indoor/outdoor movement
• pulled in our outdoor umbrella - it’s attached by this cool contraption which is screwed to the underside of our outdoor table
• cleared the garden a bit and organised a lawnmower man for over the winter
• had the stump man come and remove the stump which was by our front steps - makes it easier for the lawn man
• installed some garden pavers along a strip outside by the back door for standing the bins on (”front” door to some I guess - it’s the streetside door so lots of people use it)
• put up new curtains and blinds in the lounge and kitchen

We still need to clean the gutters and get someone to come and fill in this weird bit in the driveway with concrete (currently covered by a very weird board which gets soggy and is disintegrating). Not bad progress though and we are so ready for the winter months! Cosy!

One of the keys to effective removal of anything in your house is to ask around a bit, if not friends then Google.  Find out other ways people deal with this stuff.  Our friend Ben gave me invaluable advice for scraping up the lower layer of the cork (the actually glued on part).  You use a joint knife and a hammer.  You just get right in there and hammer the joint knife underneath and lever parts of the cork up as you scrape them up.  I use a thick bathmat under my knees to help them from getting too sore - though my knees peeled anyway - and always try to keep a straight back where possible. 

I finally discovered that the easy way to remove carpet or floor tacks is to get a small vice grip and once the cork is removed from around it use this to pull up the tack.  One thing to be sure of is that you place a piece of the just-removed floor or similar underneath the vice as you pull because you will end up with a small indentation of the vice otherwise.  The tool costs about $18 from your local hardware store and will save you hours, sore hands, frustration and probably injury.

To give you an idea of timings - the separate toilet probably took me about 8 hours all up.  This is partly because it was the first time I’d done this (learning curve) but also it’s a tiny space with a door and a toilet we still need to use to work around.  It would have been heaps easier if the toilet had been taken out already but no, unfortunately, and that’s why it’s called preparation I guess.

The bathroom was a slightly different matter, and quite the curve ball. All up though - probably about 8-10 hours. The bathroom seems for some reason to be in much worse condition than other rooms in the house.  It all started off okay, and I was hopeful that we would be able to polish as planned.  However, it was not to be - there are a couple of holes in the actual floor, plus a few sections with old checkerboard lino stuck to them and…half of it is chipboard.

Darren has his theories about how the original bathroom was - with a bath along one wall where the washing machine and shower are now - which he gleans from the treatment of the far wall and now, the floor.   When the bath was removed we figure that the floor probably had rotted or otherwise they couldn’t remove it without removing the floor boards.  Instead of putting it back together with real floorboards, they stuck chipboard down instead.  GUH.

Luckily by this time we are troopers.  We always try to figure out our options before we do things because this house has curve balls - and this is the reason we try to do our renovations to a high standard.  Whether it is us doing this stuff next time or someone else, it’s a great reason to actually do things the good way.  We considered getting boards from a demolition yard, but a friend advised us that they can often be in bad nick and weird sizes.  Since we’d have to replace two that have holes in them at the moment and the half that need to cover where the chipboard is, it could end up being worse than just tiling.

Off to the tile shop again we went!  We have chosen our tiles carefully to match as closely in wall colour as we can to our paint colours.  The main worry now was that they might not have enough tiles for us to get so that the base of the shower and the floor can be the same tile.  Thankfully they did and we ordered them on the spot.  It is one awesome thing about decorating a small space - you can be sure that the unexpected isn’t going to cost as much as it might have.

Now we pretty much wait for it to be bathroom renovation time.  The bathroom people are coming the week after Easter and will hit straight into the demolition of the existing stuff - even if the floor under the current shower tray is water-damaged we can just patch it up and keep going.   

Ingredients

• 2 cups of packed fresh basil leaves
• 1/2 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1/3 cup pine nuts
• 3-4 medium minced garlic cloves
• salt
• pepper

Method

1. Put the basil and the pine nuts in the blender and pulse 2-3 times.
2. Add the garlic and pulse a few more times.
3. Slowly add the olive oil in while you pulse. Make sure you stop every once in a while to scrape down the sides of the blender with a rubber spatula.
4. Add the grated parmesan and pulse again 2-3 times.
5. Add salt and pepper to taste.
6. Assess your final consistency. I like pesto to be very nutty/chunky and it to not be too heavy on the basil side so we added both more pine nuts and more cheese.
7. Add a bit more oil for good measure if you have added extra of the ingredients.
8. Store in a bowl or jar…and of course, enjoy! My favourite way to eat this is with ciabatta…mmmmmm.

• Local paperThis is where we found our plasterer. We didn’t look very much though. We went with the first person who quoted because we wanted to get going quickly. They did an okay job, but at least we now have a point of reference when it comes to plasterers.  We’d probably use them again based on what people have said about their quote but we might try another one next time to gauge the difference.
• Word of mouthThis is a great way to find tradespeople. Chances are if you know any home owners they would have used one or two tradespeople in their time. Ask your friends and co-workers for some names and numbers. This works even better if there’s a personal relationship: “Hi, I got your details from Peter - he says you’re the best…”  This is what we’re relying on for a floor sander.
• The internetYou can find just about anything on the internet, including tradespeople. There are several sources, some better than others. There’s the Yellow Pages, which - quite frankly - does a pretty poor job. There’s finda, which has a pretty large collection of tradespeople and you could even try good old Google. All of these options will work, but they lack 1 important feature: peer reviews/references.
• No CowboysThis is where word of mouth meets the internet. This site has a shitload of tradespeople listed - some good, some not so good. The beauty of the system is that you are able to read reviews of the tradespeople which then enables you to make a better informed choice. It’s very similar to the way in which Trade Me has trader reviews.

So far we’ve had one quote from someone we found on No Cowboys, and we’re having an electrician over tonight who we found there too. By all accounts they’re going to be all good (if the reviews and great comments on the site are anything to go by!)So if you’re looking for a good tradesperson and your mates are of no use give No Cowboys a go!