This place has felt like a building site for so long. It's still half finished, but I'm trying to cultivate more of a feeling of home. When we began thinking about moving clothes into the new bedroom, we realised we didn't want to keep them all. We made lots of charity shop trips, and it felt good to be creating more space. There's more to do in the bedroom, but I've also moved onto the study. The bookshelves are deep, and the rows of books were at the front, with miscellaneous piles of stuff shoved behind. Notebooks, old magazines, books I'm never going to read again - it's all been turfed out, along with the dust and cobwebs, and slowly a sense of space is emerging. I'm never going to be minimalist, but I'm getting a bit fed up of looking at the same stuff after decades of keeping things 'just in case'. I'm casting my eyes round to see what's next. Moving into the bedroom is what's next. Peter's on the case sorting out shelves and clothes storage, and I've started thinking about blinds. We're going for the easiest, lowest-tech solution first, so I'm attempting to make blinds from some fabric we found in a charity shop years ago and have been carting around ever since, waiting for the right project. I made a very basic prototype roman blind, just to see if it worked. Not properly measured, or pressed, or hemmed, and the rings (which are actually knitting place holders) just tacked on loosely, just to give us an idea. The fabric works, but we've decided to keep it even more simple, with just a straightforward blind with dowels at the top and bottom, that you roll by hand and secure with a tie. If that doesn't work, longer term we'll consider something more sophisticated. I just need to get on the case with sewing them now - but that involves me finishing sorting out the mess I've made in the study so I can get the sewing machine out. In amongst all this, we've had friends to stay, and visited other friends, and I've been baking. I'm not a great baker - I improvise a bit too much, and am usually in a bit of a rush, but my baking usually tastes nice, even if it looks a bit odd. I don't think we're ever going to live in a show home, but I hope one day the house will feel less like a project, and more finished.
Not yet though. This weekend is all about grass cutting, both in the garden and in the hay field. It's hard work and I'm complaining a lot, but hopefully the result will be worth it. Will report back.
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Things are finally starting to feel slightly festive round here. The kitchen fitters were still here messing about until mid December, and I just couldn't bring myself to contemplate anything Christmassy until after I finished work on the 16th. We did put the tree up, but the lights didn't work, so it sat dark and hulking in the corner for a week, which didn't help the festive feeling. Finally the 16th came, and since then we have been making up for our hermit-like autumn by visiting people and eating. A curry with some neighbours, pizza with friends, another friend here, pizza with a different friend (there's been a lot of pizza...). Very lovely, but it does all mean that I've still not bought all my presents. What I have done though (because it seemed far less taxing for my poor brain, which has not been working at its best recently) is make some dehydrated orange slices, and hang them up in the windows. Most cheerful, although you'll notice I've still not finished. We also decorated gingerbread people with some friends, and it was one of the most fun things I've done in a while. I perfected my technique as I went along. Things are getting rather festive around town too - I'm enjoying the spate of knitted postbox-toppers this year. It's Christmas eve tomorrow. I've not written any cards, let alone posted any. I don't have presents for most people yet. We didn't finish decorating the kitchen (although we do actually have a kitchen, and a dining room table - more on that when I've managed to take a decent photo). We didn't finish decorating the bedroom either, although that's closer, and we'll definitely move the bed in before the new year.
Slowly, though, I'm starting to relax (finally). I've put some decorations on the tree tonight, and tomorrow maybe I'll get round to making some kind of Christmas cake. We'll see. We're going through quite a bit of upheaval round here at the minute. It's like some kind of epic spring clean, except the weather is not very spring-like, and so far there's not been much cleaning. But there has been an awful lot of sorting out. This is our loft. Well, one of our three lofts (the other two contain mostly mouse droppings). Neither of us have minimalist tendencies, and as we've gone through life, we've collected many things that 'might come in useful one day'. Many of them have, and our propensity to buy things when we see them cheap and squirrel them away has saved us a fortune over the years. Still, times change, and we're getting to a point where carrying round old projects and endless tubs of beads, paperclips and crayons just doesn't feel quite so appealing. Many of those projects have been unfinished for a decade or more, and now feel more like sources of guilt than sources of fun. With our new decision to get the builders in to sort out the kitchen and bedroom, we're looking forward to a more organised space, and it feels like a good time to start clearing some stuff out. Of course, it does mean that things become yet more chaotic in the meantime, piles of boxes and bags for the tip collect near the back door. We're fortunate that we have two relatively local household recycling centres, and between them they have recycling bins for metal, plastic, wood, clothes, books etc, so not much is going to landfill. In another time, we would likely have donated to charity shops, but they are all closed now, and many of the donation bins have been removed. We might also have put stuff on Freegle, but that feels like quite a daunting task (and also we're not in a town, so I wouldn't want to be encouraging a flurry of special trips out here to collect individual items right now). It feels odd to be getting rid of this much stuff. Ornaments I've looked at for 15 years are disappearing, shelves are emptying, and the amount of space in the loft now is really quite shocking. Peter's been doing most of this clearing out. I'm focusing on the kitchen ceiling for now - but the more he clears, the more obvious the rest of my stuff is. I certainly won't be throwing everything away, but I've got a decent stash of fabric that I've probably had for 20 years and not done anything with for a start... The other activity at the minute is planning the kitchen itself. This has become more of a fun activity now we don't have the prospect of figuring out how to fill massive holes in the walls, and can instead thing about paint colours and tiles and where to put the kettle. The kitchen/dining room has four windows now, and I am loving the way the sun streams in. Can't wait to sit at the table with a cup of tea and a jug of flowers. It's a bit daunting making choices though. We've spent so many years making do with what we had, picking up what we could for free or cheap, that our decisions have usually been along the lines of 'how can we make good use of this?' rather than 'what do we want?'. 'What do we want?' feels like such a big question. (I should point out that I'm fully aware how fortunate we are to be in a position of deciding what we want, and I'm not remotely complaining about it - it's just interesting how difficult it is after years of having decisions bounded by other factors). This is the kitchen in our old house - it looks so empty because it's taken on the day we moved out. We just had one strip of work surface, and the fridge was round the corner near the back door. There never felt like enough space. This is the temporary kitchen we've been using for the last 18 months. It's pretty tiny, but if it was properly laid out as a permanent kitchen, it would still be a reasonably useable space. As it is, it's a bit of a nuisance to do anything in.
