When we first moved into our new house, there was no path to the door. You had to walk across the lawn, and since we moved in at the end of February, and were quickly faced with the worst snow in recent history, the lawn rapidly turned into a sea of mud. One day me and my mum threw down a load of stones (you can see the initial effort here), and for nearly two years they've been sinking into the grass and being less and less effective. Not exactly helpful for getting from house to car on the way to work without getting covered in mud. Finally, after the new year, fixing the path got to the top of the to-do list, and I dug up the stones (with the help of the chickens, of course) and started to find replacements. We've attempted to lay them properly this time, with sand and gravel underneath, in the hope that they won't sink quite so quickly into the grass. We've made the new path a bit wider too - we don't have an outside light and often have to navigate it in the dark, so having a bit more space makes things easier. Finally we finished, and while we probably won't win any design awards, the new path keeps our feet clean (ish) and has the beaky seal of approval. This has been a nice little project. It didn't last forever, and it's made a significant improvement to our daily activities. We did buy a couple of bags of sand and gravel (total cost less than £10) but we're fortunate to have a lot of this type of stone lying around - if we hadn't, we would have used something else.
It's felt good to be outside again too. It wasn't exactly warm (although it's bordering on being warm today!) but, importantly, it wasn't raining. That's a pretty exciting state of affairs round here at the minute. I'm told it won't be raining for the whole of this week, so as soon as I've finished this tea I'm heading back outside to see what other jobs I can get on with. First up is cleaning the living room windows - now the sun is shining I can see just how filthy they are. Does that count as spring cleaning??
2 Comments
The builders have left, and while I'm glad to have our house to ourselves again (as cheerful as they were), it does rather mean we're on our own now to turn this space back into a kitchen. It's been pretty exciting to see it develop (slightly nerve wracking at times too). Having all the ceilings ripped out was interesting, but I was relieved to see the new ones going back in. Ceilings do make it rather darker downstairs though. It's all very exciting having ceilings (or rather, having rooms upstairs that we can walk in), but for me the most exciting thing about all this is the new windows in the kitchen. This didn't even require anything structural, as both had had windows in before, a long time ago. The bigger one had been bricked up, and the smaller just had a sheet of ply nailed over the outside, with the kitchen cladding covering the inside (no wonder it was always cold in there). Both are now proper windows, and while this room, nestled within the wings of the house and with low ceilings and thick walls, is never going to be light and airy, they do make quite a difference, and it's nice to be able to see out across the fields. Hmm, possibly not the most picturesque view of our tumbledown barn... The house is quite low compared to the height of the land, and so we're going to have to keep on top of the grass or pretty soon we won't be able to see out.
Anyway, we'll worry about that later. There's plastering to be done first. 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.
The weather round here lately has been rotten. Soggy and grey, with a nice bit of freezing rain thrown in for good measure. I don't remember having experienced freezing rain before. It freezes pretty much as soon as it lands, meaning ever-growing icicles, sheet ice pavements, and cars that seem to have been entirely dipped in glass. Not pleasant, but fortunately short-lived, and back to normal rain plus early morning fog, which I'm slowly getting used to driving to work in. We did have a bit of sunshine at the weekend, although I've had a rotten cold all week and couldn't really appreciate it. I did get outside for an hour though and tried to do something with the tatty flower bed in the front garden. This bit of the garden is strange, as there's actually not really much soil. The area under the grass is asphalt, all the way up to the house. The 'lawn' is just what would grow down the middle of your drive if you didn't walk on it for a while - the soil underneath is about an inch deep. The bottom terrace is just filled with stones, and the top one only has a few inches of soil. I'm not sure what my plans are for this space next year - it already has ferns, roses, a few herbs and some flowers so it may just get left as it is for another year. But it's had a bit of a tidy up in the meantime (no 'after' pictures as I got too cold and went back inside and it's still not quite finished). The chicken enjoyed marauding round while I was out there pottering. It's quite difficult to get a decent photograph of them as they move around so much. They're slowly regrowing their feathers, and have created a nice little dust bathing area in a corner of the garden. Of course it's more mud than dust at this time of year, so they generally look a bit grubby. In other garden news, some more of the barn fell down last week. Fortunately we weren't anywhere near it (and have been steering clear for a while as it looked like it was about to fall). Such a shame, but without complete rebuilding at this stage I'm not sure what else we can do other than let it fall. Walls have been coming down inside too - deliberately this time (thank goodness). Our kitchen is finally one room made from two, and while there is still a long way to go, it's pretty exciting to have a table in there (a ludicrously enormous table, but it's solid oak and beautiful and was free and who am I to say no?) There's a lot of work still to do, but it won't be done before Christmas. Very little will be done before Christmas, in fact, as I'm full of cold and feeling rather sorry for myself. I've hardly bought any presents, and have made barely any plans (other than another attempt at an ultra marathon on Thursday 27th - how did that happen?)
