I ventured out to the supermarket with Liam and Erin this morning. That’s one of my nightmares, seriously. Liam is usually terrible at the supermarket and I avoid going there with him like the plague. Thankfully today wasn’t too terrible. He still let go of the shopping trolley too many times to count. He knocked over a potted plant, which thanfully they didn’t make me pay for. He ran around more than I like him to, but overall, he wasn’t too bad today. Compared to other trips there he was an angel, so it hasn’t been too bad of a day today.

I left the kids in the car while I unpacked the groceries. Normally I hate leaving the kids in the car alone, but I figure it’s better to have them safely locked in the car in my driveway than have them running in and out of the front door while I’m bringing in the groceries.

Our house is a single storey house and it’s split into two sections. At the front of the house is our master bedroom (and ensuite and walk in closet), the lounge room and what used to be the dining room. Now the dining room is the craft/computer room, but the dining table is still stuck in there. There’s a door that separates these rooms from the rest of the house.

Past that door is open plan. The kitchen, family/meals and rumpus room is all one big area. The bedrooms, bathroom and laundry run off a hallway down the right side of that area.

Anyway, now that you can picture our house in your head (yeah right!) what I was going to say up there before all that long-windedness was that as I was walking through the kitchen door I was pleasantly surprised by my house. I’ve been wanting to move for the longest time, pretty much since we moved in seven years ago, but today I realised that there’s not really anything wrong with this house at all! It helped that there weren’t toys strewn from one end of the house to the other and that the kitchen was clean and that the floors were shiny. So now I’m thinking staying here won’t be horrible. I’m even considering what we can do around the house to improve it. I know I want a commercial (or semi-commercial) oven and pulling out the wall oven we have now would create a bigger pantry, still not the walk-in pantry I’ve been wishing for, but that can come later. I’d like new flooring, I’d like to repaint the entire interior of the house. Then there’s the outside. That needs a huge overhaul. It’s a huge job. Neither of us are gardeners so we just stick our head in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist. We need to get off our bums and get it done. We’re on water restrictions here, we’re not allowed to water our lawn at all. Ever. So that makes growing a nice garden just that little bit harder.

Ah well, hopefully we can come up with something. Dermot will be happy to hear the news that I’m not horrified to stay here anymore. I’m going to make a conscious effort to stay away from real estate sites and building site. I wonder if I can do it. Worse yet, I wonder if I’ll be back here soon saying that I’ve changed my mind again.

Time will tell.

I wasn’t overly happy with my last design, so I changed it again. Then I upgraded to the newest installion of WordPress. Most normal people would have upgraded first. I never claimed to be normal!

All went well, thankfully and here we are. I still have a couple of things to tweak but the kids are waking up from their naps.

I hope everyone is having a fantastic weekend. It’s a long weekend here and I’m hoping to get some stamping time in tomorrow or tonight if I don’t fall asleep. I got a new order in on Friday and ended up getting sick and didn’t go scrapping afterall. I’m itching to test out my new Boho Backgrounds set. I got a new Crew Kids Girl Simply Scrappin’ Kit and want to start some layouts for Erin with that one. Of course, I got the ribbons to match and had to be Basic Gray ink because I didn’t have that yet. When you start using Stampin’ Up! products you *need* everything! You can get by with a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but if you’re obsessive like me you NEED everything, right now! Love it, love it, love! All of my other scrap supplies have been badly neglected since SU! came along. I’m thinking about ebaying a lot of it. When I say “a lot” I mean A LOT!

I’ve never sold anything on ebay so I’m not sure how much of a pain it would be. The thought of dragging packages and at least two kids to the post office is nearly enough to make me reconsider!

If you sell on ebay, how do you find it? Is it worth the effort?

It’s definitely not here, that’s for sure.  I’ve looked under the fridge, I’ve looked behind the couch.  It’s not in one of the many toy boxes in the house and it is most definitely not anywhere near my stamping desk.  It’s sad that I can’t even remember the last time I picked up a stamp or got out my Stampin’ Scrub.  I know I made a couple of cards for a friend recently, but I think that was over a week ago now.

I hope I find it before Saturday, I need to get a birthday card made for a little girl from Sean’s class at school.  She’s having a party on the weekend.  Actually I hope it’s back before tomorrow night, we have a scrapping night planned.  Although at this stage it’s looking like I’ll actually be making cards because I haven’t touched my camera in ages either.  Did I mention my creativity is lost?  It must be hiding with my motivation.

Let me know if you’ve seen it.  Better yet, give me some inspiration!  I plan on participating in Kristina’s next colour inspiration challenge if I have all the colours.  Remind me, email me, make me do it!

I’ve seen some fantastic cards coming out of some of my favourite Aussie stampers with that challenge!  I just realised that I don’t have a blogroll up with all my favourite stampers.  I’ll need to get on to that later.  We’re off for a playdate in about half an hour and I think I hear Erin waking up.