So what do we want from our new kitchen? We can't move the drain without a big faff, so the placement of the sink is already decided. We want a four ring hob and a full sized oven (what luxury!), and I want plenty of worktop space, and enough storage day to day things and also empty jars and bottles for preserving food. Of course there are other decisions too. What type of kitchen? Should we have a tiled splashback above all of the work surfaces, and what colour? Shall we re-do the dining room floor now, or wait until later? Where should we put an extra radiator? I do know I want it to be a productive and welcoming space. I want to make cheese, preserve food, bake cakes, and batch cook dinners. We already have a big table, and I'm looking forward to having people sit round it. Maybe there'll be a window seat too, and a breakfast bar. Right now the prospect of other people in the house feels a lifetime away, but I do hope it'll come round eventually. The builders are coming in July, and in the meantime we'll keep sorting and tidying and passing things on. Between the building work and the space-clearing it'll be like having a whole extra house. If you haven't been round in a while, you might get a bit of a shock... I was forty yesterday, and I confess that in all that time my baking skills haven't improved much. Or perhaps it's my decorating skills that aren't quite up to scratch - the cake itself (a whole orange cake I spotted on the Down to Earth blog) was extremely tasty. Basically you whizz a whole orange in the blender and add it to a sponge mix for a deliciously orangey, slightly squishy cake. It doesn't really need icing - the muffin-sized versions I made the night before were fine on their own - but a combination of a silicone loaf tin with no structural integrity and our tiny and slightly inadequate temporary oven led to a cake that definitely needed covering up with something. It might not win any competitions, but it went down very well with a nice cup of tea. Speaking of the Down to Earth blog, you might notice Rhonda's Down to Earth book in the background in that picture. This was my birthday present to myself, and I've spent the last couple of days happily flicking through it and wishing I was retired so I could spend all of my days making cakes and sewing and pottering in the garden. Today it's been raining, so I've ignored the dry stone wall that has been taking up quite a lot of my energy for days, and stayed inside. I had a vague feeling of time just drifting away, without me actually achieving anything, so in the spirit of following the book's advice, I decided to tackle a household job I'd been putting off for a while - sorting out the utility room. This is the entrance to our home, and acquires the usual household detritus that is either on its way in or out of the house. Wellies, recycling, dishes that have been used for chicken treats, rubbish bags, tools, all congregate here, and if we don't keep on top of it, getting into the house becomes a perilous navigational exercise. Yesterday Peter put all the shoes away and took the rubbish bags outside, and today I've spent a happy few hours washing dishes, cleaning walls, decanting slightly damp powdered cleaning stuff (borax substitute, laundry bleach) into airtight containers, and giving the place a good hoover. It felt good. In the course of all this sorting, I discovered a bag of soap I'd made - I never got the texture right, and after goodness knows how long sitting in a bag under the sink, it feels slightly oily. I've left it on the newly cleared side to dry out, and if it doesn't work as hand soap, I'll grate it to mix with the washing powder. I also discovered this candle-making kit that I had as a present some years ago and which got lost in the house move. Again I made use of my newly cleared surface to play with the beeswax. I like this picture on the box. It looks achievable - nothing fancy, nothing requiring endless patience, just a bit of rolling and cutting. I can't say mine look exactly like the pictures, but they're not far off. The instructions said the beeswax sheets would be pliable at room temperature but I had to hold them up against the radiator for several minutes to get them to bend without snapping - not sure what that says about the temperature of my house...
Anyway, I didn't come in here to waffle on about all that, I came in to waffle on about turning forty, but as I'm not sure how I feel about that, perhaps it's best that I don't. Tis only a number, after all - and after hearing of the death of a friend's daughter this week I'm grateful I've lived to see it. I will be sitting down to make some plans for the next decade soon though... The weather has been lovely these past few weeks, and I've been taking every opportunity to wash things so I can hang them on the line. In our old house I always lamented the lack of a washing line, and now I have one (with an excellent view) I use it at every opportunity. I bought this pack of six cotton handkerchiefs in a charity shop, probably well over a year ago. I couldn't bring myself to use them as hankies though, and so they've sat on a shelf waiting for me to decide what to do with them. Now that I'm without a commute and many of the activities that filled my time before, I'm finding myself turning back towards making and mending and pottering - things I've always done, but that have been slowly crowded out while I've been running around. I've missed them. I decided I'd use these hankies to cover the cushions on the sofa in my study. The sofa is actually a sofa bed that we got from Freegle when we moved here, and it's a rather dull shade of reddish-pink. When I decorated my study last year, I found a white cover in a charity shop, and together with the patchwork blanket my auntie made, it looks rather pretty. The cushions, though, remained dull and red, and it was about time I covered them up. But what to do? Stripes, or squares? Should I alternate with the plain hankies, or only use the patterns? The answer came when I was about to go on to yet another video call for work, and on a whim draped two of the hankies over the cushions, which were visible in the background. I liked it so much that I decided to keep things really simple. The hankies were the perfect size, and I literally just sewed one plain and one patterned together on three sides, and left the bottom open. Sometimes keeping it simple is the best option.
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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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