The poor garden has been sadly neglected this year. I may have had visions of some kind of Victorian cottage garden, but I certainly didn't have a team of professional gardeners, and so my vision has (so far, at least) failed to become reality. Back at the start of September things still felt fairly orderly. I had beds laid out, apples growing, and we had even strimmed the grass. I'd planted sunflowers, and while yes, I'd had to plonk them in any old place rather than finding somewhere ideal, some of them had grown - not very tall, but they were looking rather cheering. Back then (and it does feel like forever ago), it was still warm enough to sit outside with a cuppa and do a spot of plotting and scheming. The signs of autumn were there though, and as we moved into October we harvested our first ever apple and the weather got slightly more inhospitable. The garden has been quite disrupted these past couple of weeks as we've had to create a temporary enclosure to separate the builders from the chickens. They're not impressed (the chickens, that is - I'm pretty sure the builders appreciated not being followed round by the a hoard of pestering birds), but they do seem to forgive quite quickly (especially when faced with treats). Now we're near the end of October, and it feels like it's been raining for weeks, although my photographs do give me a slight glimpse of sunshine here and there. Our drive has turned into a bit of a river, with a new (and inconvenient) water feature developing just outside the garden gate. The clocks went back last night, so our chicken routine has to change slightly. I'd been letting them out later and later each morning and yesterday it was around 8am and they still seemed quite sleepy. This morning with the changing clocks, I went out at 7.15 (which would have been 8.15 yesterday) and they seemed quite content still having a bit of a lie in. The sun was shining (for once) and if I'd been dressed, or had a pair of wellies that didn't have a hole in (must do something about that) I might have paddled up the lane for a bit of a morning wander. As it was, I pottered round the garden in my dressing gown (one of the many advantages of living in the middle of nowhere, although I do sometimes forget that there's a public footpath running past our house). Maybe autumn's not so bad after all.
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Come and make yourself at home in our cosy kitchen. Oh, wait. We don't currently have a kitchen. Hmm. We have finally admitted that this job is not one we can do ourselves, and have drafted some cheery builders in. They seem to know what they're doing (although we'll reserve full judgement for the end, of course). When we first viewed this house, we could tell the joists in two of the bedroom floors would need replacing. In one room they sagged several inches in the middle, and in the other they bounced like a trampoline when you walked on them. Over the months we pondered, got several quotes, removed the chimney from down the middle of the two rooms, and finally this week the builders arrived. Over the years people have scoffed at our DIY efforts. 'Why don't you just get someone in?' they ask. Partly stubbornness - I am fiercely independent and like to do things myself. Partly money - one of the original quotes we had, which included removing the chimney wall, all the work on the joists, and all the redecorating, was for £17,000. I don't have that lying around. And partly because getting someone in, especially if you don't have £17,000 to pay them to do everything, often seems to involve doing quite a lot of preparation. First of all, the local farmer took the chimney stack off our roof and fixed the hole. Then we (well, Peter) removed the entire chimney breast, all the way down through the house, one stone at a time. It took months - you can see the size of it in the picture above. The stone is now in the garden, and we have been stepping across that 'rubble feature' since last summer. Once we had a date for the builders, we (well, again, Peter) had to remove the kitchen units, some of which we want to keep, and all the rest of the furniture. You can see the hole in the ceiling where the chimney breast was, and the difference in levels in the upstairs floors. We've been losing heat through that hole (which we had covered with various bits of wood) for months. Finally the builders arrived, and this week they've removed the ceilings, filled in the holes the joists came out of, started to concrete over the rubble feature in the floor, ordered new windows - and identified that a couple of lintels will need replacing. Hmm. They've also started filling in the edge of the chimney breast, which I'm very pleased about - it's made me slightly nervous looking up to see such an expanse of what looks like loose stone running right up the inside of the house, especially when the wall on the first floor is slightly wider than the ground floor wall it sits on. So progress is being made, and we are trying not to feel daunted by it all. We're fortunate that the builders are nice, and also that the house is a kind of horseshoe shape, so the builders can have their own separate entrance, bathroom, sink, and tea-making area, and we can shut ourselves off in the other side of the house, having set ourselves up a temporary kitchen in the music room. My study is out of action though, and we have to trek through the building site to get to bed, but you can't have everything. Of course, things get uncovered on a job like this and you can't always predict exactly what's going to need doing at the start. We have a nice building regulations man involved, so he's helping to guide what needs doing. The two lintels over the existing windows need replacing, which we hadn't planned for. We're opening up two other windows on the opposite side of the room which had been bricked up - the lintels on that side are fine, but one of them doesn't go all the way across, so without a load more work (on the outside of the house), we can't have a window the full width of the windowframe. And we had to remove the false wall at the entrance to the kitchen. We'd wanted to get rid of it anyway, but Buildings Regs Mike advised we needed a fire barrier between the bedroom and kitchen, unless we put in new windows upstairs. At the time, we decided against that because of the time and expense - but now that the wall has had to come out anyway, we're considering replacing the upstairs windows instead of rebuilding the wall, so that will be another bit of expense (and also means we have to clear a space in the bedroom now as well as everywhere else). So things feel a bit all over the place, but still manageable right now. The builders should be gone by the end of next week, although given the extra bits of work it may taken them a few extra days. But even once they've gone, we won't have a functional kitchen. They're literally just doing the things we can't do ourselves (joists, windows etc), so then we'll have to start on an epic DIY project of rebuilding and plastering and decorating. The chickens aren't impressed. We've had to build them a temporary enclosure in the garden - chickens and builders do not mix well, and I had visions of a builder breaking his neck tripping over a chicken, or a chicken landing up in a cement mixer. So they are incarcerated while the builders are here, and they are making it quite clear that they are displeased. It's the weekend now though and the builders aren't here, so they're out and about, marauding around and laying eggs in the coal shed. I hope they don't get too used to it - they'll be shut back in again on Monday morning. Not for long now ladies.
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Hello!Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I'm Jenni, and I write here about our new foray into country living, which includes growing food, knitting, baking, wandering around the fields, and seeing which local cafe serves the best cake. Categories
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