Hey ho. The Christmas tree is up, although I have so far failed to take a decent photograph of it. I've booked a fortnight off work, which I am VERY ready for. Some of my fruit trees have arrived, which means I'll be out with a spade, probably on Christmas day at the rate I'm going. And I've already started thinking about plotting and scheming for next year - my favourite thing to do over this wintry fortnight. Especially now I can sit at my new kitchen table to do it. Yesterday was lovely, a brief respite in a week of gloom and perpetual mist (which has descended again today). I was delighted, and spent most of the day outside, rebuilding the greenhouse. The frame itself was still mostly intact - a few poles had come out of their sockets, and I had to fix one of the connectors with some electrical tape, but that didn't take long. The frame is so light I can move the whole thing myself standing inside it, which makes it easy to find the right position. It's not too far from where it was before, but is a bit more protected from the prevailing wind by that dry stone wall. Of course, the wall itself is a source of potential danger - if you look carefully you can see part of it has collapsed a bit further back. I left enough space so that another collapse wouldn't actually hit the greenhouse (hopefully...), and plan to rebuild that entire section of wall soon anyway. I wanted to make the foundations somewhat more secure, so I dug them into the ground. Looking at the pictures, I'm not sure I've left enough space by the wall after all... although it seemed like plenty when I was out there. I'm not moving it again, so it'll have to take its chances. It was actually quite warm yesterday, and I'm full of cold, so I kept breaking off my digging to have a sit down. I'm very much appreciating that folding stool/kneeler that I picked up in a charity shop before we moved. At one point I decided it would be fun to get the storm kettle out to make a cup of tea outside. I managed it eventually, but it took about five times longer than just going into the kitchen (and I had to go back into the kitchen several times anyway, for tea bags, milk, and a mug, and then matches to replace the useless lighter, and then some dry kindling, as everything outside was too wet. Good job there wasn't really a storm... Eventually the foundations were ready, and the greenhouse moved into place, tent pegs hammered in round the frame, and the turf put back upside down. I'm hoping the turf will all compost down nicely and be a nice crumbly soil to plant some tomatoes in. The plastic cover had acquired a few tears in the previous incident, and I had to sew a couple of the tags back on. It was ready eventually though, and, having made a muddy mess out of the grass down the middle, I raided the outbuilding we demolished recently (I use the term 'we' very loosely) to start making a path. Finally I weighed down the cover with breeze blocks, and I hope all that will be enough to keep it in place. Of course, because I've dug it into the ground, the door is now lower, and I have to duck to get in, which is rather irritating - I'm quite short and not at all used to having to duck. I think I'll dig myself a step or a little ramp. I didn't actually plant any seeds yesterday. Instead, I stayed outside in the sunshine, and started dismantling the collapsed wall ready for a rebuild. I've been reading a book about dry stone walling (and trying to remember the course I went on about twenty years ago). You're meant to lay out the different types of stones in different places so you can see what you've got to work with. I got tired after a while. I'd been out for hours, and my sniffly cold was taking its toll, and there are an awful lot of stones to shift. Once the sun dipped below the horizon I finally packed up my tools and went back inside. I was hoping to get my seeds planted today, but it's been so gloomy and drizzly that I only ventured as far as the car for a little trip to the cafe for pancakes. I'm working at home tomorrow though, which means I'll have plenty of time before and after work to potter about. Good job, as I've spent most of today sitting down reading a book.
Remember my last post, when I talked about sowing seeds in my flimsy plastic greenhouse? The greenhouse is a plastic one, and while I've weighted it down as much as I can with large stones, the plastic does flap about quite a bit, and I suspect is in danger of catapulting the seeds off the shelves if I don't place them carefully. Well, later that very day, the greenhouse came adrift from its clearly-not-very-secure moorings and flipped on its head. The pots, and the seeds, where everywhere, some in a heap under the greenhouse itself, some blown half way down the drive. I fully expect to see tomatoes popping up in the middle of the road in a few weeks. The greenhouse itself was remarkably intact, and as far as I can tell, only one plastic connector is broken. I've earmarked a more sheltered spot, and was going to rebuild it today, but got sidetracked by a trail race and unexpectedly joining the local wind orchestra.... So it'll have to stay on the ground until next weekend. Hopefully the weather will be a bit warmer by then anyway. I've had slightly more success with my attempt at building a series of compost bins. These are just a few pallets I found in an outbuilding, various bits of wire fencing, and some breezeblocks encouraging the whole thing to stay upright. I'm slowly bringing the hay from the outbuilding round and layering it with fruit and veg peelings. In other news, we had a fatality in the garden yesterday... I nipped outside to give the grubby front door a wipe, and disturbed what I think was a sparrowhawk feasting on these feathery remains. We're going to have to get used to being rather closer to nature out here. There's currently at least one mouse galumphing around in the loft at night (it's never just one...). We've put a humane trap up there, and it's got a few more days to jump in before we take more drastic measures. Not ideal, but I'd rather the livestock stayed on the outside...
