Oh, my goodness it's ages and ages since I updated this. We have been quite busy for the last week or so getting ready for the electrician who is coming tomorrow and the plumber who was due to come on 6 June. Surprise, surprise though, he left us a message to say it would be the following week as he has wedding planning to do! Could try your patience a little, but I guess it does give us a bit of leeway for getting things sorted for him to start. Bob did manage to dig one of the trenches last week - to connect the kitchen sink waste to the septic tank, another of those minor things we forgot all about! It was a bit hit and miss whether there would be enough fall on the pipe and it is really hard to tell by eye around here. I was sure it was going uphill, but the spirit level proved me wrong, so we got the pipes connected and the trench filled back in. While Bob was digging (I helped with connecting the pipes and filling in) I tiled the surround for the en-suite basin and also the window sill in there.
We had a long weekend near Bath with Bob's family which was a nice break. Did the usual tourist things - a tour of the Roman Baths (including the free glass of health-giving spa water which made me feel ill - maybe it has long-term benefits?!), boat trip, look around the Abbey, National Trust garden and lots and lots of food and drink. Yesterday we hired a canal boat for the day for Bob's dad's birthday present. That was good fun and everyone had a go at 'driving'. So that all made a nice change and now we're back to work.
We got well over half the kitchen floor laid last week including all the fiddling around the edges and a bit of brickwork round the bottom of the bread oven corner to hide where the bottom of it sits on earth or rock. We then left that and moved onto the floorboards in the bedroom. All quite fiddly and time-consuming as they run straight through two doorways and round the chimney and, of course, none of the walls are straight. Next time maybe we'll do a new house with right angles and straight edges! . . . . . actually, I don't think there'll be a next time, this is it I reckon. Anyway, by 5pm on Thursday we'd got most of it done but came to a bit of a standstill as we tried to work out how best to use the remaining few boards and where they needed cutting. As we were going away for four days on Friday morning and with the electrician coming tomorrow, after half an hour of mmmmming and aaaaahing we had to decide whether to finish it so we could oil it today or oil it before we went and put one of the temporary loft-boards back across the gap. We went for the latter, but even just doing that took us until 8pm - sanding out the black marks from the cut nails we'd used and then vacuuming (yes, I've done the vacuuming upstairs for the first time in two and a half years!) all the dust away before we oiled it took a while. Then we had to get everything ready for our weekend away - thank goodness I'd made tea earlier in the day and could just shove it in the oven! Next morning I got up before 7am to put a 2nd coat of oil on the floor before we left . . . it was a toss up between that and updating this blog, but I'm afraid the floor won and probably a good job because it'd be a shame for the floor to get spoiled with dirty footprints.
Here's Bob unpacking some of the electrical shopping - just like Christmas! There was loads more, but this is the small stuff (sockets, light switches, etc) which needed counting and checking off. Still more to come, but hopefully one of us can get that tomorrow - I think the sparky should have plenty to get on with! Today we have had a major tidy up in the house (won't be able to find anything now!) and put all this shopping as well as all the lights, smoke detectors, extractor fans, etc on a makeshift table in the kitchen so it's easy for sparky to find everything. It was like playing shops!We also tried all the light fittings in place and Bob has been making wooden plaques for some of them to go on. You can't get them to sit right straight onto stone walls, so he has shaped the back of each to sit neatly against the stone with a nice flat surface to attach the light itself. While he was doing that I got the filler out and repaired some of the edges of the plaster in the kitchen ceiling where all the hammering above on the floorboards had jiggled it loose and then I finished painting the bits of the ceiling where lights are going. So much easier than trying to fiddle around the lights once they're up.
All of today's work has been interspersed with frequent trips into the 'lounge' to see the baby wrens. They left the nest today. Bob went in for something this morning and saw one fly out, then when I went in later three fluffy balls were sitting on the top rung of the ladder wondering what to do next (soooo cute!). I dashed to get the camera, but they'd all flown in different directions when I got back. They just fly around and when they hit something they grab with their feet and stay there for a while working out the next move - quite funny. I did try to take some photos, but they didn't turn out at all (looked as though I'd opened the camera and spoiled the film, but as it's digital that's probably not the reason could be something to do with the flash being switched off I suppose - oops!). I'm not sure how many babies there were - at least five or six, but probably more. When they'd made it outside there seemed to be little fluffy wrens all over the place calling so the parents knew where they were. It must be a nightmare for the adults trying to keep track of them all.
Not so good news for the baby Great Tits in the wall of the top barn. On Thursday Bob found a dead baby all undressed apart from its wing feathers and a few on its head. Clearly much too young to be out and about. The nest is quite deep in the wall, but there were more babies in the entrance all in a higgledy piggledy heap. They looked a bit more fully clothed than the dead one and I wonderd if maybe the adults had turfed it out and in doing so some of the others had got pushed towards the opening. Anyway, when we checked the next morning they were dead too. We decided that when we got back we'd have to try to get them out - last year we had a dead baby robin who smelled to high heaven after a very short time. But today there is still cheaping from the nest and the adults have been in and out, so we can't go poking around can we? Maybe the adult bird will sort it out.
All three sets of blue tits are still busy feeding their babies, but I'm sure they must be about ready to fly. We'll be inundated with them all, but they are really funny when they discover the nut feeders - very fluffy with not a clue what to do.
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