Indeedy-do – we now have power at the house. Just before Christmas, we had power connected at the cabin. Mick, the electrician, is also a farmer, so was busy cutting hay and butchering cattle, until he came over today and connected the house to the mains! Yay! Monte was listening to the radio whilst doing some work on the windows. No noisy generator to be heard. It was wonderful.’

Most people would take that (power, radio etc) for granted. We will *never* take that for granted. Not for quite a while, anyway!

Probably the most exciting event this week was finishing the rendering inside the house! All the rooms are now rendered inside. There are three coats of limewash to do on the rendered walls now. The limewash hardens the walls even more and becomes very white. The paint that we chose goes quite well with the limewash.

More tiling is happening on the house. We are very excited because each room is looking more and more beautiful as it is completed. We feel very lucky, but it all comes at the cost of the sacrifices we have made over the last two years. It has been a very hard slog, going without power, space and nice surrounds. The hardest part for me was going without a washing machine. It is very luxurious now having a fridge. Luckily for us, the children have managed very well, but now Georgia is talking more and more about wanting more space of her own. An eye-opener of sorts; there are many people in the world doing it a lot tougher than we did. Our friend Philz was telling us that an apartment the same size as our little cabin (6x6m) would be a luxurious, expensive home in Japan. Perspective…

Unfortunately, perhaps, we will not be moving into the house before the beginning of the school term. We have decided to wait until the house is complete – just a matter of weeks. This is instead of moving into a select number of rooms and then finishing the others off when we are in the house. We have, however, decided to move furniture into each room as it is completed. That way the move will not be a huge effort – rather a smaller effort over more time. Equally exhausting, no doubt, but progress nonetheless.

We have found somebody to install the flue for the Esse stove, which will bring us closer to the official completion of the build. We need to organise, and perhaps engineer, retaining walls for the same reason. We are *still* waiting on the bath and the kitchen. This week we will choose the architraves and skirtings, probably a ‘lamb’s tongue’ kind of molding. Everything is going very smoothly.

I’ve been accepted into uni again, for a sponsored place in a Grad Cert in Education, which would lead into Masters. I am seriously considering it for this year. My inlaws are my greatest encouragers in this regard, motivating me to write a book and do a PhD. Of course, having a desk and a study in our new house will mean I won’t have any more excuses!