boomhauer in the bush

Asia is nice

Hello there,

I'm in place called Phi Phi at the moment which is as paradises go its up there, the place was devasted by the tsunami 2 years ago but is getting back to normal now.

We went on a sunset tour yesterday and went to the beach where they filmed the beach did some snorkelling, just the usual day!!

Asia has been great, Singapore, Kulua Lumpur, Langkawi, Phuket and Phi Phi have been brilliant and again i need to get my finger out and post the photos that i've taken, i reckon i'm turing in to quite the david baillie, only joking!

Anyway thata about it

hope everything is good back home

love

Col

Goodbye Australia

Well we've got our flight in 3 hours and we're leaving the house in 10mins to go to the airport!

I've had the best year of my life and can't wait for this last 3 months in Asia just a wee thankyou to Rod and Belinda who've put us up over the course of the past year and provided us with the work to fund our little Asian adventure, anyway Asia in 9 hours bring it on,

I'll see if i can post something when i get to Singapore,

hug and kisses

love

Col

Happy New Year

Happy New Year Everyone,

I have photos of the festive period not a lot but some none the less and they will be getting posted soon, met phil tuffnel on New Years Eve which was nice, his only question was "Where did you get the beer?" Seriously!

In the mean time I've uploaded some photos of the work that me and Dave do. I've really enjoyed the work that we've been doing in Melbourne it beats the alternatives, fruit picking or call centre work, hands down and i'm learning new things everyday. Before i came to australia i would have never thought that i would be putting in foundations, flooring, walls etc for houses and much more besides.

The photos are from a house we were renovating in a place called Ararat and from a house in a suburb of Melbourne cakked Rowville, where we're staying just now. The photos are honestly pretty boring but just wanted to show that we do actually work here! By the time we leave Oz we'll have worked 7 out of our 12 months i know i doesn't sound a lot but when you've got to fit in travelling around a country thats twice the size of Europe it can be tricky.

Anyway hope everyone is well back home and that you all had a great christmas and new year

Love

Col boy

Oooooooh a Redback! and a big one too, there were loads of redbacks at the house in Ararat one actually landed beside my hand when i was fixing a door frame, quite disturbing having a deadly spider land beside you but you get used to it pretty quickly, I would be more cautious of a whitetail looks kind of the same but you guessed it, it has a white dot not a red one if they bite you the bite never heals ever! and we seen a lot of those too!

Dav wasn't impressed with the flooring that we found, apparantely nails weren't a priority back in ye old days

Do real builders use car jacks to hold up buildings? nah didn't think so but we're not real builders we're backpackers 1-0

That looks safe!

We decided to knock out the walls as well, this place was becoming a pandoras box

This is what the house looked like once we pulled of all the fake brick cladding, it looks like dump!

Thats the side of the house and the chimney that we knocked down, well i actually pushed half of it down from the roof! i know i know this is incredibly exciting stuff

Starting the new flooring, with our fantastically built bearers and joists

New floor down, no bother

Thats the house with all the weather boards off and the some of the insulation up, i took this photo about 3 weeks ago and the house still looks like this as we haven't been back to it, but as there is never any rain theres no problem. I know what your thinking which silly bugger went up and took the weather boards off the top, that would be me! and i'm scared of heights!

That's the new walls built

Dav firing up the nail gun, that bad boy is a lot of fun!

The end product, well sort of the other wall got plastered but you get the idea

Our boss sold his old house and part of the deal was that a paved path had to be put down so we were the men for the job

Dav brushing the sand in giving it that professional look!

The finished article complete with matching red chuckies, not bad for a couple of amatuers!

C'est tres bien

Cold/Hot/Bushfires

Hello there,

I realise it's been a while since my last post so i've done 3 at once! We're sill in Great Western working away keeping our heads down. We had some really weird weather lately about 3 weeks ago it got as low as 9 degrees C in the day, this is summer in australia! then the week after it got up to 40 which started off bushfires then we got electrical storms, all good fun though. It's hot all the time now the last couple of days have been up to 40 and with the hot northerly wind its like standing next to a hairdryer when you go outside!

Theres not much else to report we're just working oh yeah we went to safewys the other day to get some messages and there was this youg lad here, who looked like he was a couple cans short of a sixpack with his trousers up to his armpits and what dave described as 21" waist, so he walked out of the shop and proclaimed "God bless beethoven if here were today he'd say whoosh!" i don't know who was taking to probably a parked car by the looks of him but it was the funniest thing i've seen in a while.

Anyway thats about it hope everything is good back home, leave a comment or send me an e-mail and i'll get back to you

Cheers

Col Boy