First overnight visitors

Well, we got the oak room sorted - just in time for Carol and Graham's visit.  I finished the curtains at 10.30pm the day before!  It all looked really quite good when we'd finished and we were very pleased with it. 

Eventually, this room will have twin beds in and this double bed will be in the other spare bedroom.  We need to dismantle this bed because we need to chop the footboard down so tall people (Ben and Laura) can hang their feet over the end. 

Bob worked hard to get the panelling finished.  This covers up the
underpinning (you can just see the concrete blocks at the bottom of the uncovered
wall).  The little top shelf on the panelling took ages because it is cut to fit all the
ins and outs of the stones.  We will paint all this when we take the bed down
which will probably be next week.

Here's the flat-pack settee almost put together.  It was actually really
easy to put together and is quite comfy.  It makes the room look quite posh - a
bedroom with a settee in it!  Or is it a lounge with a bed in it? 
Either way, we sat in there with a beer when we'd finished thoroughly
enjoying a soft seat at last!



Instead of going for a walk with Carol and Graham (they do that on normal
weekends away), we made them chop down trees.  Carol was like a
demon with the chainsaw and Bob and Graham could hardly keep up
with moving the trunk along for her to cut the next log off!



 

Carol and I did try chopping a tree down the old-fashioned way, but
it really didn't work too well - wrong sort of saw of course!

Then, after a bit of a snooze we all cooked the evening meal
(curry of course) and sat around the table talking into the night,
as they say.  Very enjoyable and our first overnight visitors seemed
to approve of the accomodation - phew!

Now then, what do you notice that is strange here?  The observant
among you will see that the middle egg is a rather strange pointy shape,
but that's not it.  No, the strange thing is that there are THREE eggs!!  Elvis
has started laying eggs again after months of not doing, bless her little cotton
socks.  They are a bit peculiar and I'm not sure how long she'll keep it up,
but it certainly surprised us.

Now I have a strange observation for you that doesn't really relate to anything in particular.  Since I have been working at Marks & Spencer I appear to have a 'helpful shop assistant' aura that goes with me everywhere.  When I was choosing a yoghurt in Sainsbury's on Thursday an old lady turned to me and demanded to know whether they sold low cholesterol yoghurt.  Of course I am a helpful shop assistant so I said I thought they sold very low fat ones.  And would that be suitable for her diabetic husband she wanted to know, well I thought natural yoghurt probably would be.  So where are they then?  I spent about 5 minutes finding the yoghurt and giving her dietary advice and then went on my way only to be accosted by another lady wanting me to show her where the Worcester sauce was.  Both asked me as though I worked there not as one customer to another and this is not the first time it has happened.  So what do you make of that - very strange.

Well, I'm on my own tonight.  Bob has been at his Dad's for the day and staying overnight.  I changed my shift to work the afternoon instead of the early one today and while they were changing it around they added on an extra four hours so I didn't finish until gone 8pm.  So, I've had my leftover curry for tea, written this and now I'm going to try and work out how to change all the clocks and timers and then I'm off to read my book in bed (it wasn't worth lighting the fire and it's getting a bit chilly now).  G'night!

This may be my last ever blog!

Yes, this may be the last you hear from me.  Bob's just put a log on the woodburner . . . . trouble is it has a branch sticking out so it's too big to go in and the other end is already alight so we can't take it out!  So, I'm typing through a haze of smoke as we wait for it to burn enough to push right in so we can close the door, either that or it burns the house down!  Farewell!!

Oh, well OK then the drama's over - I just managed to knock a bit off the burning branch which was enough to be able to push it back a bit and close the door.  The fog's now clearing and I think we may live to see another day!

We have our first paying guests coming next weekend . . . . well, not paying, but Carol and Graham (my sister and husband . . . her husband, not mine of course) are staying overnight so that's quite exciting isn't it?  So, we've been working hard on the oak room for them to stay in.  It is now all skimmed and decorated and has a door.  The electrician came on Wednesday, so the light, sockets and underfloor heating all work now.  Talking of heating, the underfloor heating has come on over the last few nights.  You can tell it's been on in the morning as nowhere is chilly, but I wouldn't say the floor is really toasty.  I guess it has quite a slab of concrete to heat and so will take a few days to do that.  Glad it's doing its thing and coming on automatically and working out for itself how long it needs to be on, etc.  The plumber also came on Wednesday and he has drained the whole solar system, flushed it through with fresh water and then pressurised it all with fresh glycol.  He's taped the posh insulation on all the pipes and tweeked a few parameters and has high hopes that all will now be well.  It has been working fairly well to be fair, but it is really too late in the year to tell if it really is all lovely, so we'll wait and see what happens next summer . . . . . . . . .

I've had a really busy week workwise - this is supposed to be a part-time job, doing just 21.75 hours a week, but this week I've done 40 including being in for 7am on my day off!  Next week four or five new people are starting, so perhaps it'll calm down a bit.  Tee hee, we won't be the new kids anymore and people'll be expecting us to know what we're doing!  I've just found out that in the lead up to Christmas the shop opens at 7am which means that the people who go in early to fill the shelves, as I do sometimes, have to be in at 5.30am - oh joy!!!

Won't think about that just yet!  Here's the rest of our week in pictures:

Bob playing with fire again!  He's actually retrieving the old
suffolk latch which we salvaged from one of the old doors.
It was fat with a million coats of paint and the best way to strip it
is to chuck it in the fire.  It's now about half the size and attached to
the bathroom door.

