The joys of a pot of tea

My secret love of Tea Parties

When I was a little girl, my most favourite thing to do was to have a tea party with my best girlfriend. We would dress up and set up our little tea pot and tea cups and saucers and eat little vanilla wafer biscuits or a teddy bear biscuit from the extensive Arnotts biscuit range.

 On very rare and special occasions, my mum would let us use her precious china tea set. It was given to my parents as a wedding gift and it was such a treat to be able to use it. In fact....it still is to me! Years later my love for a tea party is still very much alive and I like nothing better then to go thrifting (I love to use that word....instead of op-shopping, makes it sound so much cleverer productive and thrifty!) for vintage tea sets or mix and match tea cups and saucers. I am getting quite a collection now and I love to be able to get them out and use them! In fact for Miss O's first birthday this year, I used all my bits of vintage china and it was such fun...for me that is!

My good friend, who is sadly going away for 3 months or so, also relishes in a pot of tea for two, and we have had countless cups together chatting and sharing thoughts and dreams and having a  good giggle with one another time and time again. It is so special and I truly enjoy baking something nice and setting up a tray with a pot of tea and my gorgeous tea cups. Somehow, tea just tastes better when you can sip it daintily from a tea cup....don't you think?

So today, this afternoon in fact. I am going to poor myself a cup and relax and savour the taste of tea from a tea cup. I may even have to bake something nice....just because.

You may want to join me in having one too!

xo Rachel

Saturday....and Sunday Makeover

Driveway After Pictures

Ok, so perhaps I was a little ambitious with the whole Saturday makeover idea. It ended up being both Saturday and Sunday and a pretty hard slog it was too! Mr and Mrs PTF are both thoroughly exhausted but satisfied with their efforts. Even Little O helped the team out by scraping the tan bark off the trailer all over the place into the garden beds, of course. She loves getting in there and getting nice and dirty. I wish I had taken a pic of her, she was just too cute!

So...we eventually shovelled out all the wretched scoria and loaded it up into the trailer for the tip. Then we planted the hydrangeas and also some small agapanthas that we have had sitting in a big pot for about 4 years!!! Hey its a makeover on a budget, so whatever we could get our hands on was good enough! I have to admit though that I also went to Bunnings with Little O this morning (Sunday) and bought some seaside daisies (I could not resist...I love them). My excuse to Mr PTF was that its all about 'street appeal' however I think the winning point in the argument discussion, was the fact that I let him have a sleep in and I snuck out with Little O before he woke up!!! Hahahaa!

So I will stop blabbing on. It is not the most exciting makeover to say the least...but here are the pics! I decided to make them into a collage cos I mean how many photos of a driveway can you look at, one after another?

We were completely wrecked after all this shovelling and digging. The soil was really dry, with lots of rocks,clay and dead tree roots, and it was really back-breaking work.

So there you go a little prettying up of our driveway, all ready and waiting for sale!

After all this hard work what more could you want then to sit down in the beautiful summery evening with a glass of Lemon Lime and Bitters with a slice of lemon and a sprig of homegrown mint and some mags....ahhh. Delish!

See ya soon,

xo Rachel

Saturday Makeover

Driveway Before and After

So today we are working on our front driveway and getting it all nice and prettied up for selling. Not a fun job to say the least, however I am looking forward to how lovely it will all look at the end.
Its drizzling on and off, so its time to get those Stormwells on (how appropriately named!) get my happy face on and get to work!!

I thought I would take some pics of how it looks at the moment....extremely uninspiring. The horrible red pebbly rock 'scoria' is the absolute pitts and I can't wait to get rid of it!

We are just going to do a really basic job and put down some mulchy tan bark and a couple of plants as we don't want to spend too much moulah on it.

I bought some hydrangeas from our next door neighbours who were conveniently having a garage sale this morning- a great excuse to go off and have a potter around and leave Mr PTF to do the shovelling! I did eventually come back though with about 8 potted hydrangeas and a cute little wooden toy truck with red painted wheels for little miss O, all at bargain prices...gotta love that!

So there you have it....the definite before shots.... I will be back soon with the after shots!!

 xo Rachel

On Pear Tree Farm

 Here I am!

Well, I have made a big jump and joined blog world....oh my what have I done?! I made a rash promise to my lovely husband that if we bought what I affectionately call 'Pear Tree Farm', then I would write a blog about our new life there and all the little goings on that happen in our day to day lives. So here I AM!! 

It is all very new and confusing to me at the moment....for example: 

• I am struggling big time to get images centred!
• I have no idea about css, what the??
• I have changed templates a gazillion times trying to work out which one works best for me and how on earth to get things in the right spot and I am still going!
• I seem to have a heck of a lot of trouble getting images to load in the right size and wish to goodness it could all be more straightforward

So far this is all I could come up with, I am sure it will change and morph and grow as I get more acquainted with blogger....let us hope so anyway! For now though, this is it.


So I shall explain about the elusive Pear Tree Farm. My husband and I have been searching for a new place to call home for about 2 years now and after searching high and low, going through property after property, making offers, having our offers rejected, more searching, constant and almost addictive surveillance on domain.com, lots of tears (from me of course) a fair bit of negotiating, we bought a place!! I have inventively named it Pear Tree Farm (for all the pear trees that line the driveway....clever I know). We are in the process of moving and also getting our current house on the market. It is a big change for us all and one that we are ready for. It has been a challenging process but one that has taught us alot and to be honest I have come to love our existing house a whole lot more than I used to and...gasp I think I will indeed miss it quite alot. It has been a wonderful house for us and we have renovated it and made it lovely. Our first home together, we moved here after we were married and have lived there for nearly 5 years now. We brought our new little bubbie home from the hospital to this place and she has spent her first year here. It holds many precious memories and I will miss it.
Yes.
I will.
Together we have painted, re-curtained (is that even a word?) the house and worked endlessly on the gardens clipping and pruning roses and creating an awesome and rather wild veggie patch. Here is a pic if it...and I am in there somewhere!!