Time to catch up!

I can't believe nearly two weeks have gone by - so, sorry for not writing anything for a while (Laura did tell me off for not updating this often enough!).


Well, we didn't get too much done over the weekend - Laura was here so we went to the Welsh Food Festival which was really good with loads of free tasters of all sorts of local produce - scrum-yum!  Then to a local canal festival - not quite so tasty, but it was a lovely sunny day so a stroll along the canal was very nice.  Laura had a go at plastering on Sunday which was quite good fun and very messy and then we went shopping in Shrewsbury on her birthday on Monday which made a nice change (although shopping is not really my thing!).    Then on Tuesday, Ben and Lucy called in on their way back from Aberystwyth where Lucy had just taken, and passed, her driving test - well done her!  They were at Uni in Aberystwyth and that's where she learnt and that's why she went back there to take her test.

Big news on the building front is that we put the timber-frame extension up on Wednesday morning.  We enlisted the help of some willing neighbours (five of us in all) which made it a fairly straightforward job.  Starting with a 'site meeting' (well, a cuppa and a chat), it took about an hour and a half with no real glitches.

The joints are all mortice and tenon joints - a square hole in one piece with a square peg on the end of the other which fits into it.  Then some of those joints are pegged - a hole goes through the whole lot and a tight-fitting round wooden peg is knocked in.  As the main timbers dry out, they tighten around the peg to make a really tight joint.  My job last week (as the apprentice) was to make the 'draw pegs'.  Instead of sawing the wood, I split inch square (well roughly inch square) pegs from a piece of oak.  As the wood splits along the grain instead of it being cut through it makes the finished pegs much stronger.  I then used a draw knife to roughly round the pegs and then used a rounding plane (like a giant pencil sharpener) to round them to a consistent size.  I really enjoyed this whole job - it felt as though I was doing something just as it used to be done.

Over the last couple of days, and in between torrential rain, we have put up all the roof timbers and the building inspector has been out to check (and approve) them.

During the rain this morning we went and ordered the slates which should be delivered on Monday.  So the plan is, weather permitting, to put the waterproof breather membrane and battens on over the weekend and then get on with slating next week.  Whenever we have been doing slating, the weather has been absolutely fantastic (too hot to touch the slates on more than one occasion), but I'm not holding out much hope that our luck will hold out for next week, we'll see.  Fingers crossed!

Completely changing the subject, we have tried the first plums from the tree we planted 18 months ago.  Its little branches are completely weighed down, bless it!  They were delicious which is a relief.  We only bought it because of its name (Marjorie which was Bob's mum's name), rather than because we knew how delicious the fruit would be.  That's just not the way you'ree supposed to do things you know, but we got away with it this time!  We also planted a damson at the same time - just before about a hundred other damsons sprang up all over the garden!  So today we picked the whole crop from that . . . .about 15.  I was really surprised at how nice they are to eat raw, I always thought you had to cook them in some way with loads of sugar.  One of the hundreds of other 'damsons' also has fruit on and we have been waiting for the green fruit to turn purple, but they seem to be turning yellow instead.  So, I tried one of them and it was lovely . . . . having looked in the books, we think it must be a greengage.  Never had them before, so that was a nice surprise.  So, we now have a bowl of our own fruit to pick at - fantastic.