We're deep in dry stone wall territory here. Dry stone walls are the main field boundaries, and I love them. Good job really, as we have rather a lot. The one above belongs to a neighbour, and I noticed today that it seems to have been repaired recently. Ours, on the other hand, are looking a little worse for wear. This one is next to our drive, in what I'm now thinking of as the veg field, and it collapsed this week. We've also had a couple of collapses onto a nearby green lane. This must have only happened in the last week or two as well. I wonder if it's partly the weather, and the sheer amount of snow that has been blown into drifts up against them. But they're also just old, and looking round I'm starting to see the places that are likely to go next. I've had a go at walling before, a long time ago. I can't even remember why now - I think I was doing some conservation volunteering at the time, and maybe it was part of a job, or perhaps there was a training course. At any rate, I have a (very) vague idea of what goes into building a wall.
From what I can gather, it's basically a really big, heavy jigsaw, where you're not sure whether you've got all the pieces. I've ordered a book, and if that doesn't illuminate things enough, there are a couple of local courses I can go on in April. In the meantime, I was out until it went dark last night, stripping back enough of the collapsed stone so the wall feels stable again, and therefore is unlikely to fall on a passing rambler. We have a selection of outbuildings here, in various states of repair - some more usable than others. Straight out of the back door is this coal shed, sturdy enough but might need a bit of patching up, feels like it's been there for hundreds of years. On the right is one of two unpicturesque corrugated tin garages - this one in a decent state and the other one falling down all by itself. Attached to the coal shed is this breeze block extension, which has an outside tap and electricity, but is incredibly ugly and directly blocks a view from a window. When we first viewed the house there were three freezers of rotten meat in here, which took forever to get rid of, so my associations with this space are grim, and I wouldn't be remotely sad to see it go. Next is this lean to, feels cheery inside but looks a bit unsightly outside, and as the wall it's attached to looks likely to collapse at any minute, it's going to have to go. This is my favourite - every time we visited the house when we were trying to buy it, it had fallen down a little bit more, and now can barely be described as a building. The local farmer reckons we may be able to get a grant to rebuild it, but we're not so sure we want to. We could put that material to good use in other projects, and have no use for a barn or cow shed. We'll see, but right now our thoughts are drifting to letting it fall down gracefully (or perhaps getting someone in with a digger to give it a bit of a nudge). The final one is the most useful. The breeze block pig sheds (we think) at the front will go, but the building itself is pretty sturdy, so we'll clean it out and use it as a workshop. It's big enough to get tools and even machinery in, and the views from the windows are spectacular. Reading back it sounds as though we're planning to pull most of them down. That wasn't our plan, but a couple of them are in such a bad state that spending time and money on repairing them when we don't actually need them seems a bit unnecessary.
I am planning on adding a new 'outbuilding' though - a greenhouse. I plan to grow most of our veg and as much of our fruit as I can so I'll need to get an early start... Today was the first day I've been at home in the daylight since the snow melted. As there was a brief period between showers, I thought I'd get out for a wander round the fields (I confess, I was actually trying to work out exactly which ones were ours). I was quite glad of my wellies, although I nearly lost them at one point. I think we've bought some kind of swamp. I think it's partly because of the amount of snow we've had lately, but I also remember this field in particular being pretty soggy when we first saw the house in August. The gateways are the worst, particularly in the fields the neighbouring farmer's cows have been in, and in several places there were little streams running down the hill. I'm (apparently) in charge of 'outside' here, and so dealing with all this water is my job. I'll be doing a fair bit of reading in the coming weeks. I've made a small start... This is our main route into the house, and it's been getting muddier all week as the snow has melted. Peter had made a path up to the front door using some old roof slates from our falling down barn, but the entrance itself was still rather damp. We pulled some more roof slates from the rubble, and I made an extra bit of path from the drive. At some point we'll join the two sections up. While I was out, I spotted a pile of hardcore, and made a start on filling in our biggest pothole. It was a slow start, as we don't currently have a wheelbarrow, so I was filling one spade at a time, and our friends arrived before I'd finished. Felt good to make a start though. Now the snow has gone, I can see the drive is lined with daffodils, and we've found a clump of snowdrops at the end of the footpath. Can't wait to see what else appears in the coming months.
|
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
All
Archives
February 2024
|