I envy your wall space, I wish we had more! What has worked really well for us is using empty walls as our "brag" board. Do you have particular interests you love talking about? Putting something up about your family, a favourite subject, pet or holiday could be a great talking point. Our visitors get drawn to our fishing photos, where we caught the fish (Botswana/Amazon) and the type (Tiger fish/Peacock Bass). Although the photo print (size A0) could be printed really cheaply (~$50) at somewhere like Officeworks, I discovered that the frames (~$440 each) were the biggest expense. However, as we know we only needed to print a new A0 sized photo in the future, spending money on good, customised frames is worthwhile. We have also now tried printing our favourite shots on stretched canvas (~$100). The product gets delivered, usually in a week, ready for hanging much quicker than ordering a custom made frame ;) Smaller canvases range from twenty dollars to about a hundred. I found this company very reliable in terms of quality of print and speed of service: http://canvasfactory.refr.cc/HDLHZPH We have displaced our canvas photos from the wall and occasionally display them underneath the kitchen bench as you can see here (desperately covering up white space)!

Hi everyone - just an update on our bathroom. Thank you again for all the suggestions. As all renovation projects go, we started with a basic touch up with tile paint and repainting the vanity; the tile paint was a disaster. To be fair it is very humid in Cairns at the moment, however the instructions were to leave it longer to dry. In the end we have ripped out both the floor and the wall tiles, we have reduced the height of the roman bath to a step in shower (we tiled straight over the shower floor with mosaic tiles). We managed to get a second hand vanity in fantastic condition, are replacing the shower glass from higrove (thanks for the tip) and even got some brand new tiles from the dump shop for $15.00. We thought we would try our hand at rendering and we are very happy with the effect of getting rid of the besser block walls. So for colours we have grey floor tiles, and white wall tiles. We are up to the wall tiles now and very excited about showing you our bathroom renovation which fingers crossed should be finished next week. Thank you again for all your comments. I have learnt a good lesson on weighing up the benefits of using what is existing in the space, to starting again and look for DIY tutorials on YouTube.

Both my dogs are rescues, Coby Dog (JRT x corgi) came with his name and his recalls were too good to change it. The Macaroni Monster (JRT x mini foxie) came as Mac, but he was was a round little tube, so he became Macaroni and the Monster was added as he was the puppy from hell and he is still very determined.

Being a Canuck I grew up with cable (my folks got it in the mid 60s) so when I arrived here I was a bit puzzled by the funny metal things on the roofs still being in existence. Everyone has cable in Canada (well, unless they're out in the boonies, in which case they've got satellite). Oh, and it really is "cable." I have no idea why, living here in a reasonable sized town, I have to have a satellite dish on the roof. In any case, as Blee says, it was attractive when it started because it gave you more channels (where I lived, there were two Canadian channels and a handful of American ones you could get with an antenna but when cable came in, the reception was far better and the number of channels much higher). It's got more specialized and more expensive over the years, but the cable companies (there are three major ones in Canada) long ago branched out into mobile and internet technology (which is why it's the cable companies, not the taxpayer, that are paying for all that fiber optic cable there) - so regardless of what the future brings, they'll probably be providing the infrastructure to deliver it.