
I would like to show you the cottage I lived in for almost twenty years. The front half I built when I was 22, with no building experience! It cost $10,000, and I kept it cheap by doing absolutely everything myself. The back half was added much later. I made this photo tour in spring of 2014.
This is what you saw when you came in from the front gate.

Here you can see the front of the original house, with its beautiful gothic arched windows that I got from an old church. Back right was the chook house, and a wooden gate that went to the chook area and my son Jesse’s garden.

This was the entrance to the new part of the house, the kitchen door.
Here’s the pretty herb garden beneath that kitchen window:

And here’s my home from the other side. I was inspired by French country farm houses, and I think it really does look a bit like one:

Now come inside, let me show you the kitchen:

All the cabinets were made from old weather boards. The kitchen had the most glorious view from the window, which you can see in this photo here:


And here’s the table where we ate, chatted, and watched each other do silly interpretive dance routines on the ‘stage’ that was our kitchen floor.

When we ate, the rabbit, who free ranged in the garden, liked to hang out near us outside the window, entertaining us. It was nearly as good as interpretive dance.

There was a lovely little Alice-In-Wonderland style arched doorway that went from the kitchen to the lounge room:

Now step through into the lounge room, and you’ll see the wood stove, which made me very, very happy in winter. When everything was grey and dark and wet, lighting the fire lifted my spirits. I always did intend to have a wood stove but the one I installed when I first built the house was stolen (!!) and then we put a cupboard in its space, and after that we couldn’t figure out what to do with all the STUFF that we depended on in the cupboard, so I couldn’t replace the woodstove!

Now here’s the front door, and through the arch window, you can see my fishing girl statue. She was been trying to catch fish in that pond for years, but no go yet, unfortunately.

Right in front of those lovely arched windows was my art desk, where I spent much of my time:

I also made art in the bathroom (which you had to go outside to get to), where I had a bench for dirty/stinky jobs like plastering, soldering and spray-painting:

It was pretty squishy in there, and the only reason I was allowed in there at all with my dangerous tools is because the room was in shocking state of disrepair with the roof about to fall in and holes on the wall. Later we fixed that and I moved my dangerous tools to my studio at the Abbotsford Convent. We had a composting toilet:

Which worked great and didn’t stink at all.
Now come back inside and upstairs. This is the loft, which was home to our bath, and originally my whole little family slept there – all squished in like peas in a pod. In 2014 the loft was just for Jesse:

And here’s the bedroom, which was my favourite room in the house:

Sitting up in bed, journaling, was probably my favourite switch-off activity, the best possible way to restore myself. When we slept in the loft, that was pretty hard on my back, as I never had anything to lean against, and had to sit right in the middle of the bed so I wouldn’t hit my head on the ceiling. Here in the new bed, I could spend hours journaling comfortably.

I think my favourite feature of the room was the chandelier, which existed as a dream in my journal for years before I finally had space for one. I made it from old forks, pewter jugs and other scavenged metals. I took a metal-smithing course just to learn how to do this, and now as a result, I’ve got the skills to do other metalwork – it heralded the beginning of a jewellery making career!

The bedroom had a lovely arched window:

And a wardrobe made from salvaged timber:

And this little corset I found in France, hanging on my grandmother’s coathanger:

Ok, let’s head outside and I’ll show you the garden.

If you went through that little wooden gate I mentioned back at the start of this post, you’d find yourself standing in front of the chook pen. They had a little yellow house to roost in, and a big pen covered with a grape vine to play in. But through the day we’d open the gate and they’d hang out in the orchard too. See the black square bin in the photo above? Worms lived in there.


Here’s Jesse’s vegie garden and cubby, fenced off from the chooks, who would otherwise have destroyed it:



We had a separate pen for our meat chickens, and they hung out under our fig and mandarine trees:

Now on the other side of the house, if you stepped outside our kitchen door, there was a garden of wild greens and the mosaic path, leading to my vegie garden:

My favourite piece of garden art is here too, a stencil I painted onto a piece of tin, which was flattened and had some barbed wire as a frame:

This was my vegie garden, where most of my gardening efforts were concentrated:

It had raised beds, and a fence around it to keep out animals. I tried to plant out roughly a square metre each month for us to eat. To know more about how I produce maximum food from this, read my page, How To Really Grow Food In Your Backyard.
This bed here was just ripening up, soon to be eaten:

We were already eating zucchinis and the last of winter’s spinach, broccoli and beetroots:


Past my vegie garden was my ‘food forest’:


At one end of the food forest was the composting station. This was where the composting toilet results went, and all food and garden scraps, and entire dead animals. In fact, my neighbours brought me their expired animals to dispose of here. It burned hot and fast. When I emptied stuff onto it, and came back a week later, it all looked like dirt. Ultimately, this fed the vegies and fruit trees, which made for a nearly-closed system of fertility.

The food forest was also home to bees:

The bees thought they owned the forest and sometimes buzzed me when I was out there doing destructive things like weeding. I learnt from experience that if buzzed, I get two warnings and then a sting. If it wasn’t a good day for a bee sting, I’d head inside after the first warning.

There was a fair bit of food hidden in my forest:



And some lovely little spots like this one:

And there we have it, folks. Thanks for looking around with me. I really loved that house.