Day tripping on the edge of the Yarra Valley.

Actually, it's not really a day trip for me, more of a 15 minute drive up the road.

Back in April, the Robin Boyd foundation held an open day of some significant Boyd designed houses. As I'm not a member of the Boyd Foundation, I had no idea that this was on and only found out about it after reading it over at Modernist Australia. My disappointment at missing this event turned to surprise when I read the suburbs that these houses were situated. Lilydale, Ringwood East, Warrandyte and Research. Ringwood East is the suburb next door to mine and it turns out that the Patrick Hegarty house is around the corner from a friend of mine. When I drove past the other day I was going to take a photo, but the weather had other ideas. And the Stanley Blott house in Lilydale is actually in Chirnside Park on the cusp of Lilydale. And it's only 15 minutes up the road.
I drove up there yesterday (I say up as it's high on top of the hill, overlooking the Yarra Valley and Dandenong Ranges) and managed to get a few photos of not only the Stanley Blott house, but some other wonderful houses that were built sometime in the 60's or 70's. The whole area is a real mishmash of houses, with a lot of redbrick 70's and 80's houses, some flat-roofed styles from the 50's and 60's and the odd McMansion springing up.
I didn't go searching for the homes in Warrandyte or Research as both of those areas are heavily treed and I doubt they would be visible from the roadside.

Seeing the light!

When we bought our house it had been recently renovated and new fittings like carpet, timber venetian blinds and lights were all in place. The lights were nice, but kind of generic and cheap oyster lights. There were 7 of these lights throughout the house, all requiring 2 globes. The larger spiral energy saving globes didn't fit, so I had to hunt around for the compact ones before they became readily available. Also, the upturned design of the light meant that it was a great spot for flies and moths to die, leaving a lovely dark shadow on the glass part of the light fitting.

I convinced The Bloke to change them all to batten fix lights so that I could change the shades as I desired. I thought that this would be a simple task, but unfortunately the heat from the lights had damaged the plaster and large pieces had to be replaced. So, the lounge room is still a work in progress, but the hallway is done.
I found a spaghetti light on Ebay that is the same as one I have hanging in my front entrance. After we removed the wiring and constructed a clear acrylic hanging plate for it, we strung it up from a batten fix lamp cord.
Then we replaced the temporary light shade that I had put up on the brick feature wall in the kitchen. When we moved in, it had a rather garish, colonial looking coach light in gold with amber glass (sorry, I didn't take photos of it).
Now it has a retro glass and timber sconce that I found at a salvage yard, cleaned up and gave a new coat of paint.

The bathroom needs new lights but that will wait until we do a complete renovation of the bathroom. As we still need to finish landscaping the front yard and building a new garage, I think that will be some time away.