Door No 2

Yet more excitement on the building site!  We now have a kitchen door . . . . well nearly.  Once again we are waiting for varnish to dry!  Bob took the old door frame out and cleaned up and re-pointed the hole - looks better already.  I think the chickens are probably a bit disappointed that the old door has gone, they were quite partial to a bit of lead-based paint to peck at!  They'll be even more disappointed when they realised that they can't limbo under the new door to get in the house.

So, the new door is made and has one coat of varnish on which is just about dry - if it's sunny tomorrow, we'll give it another coat but if not it'll have to wait.  This afternoon we tried it in place and put the hinges on and with just a little bit of tweeking it fits beautifully.  The arched piece is made and awaiting another coat of paint before it is attached to the top of the door frame.  It just looks sooooo different with a nice, solid door there that actually reaches the ground - all the mod cons here you know!  We might even get electricity one day!!

The stair hole has now had it's first coat of plaster and looks much better for it - but that is also taking rather a long time to dry.  It has been a beautiful sunny-blue-sky day today, but bitterly cold but I don't suppose plaster, varnish and paint take any notice of the colour of the sky when deciding whether to dry or not.

The smallholder quiz was a good laugh as expected.  The finish was so close - at the end of the quiz we were tied first place and so had to answer a tie-breaker question.  The quizmaster had clocked the mileage from the nearest crossroads to the hall and we had to say how far.  We said 1.76 miles, the other team said 1.78 . . . . the answer was 1.8, so we were just pipped to the post - couldn't have been much closer though.  We were actually quite proud of our score though because the questions this year were all smallholding-related and between the whole of our team we have six chickens . . . . that's all.  The other team are all proper smallholders with pigs, sheep, chickens, orchards and everything, so we didn't do too badly.