A nice romantic walk on the beach.

Some images from an engagement photoshoot I did this week. Meet Amy and Bernard - they are getting married in just over two weeks. I wanted to put these on here and write about it because 1) Amy and Bernard are super cute, and 2) I want to show prospective wedding couples what the engagement photoshoot is all about. Its basically a way for me to capture you as a couple before you get married. I encourage you to wear whatever you like, and more importantly to be yourselves infront of the camera. Beforehand, a lot of people (especially boys) find it hard to imagine being relaxed whilst being photographed, so its great when after the shoot people say to me "oh that was actually quite fun! I didn't feel awkward at all". Thats the idea! It means that you have some lovely images of the two of you just being together, and also on the wedding day you feel SO much more comfortable infront of the camera.

There's my little plug! Here are the images. We shot this in the middle of all that horrible rainy weather, and the light in the evening was beautiful. I got Amy and Bernard to walk their two lovely dogs on the beach.





Look at the cute dogs! Thats Marley on the right, he's a 9 year old Blue Heeler (sp?) / Bull / Staffordshire cross and he likes to CHEW things. Aida is on the left, she's a Ridgeback puppy and she is so cute (and SO full of energy). They won't be the same size for long, Aida will soon grow up to be bigger than all of us. Well, almost.





Such a perfect evening for photographs, although a tad cold!





I love images where the boy is looking at the girl!







After the beach we went to hang out on the train tracks, which I've been eyeing up for ages as I drive to and from the beach with Nana and Nails. Plus the light was perfect for the old-rusticy feeling I was after.







I think this is my favourite - doesn't Amy look radient?



I have my first New Zealand wedding this Saturday, and a whole bunch after that too. How exciting! I can't wait to get stuck in. Its taken a while to build up the business over here, but I'm getting there. Luckily dunedin is geographically quite big, but socially quite small, so great for personal referrals!

My next post should be about the barn...

Our swanky London flat

I've had requests to blog some images of our barn conversion. Apologies for the delay.. Part of me wanted to wait until we were in - which since Christmas I've constantly thought was going to be in about 3 or 4 days time! We're converting the barn as somewhere to live until we build the house. Anyway, we decided to do things properly, so we are essentially building a proper flat within the barn, and that means everything takes longer. Steven has done the whole conversion himself - I thought I was a perfectionist! When I help I can almost feel him worrying that I won't continue the STRAIGHT LINE.

Even though I say this every week and no one is going to believe me anymore - we will actually be moving in next Sunday. WOOHOO! There's only a few hundred more little things to do in the meantime. Sometimes I find myself daydreaming that its all magically finished and we can move in tonight. Here are my most popular daydreams at the moment:

1) We win the lottery, and pay a team of the fastest tradesmen around to finish the barn for us. Then we holiday in Hawaii for a bit.
2) We actually do the work ourselves, although I have a magical remote control that fastforwards to me sitting in the barn watching a good film with a large slab of chocolate thinking "I'm glad THATS all over".
3) We are nominated to be on one of those television programmes where Very Good People get rewarded for their good deeds by having their house built for them. Overnight. Only I'm not sure donating to charity by direct debit every month would qualify us.

Here are the photos!

Space for a double door and an upstairs window at the front:



Our new gravel driveway!





The upstairs is a mezzanine area, typical of a £300,000 flat in London! Only this is costing us a little less..



Weather boarding the outside:



This day Steven was doing the outside walls and I was doing the insulation on the inside:





A self portrait:



And a demonstration of how you insert the pink batts insulation into the walls:







That last one is Donna of course looking after her chicks. Its so cute watching them copy what she does. We only have 4 chicks now since Nana killed one (Nana the dog that is). She has a dark side to her that one. The only problem is she looks so cute and mournful on the naughty chain.

Piglets

Okay I promise this is the last baby animal blog post for a while. But I just wanted to show you the new piglets from next door. They are 3 days old in these photographs, and they are SO CUTE!











A happy pig:



I've got lots of barn conversion photographs coming up too!