Great big retaining wall

Because the house is built into the hill, we had to dig out a fair amount to build the extension which in turn means a fairly substantial retaining wall.  Now, this is just the sort of thing that slips your mind when you're doing this for the first time . . . . . just didn't even think about it (and certainly didn't budget for it!).  Anyway, rather than building a stone or blockwork wall, we decided to do it in the style of a silage clamp!!!  Hope it doesn't smell like one!  Using H-section steels as the posts and slotting sleepers in between.  The idea being that then instead of digging footings all the way along (you know my thoughts on digging) we would only have to dig post holes - well when I say we, I mean Bob (I've done my digging for a bit).

So, today we concreted in the first two posts and are waiting for them to set before we pop (!!!!!) the sleepers into place.  We managed to get some used sleepers that aren't soaked in creasote so they don't smell and they won't weep black goo whenever it's hot - they're made of an Australian hardwood.  If we planed them, they would look like mahogany - now how posh would that look with a polished mahogany retaining wall?  Bob also dug the next two holes , so more concreting tomorrow.  I've pointed round all the windows with lime mortar and built a little brick enclosure to hide where a cast iron down pipe goes into a bright orange drainpipe.  We also had coffee with some neighbours who are also renovating a cottage and barns and living in a caravan just down the lane.  So, all in all, a good day with stuff to show for it.

Who is Elvis?

So, who is Elvis?  Well, about a year ago we took the plunge and built a hen house, converted the old pigsty into a chicken run and got three chickens.  They were ex-battery chickens and were pretty pathetic looking when we got them - almost oven-ready you could say!  They soon got used to their new surroundings and learnt how to be proper chickens - perching (that took lots of training with cobs of corn dangled on string to entice them up), scratching in the dirt, dust bathing and stretching their wings.  An odd feeling when you realise that they had never been able to do that before.  We called them Mrs P (short for Mrs Pogle because I used to love Pogle's Wood when I was little and this chicken quietly took charge of the others with no fuss like mother Pogle), Molly (she was the quietest and spent her first afternoon with us snoozing in the doorway of the hen house - she could have had a little pair of spectacles and her knitting and just looked like a Molly) and then Sid (as in Vicious, because she really was to start with and spent her first afternoon crashing around the hen house making a terrible racket trapped in there by the dozing Molly).  We had our first egg within an hour of getting them home - the poor thing must have had her legs crossed all the way home!  After the first few days, while the pecking order was being established they all settled happily together and had a lovely life free-ranging where they pleased all day and tucked up safely in the pigsty at night.  They soon grew new feathers and were practically unrecognisable as the same chickens.  We had two or three eggs every day.  Instead of looking through recipe books and tutting to myself that six eggs was a bit extravagent for a cake I found myself scouring the recipes for the ones that used the most eggs possible! 

At Easter Mrs P died after a short illness (as they say in all the best newspapers) and the other two went into mourning.  Now I don't know if chickens do that, but that's the way it seemed.  The eggs became a bit sporadic and they just generally seemed not themselves.  We have heard it said, and I guess it makes sense, that when one of a batch of ex-batt hens dies the others may follow fairly soon after.  We didn't want to be left with one lonely chicken (and we did really want some eggs) so we decided to get a couple more.  These two were in a far worse state than the first batch and really made you want to cry to look at them.  I'm not sure if you can see well from the picture, but the reason for Elvis's name is obvious when you see the floppy quiff of a comb she has.  The other one took a while to name.  This is partly because for the first week we could happily have wrung her neck she was so nasty to Elvis and because she was, and I probably shouldn't say this, but she was so darned ugly.  Vulture was one possibility, but eventually Myfanwy sprang to mind.  Obvious really isn't it?!  There is, apparently, a lovely Welsh folk song about Myfanwy and the romantics among you can pretend that this is where her name comes from.  In fact it is from the lyrics of a song on The Decemberists CD about a chap who happily gets married and then feels lumbered when his wife starts having babies until 'ugly Myfanwy died on delivery mercifully taking her mother along' and then continues the tale of how he kills the other children by various means (including feeding them foxgloves) so he can get his old life back - all sung in a jolly sing-along sort of tune!  So, not quite so romantic eh?

