Backyard work...

Our work on redoing the backyard has seen a lot of progress in the last couple of months!

Remember this is how it used to look:a year ago

August 2011
We are not connected to mains sewage and therefore have leach drains. At the moment they're
towards the back of the block and we can't do much with that bit of land, except grow grass on it, so Rod decided to put new ones in directly behind the house seeing as that's where the grass area is going to be anyway.

so here's a view of the retaining wall Rod and his band of merry helpers built and all the leach drains covered over with sand where one day we'll have beautiful green grass to run around on and enjoy :-)

steps out near the laundry door
(they've been cemented up now)

Rodger the welder building the trusses for the new patio

old patio

And this past Saturday, the merry band of helpers (Paul Byl, Marcel, Mike and Justin)
came to help barrow the concrete into the patio area. Tony from Rod's work helped out
with all the screeding and technical sides of working with concrete


And there it is! All poured and ready for honing...

...so eventually it will look something like this:

Dad and Mum van der Schaaf celebrated 40 years of marriage on Sunday the 9th of October, so we went down to Albany on the weekend to join in with the celebrations. On Saturday afternoon, everyone (except Fritz and Viv and kids) enjoyed each others company while playing a game of 10 pin bowling :) Was great fun!

some of the van der Schaaf crew:
Ethan (in the stripey shorts), Olivia, Ezra (mini Pop), Devon
Darryl (in the red jumper), Rod, Glenn, Lauren (looking backwards)
Michael, Kara, Sienna (her daughter) and Kathryn

Rod showing us his style

Mike showing Zachary how it's done


I didn't take any photos on Sunday, but we all had coffee, cake and nibblies at Dad and Mum's house. Dad has just had another knee replacement and hasn't been feeling too great, so we just kept it low key. Next year March we all hope to go away for 3 days to a farm stay down south which should be nice.

We had to leave early Monday morning because I had a doctor's appointment at 10am, which I couldn't really change. I took Olivia along and we got to see the baby on the doctor's ultrasound machine which was really neat! Here's one of the clearer pictures he printed off for me - head to the right and body to the left if you can't work it out :-P. I'll be going for the 19 week anatomy scan in a few weeks time (I'm 16 weeks now!) so then we'll get some better pics hopefully :-) Looking forward to it!