I’ve had a couple of emails asking about my blog banners.  I’ve created a few for other people like the wonderfully creative Sam.  I was originally a digital scrapbooker a very long time ago.  It feels like a lifetime ago!  I only had one child back then!  Anyway, if you’d like me to make you up a banner let me know what you’d like and we can go from there.

Go visit Sam, she has a wonderful blog showing off all kinds of fantastic card designs.  I’m about to totally copy a couple of them.  Hi Sam!

I’m sure it never used to take me this long to change a blog design!  Excuse the mess, hopefully I’ll get more of a chance later.

Does anyone still actually visit?  Leave a comment and make my day!

You can probably see that I’m in the process of changing my blog design.  I’ll have to finish it up later, I need to get the kids up from their very late afternoon nap, oops!  I guess we’ll be up late tonight!

That’s not the only change happening right now, I’ve decided to leave Stampin’ Up! for a little while.  I’ll definitely sign up again, just waiting for it to be the right time!  It’s possible I’ll be blogging more regularly now.  I might even show up some places I haven’t been for a while.

I might even have time to get some of my own scrapbooking done, who knows!  It’s been ages since I completed a page.  My photography has been sorely lacking since I joined SU!, but that’s just because I had a new obsession to deal with!   My poor camera hardly recognises me anymore.  I can’t remember when I last took photos of the kids.  I really need to rectify that.  If the weather isn’t horrendous tomorrow, I’ll try to get them outside for a quick photoshoot.  Erin had her beautiful fairy costume on today for a birthday party and I forgot to take my camera.  The fairy, the pirate and Superman all went uncaptured.  Bad mummy!

I’ll be back later to get my design right, if I get time, seems I’ve left the kids asleep too long and they may be up until midnight!

It’s here, and it is WONDERFUL!  I won’t give away what’s in there in case you want to find out for yourself, but I will say it’s very, very lovely and you’ll want to spend lots and lots of money.

If you’d like a copy, let me know and I’ll either post one out or hand deliver it to you.  If you’d like to host a workshop or catalogue party you’ll receive a copy of the NEW catalogue - FREE.

Yes, I’ve been quiet again, what a shock!

Our offer on the land was accepted the day I last posted. We’re thrilled. Since then we’ve been dealing with mortgage brokers, trying to get the best deal and finagle (if that’s a word) how to best work things around. Our ultimate goal is to secure the land, get a loan for the construction of the new house and while all that’s happening sell our current house. If our current house fails to sell we’ll be left with a HUGE mortgage, but we can always rent this place out to help with that. The easier way to do things would be to sell this place, rent for 6-12 months and build the new place while renting. We’re not that patient and we don’t want to throw money away on renting.

So that’s where things are at the moment with that. Of course, my fear is that the bank will look at the numbers, laugh hysterically and say a big, loud, resounding NOOOOO! And in that case, hopefully we’ll still get enough to secure the land, because it is absolutely beautiful!

Worse case scenario, the bank says no, we stay here and fix up the house and sell it without any time pressures. Best case scenario, the bank says yes, I stop losing my mind, we put this place on the market and enjoy the stress of building another house.

I’ll keep you posted, eventually

I’m considering splitting the blog up again. There are distinct things I need to post about and I’m wondering whether they shouldn’t be in separate places. I’ll definitely do it if we get the go-ahead from the bank. I’ll start up a building blog like I did the last time I we were building. I really should have all my Stampin’ Up! stuff separate, too.

I nearly had a recruit last week, sadly she was in the States and I am here in Australia. She sounded lovely, too! Hi Denise! I hope you found the information you were after.

So if you have nothing better to do, and if anyone still actually reads here (!!) leave a comment on whether you think I should split the blog up again or keep in all together like it is now.

Last night we went and saw a beautiful piece of land.  I had put it out of my mind before because friends of ours are building just two doors down and I didn’t want to make them feel weird about it.  After all the frustation lately and worrying that we’d lose out on anything that came our way, we decided to have a look anyway.  Oh my God, but it’s gorgeous!  It has beautiful views, lovely soil and is close to the end of a court (cul-de-sac), so very quiet.  It is a fair bit more than we wanted to pay, but it is worth every cent more.  A bonus is that it’s not yet sold, which has always been our stumbling block.  So far, every single block we’ve liked has gone just before we called the agents.
I’ve just put an offer in and I’m waiting to hear back from the agent.  Keep your fingers crossed for us!

So, now we’ve decided on the land we want and we’ve decided on the house we want.  I’m waiting on a call back from a mortgage broker and the sales guy from the builders and things could get going very quickly from here.  If everything goes according to plan, we could be in our new house this time next year.  The builder we’re going with allocates a start date based on how many houses they know they can build in a month.  At the moment I think we’re looking at a start date somewhere in August or September.

We’ll have to get this house (our current one) ready for sale.  We need to work on the garden, replace some chipped floor tiles (lucky we had heaps left over), a little bit of painting, get the carpets cleaned and maybe stretched.

I better go, I need to take a deep breath or something ;)  HA!