Integration has not gone quite as planned and the first couple of weeks were quite traumatic.  We had a separate little run and house inside the main run for the new chickens for the first week.  Sid and Myfanwy were like cocks at a fight flying at each other through the wire and poor Elvis just spent the whole time trying to get out of Myfanwy's way.  They now all live together, and believe it or not Elvis and Myfanwy (she's not quite as ugly as she was by the way) are the best of friends and the two of them just steer clear of Sid and Molly.  But,  NONE OF THEM ARE LAYING EGGS!!!!!!!  What are we doing wrong?  They all seem OK and are not too stressed around each other, they have pelnty of food and water, the weather's warm, so no excuses really.  I secretly think Sid and Molly have had a word and said  'It's OK, you don't need to lay eggs.  They still feed you and talk to you so, no need to bother yourselves!'.  So, we have to buy eggs!  I'll let you know when they start doing their job properly!

Digging!

This weekend we have been digging out the last floor - in the middle barn which will eventually be the lounge. I don't normally do digging! I just can't really do it - must be a girl thing. Bob and I have an agreement that he does the digging and I make the curtains - seems fair to me!! But I thought I'd better help and so I've been digging shovelling, pickaxing and everything too - I'm just not as good at it as Bob. Knackered now I can tell you!

Wow, just had to nip outside (it's 10.45pm) to look at a baby owl making a very peculiar noise in a tree really close by. We managed to pick it out with the torch and it just stayed there bobbing around and squarking. Brilliant! Not quite sure what flavour owl it was, but probably tawny as they are usually around.

Anyway, back to the mundane. The floor is now at about the right level. We'll have to get the building inspector out - it seems that any time you dig a hole, they want to see it. I expect he'll be here about 30 seconds - we always feel a bit guilty that we're wasting their time, but we'd be in trouble I suppose if we didn't call them. Next will be to whacker it (with a whacker-plate to compact it), then a layer of sand followed by the plastic sheet for damp-proof, 3" of insulation and then concrete.

Whenever we're doing anything like this, we always thing we might just find buried treasure. So, we found an old axe head (don't get excited - not bronze age or anything), a pitchfork head, a heart-shaped piece of copper (don't know what that was from, but it's quite heavy and about 3" high), the remains of a leaded light window and some broken bottles . . . guess we can't retire in luxury yet then! Weirdest find yet was tonnes of porn magazines and tapes which had been dumped in bin liners in the leanto at the end of the house - the whole place was about two feet deep in them - they'd obviously been there a while. Wonder what the story was there?!

A brief introduction

Hello and welcome to this Blog. This is the first time I've done this (bit scary really!), but I should have started it about two years ago . . . . I first thought of doing it about a year ago . . . . thought I really ought to get on with it a few months ago . . . . but needed a kick start in the shape of my son, Ben, to actually do anything about it. He just sat down, worked out how to start a Blog and set this up - it took just minutes and was so easy, I should have done it ages ago!

Friends and family obviously know all the background, but just in case anyone else reads this, here's a very quick introduction (I'll write about all the stuff that's gone on so far in the weeks to come, but if I don't start doing updates on what we're doing soon then there won't be much point really).

So, here goes: - My husband, Bob, and I are renovating a cottage and attached barns on the English side (just) of the Welsh border in North Shropshire. We have been here since October 2008 (you see I should have started this ages ago!) living in a static caravan. We haven't done anything like this before (except in our heads) so it's a steep learning curve and taking a fair amount of time, but as we're doing almost all the work ourselves, that seems OK to me.

The former quarry cottage had not been lived in for over 30 years (except by sheep) and was in a very sorry state with holes in the roof, walls falling down, no floor upstairs, overgrown garden etc, etc. We have found the cottage on an 1832 map, but not sure how long before that it was built. Attached to the two-up-two-down cottage are two barns and they had a good thick layer of ancient cow muck covering them. The buildings are all in line, so a long, thin building just one room wide. The site is surrounded by woodland and on a steep slope, so the end barn is half built into the hill and there are two more small barns further up the hill. It is just outside a small village and you get to it down a narrow, muddy track (it's actually a council-maintained road, but they've obviously forgotten about it).

OK, so briefly this is what we've done so far - we've stripped the roof and replaced many of the timbers and re-slated it, we've done a lot of underpinning (in some places the walls didn't actually reach the floors let alone have foundations), cleared out all the barns and removed the very rickety haylofts and insulated and concreted all but one of the floors and we've done endless re-pointing (and still plenty more to do). We have also built a stone and slate extension and have the foundations and concrete slab down for the other half of the extension which will be oak-frame clad in chestnut. Most of the new oak beams and posts are now done in the cottage part (which will be the kitchen).

You may be wondering about the name of this Blog and can probably guess that we have chickens and one is called Elvis - I'll introduce you to them later.