| Otterbein house 'is us'
"We came out of separate homes and past lives with nothing," Michaeline Fedder recalled. "Now 99 percent of what we have we bought together."
The remaining 1 percent consists of family portraits and photographs that grace several walls and tables of their South Baltimore home.
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Marotta: When in doubt, write it down
Night-stalker ants in the bathroom got right to work the second you sat down in there, and the next thing you knew they'd used their busy little bodies to cover your bare feet in a complete set of trembling jet-black booties. The ants in the kitchen, meanwhile, were just plain everywhere: on counter tops, inside cabinets, even in the food dishes of our poor old cats, who shrank and blanched at the sight of them. So what did I do about this awful problem? I sat down and described it in a column. Same with the other cross I have to bear, those middle-of-the-night Charlie-horses I've been getting: leg cramps that come on so hard and unexpected they lift me straight up in the air like a person in a levitation act; like Lazarus raised up from the dead, only raised up hollering. This, too, I brought to my readers, and praise God for the written word, the same thing happened again: solutions began flowing into in my mailbox, faster than I could read them almost.
Majestic home in the hills
ANDREW and Bernadette Docker looked for seven years for a suitable patch of land in the Gold Coast hinterland to build their family home, before deciding the finest was a sloping 24,000sq m high in the Tallai hills. They had enjoyed river frontages, lake views, dry outlooks and ocean vistas over the years but this one encompassed the lot – the bushland of the Springbrook mountain range, the high-rise down to Coolangatta and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Then they called in architect Phil Morton from Regional Design to create a home where the family of six could either keep company with the parents and siblings or make themselves so scarce you wouldn't know who was at home. With six bedrooms and six bathrooms spread over 1260sq m on four levels, a formal salon, casual living room, patios and a fully tiled wet-edge pool, the north-facing home offers a choice of retreats for Andrew, Bernadette and their four grown offspring.
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