We suddenly realised that the stone wall in the oak room was
covered in green slime - well not slime any more because it had dried.
It would've been sensible to clean it off before we built the room wouldn't it and I do remember thinking about it, but it never got done.  So, with rubber gloves and old washing up brushes we set to with stone floor cleaner and it does now look much more like an inside wall thank goodness!



We went to the blacksmiths today to pick up a curtain pole and saw
these bright little numbers and thought they'd make the view from the
oak room a bit more cheerful!



. . . . . and guess what I'm doing again?  Next lot of curtains
is on the go - for the oak room of course, but I'm not sure if I'll
actually get them finished in time for next weekend.  We chose the material
yesterday, but they didn't have enough so they took our number and said they'd
call as soon as it came in.  Not long after we got home, they called to say it was in - now how's that for service?!  Someone else had actually ordered some and that's what
arrived, but they didn't need the whole roll so there was enough for us too - handy!

Now, just look at this cheeky chicken!  Tuesday was a lovely day so we
had the kitchen door open and spent the whole of our lunchtime shooing the
chickens out of the door ending up with a washing up bowl of water as a persuader!
Next thing we know, a chicken appears from the other direction and hops up into the
stair opening to look at us and check if there were any sarnies going spare.  She'd gone through the open door to the middle barn, down the steps, along the hall and then up onto this bit of wall!!  On the same day, Bob found a wren in the middle barn (where they nested
earlier in the year) - well they'll have to think again because they won't be able to get
in there next Spring . . . . hopefully!

Birthdays and bog brushes

We have finished skimming the oak room.  On Monday we did half the ceiling (too big to do all in one go).  Stupidly I had a shower when I got up and then did the plastering.    You can imagine what I looked like when I had finished - well and truly splattered!  So, I had to have another shower and wash my hair again before I could go to work.  This morning I was more sensible and left the shower until after the plastering.  Our skimming skills did come flooding back (thank goodness).  So, next job in there is to paint but we'd perhaps better let it dry for a day or two first.  The electrician is coming next week to liven up the sockets, light and underfloor heating.

It was my birthday at the weekend so we had a day off from building work.  I did still have to go to M&S for a 4 hour shift starting at 7am!  Still, once I had got over the injustice of having to be up so early on my birthday, it wasn't too bad and I was soon home again.  As Bob's Dad and stepmum (Arthur and Jan) were coming over in the afternoon, I made some scones.  Good job too because various neighbours called in and we spent the whole afternoon sat around the kitchen table with them and Jan and Arthur eating scones, drinking tea and eating chocolates (Ben had made me some homemade crunchies - yum, yum!) - what a lovely way to spend your birthday.  We then went out for a meal in the evening and I have to say that by the time I went to bed I felt just a little bit sick!

I haven't got round to making the blind for the utility room yet - not really a priority.  I did decorate a loo brush though!  Now, how many people do that of an evening?  Aren't loo brushes boring?!  We have one in the ensuite which we've had ages, it is ceramic with three ducks on it which is quite cute, but we couldn't find anything similar for the bathroom.  So we bought a plain white ceramic one and I got out my red nail varnish and black marker pen and it now has ladybirds climbing all over it.  Much better.

The plumber's coming again tomorrow - this is getting a tad monotonous isn't it?

Well, better get off to work now.

Dot, dab, dog, door

Hello again - guess what?  I have a job at M&S until New Year's Eve at least.  That's quite a relief  because finding another one would really be a bit tedious.  I'm not sure what will happen after the Christmas rush, just have to wait and see I guess.

Poor Elvis got got by a dog earlier in the week.  We were in the middle of cutting the plasterboard for the oak room when there was an almighty chicken squwarking (how the heck do you spell that, everything looks wrong) outside.  Bob legged it leaving me balancing a sheet of plasterboard and when I'd managed to manouver it back onto the trestles I joined him!  By then the drama was over, but apparently Bob found a dog in the garden with Elvis in its mouth.  After an awful lot of yelling from Bob the dog dropped the chicken and the dog trotted off up the garden and the chicken ran hell-for-leather in the opposite direction.  So, we then had to round up the chucks to check them over.  Peggy had missed the action, so we shut her in the run. We looked high and low for the other two for ages.  Meanwhile the dog had made itself comfy on our woody slope, wagging its tail and watching the action.  Eventually, Bob located a tiny mournful chicken sound from behind the chest freezer in the lean-to, but when we looked behind there was no sign of a chicken.  Then another little noise and then more in response to our coaxing, but still no sign of them.  They had squeezed behind the freezer and wedged themselves, two of them, in the space next to the compressor.  We had to very gingerly move the freezer because we weren't sure if there was a bottom to this space or whether they were standing on the floor and might get their feet trapped if we just pulled the freezer out.  After quite some time and with plums to entice them, they came out.  Bonny was fine, but Elvis was a bit shaky and had some missing feathers.  She wasn't quite herself for a couple of days, but seems fine now.  By the time we had got them out, I was covered in leaves and cobwebs and was in danger of being late for work.  So while I got cleaned up and changed, Bob went and coaxed the dog down, tied a rope around it's collar and, by phoning a neighbour, identified its owner who came to collect it.  Drama over.

All that meant, of course, that we didn't get far with the plasterboard.  So, the next morning we had another go.  With all the bits cut we were ready to dot'n'dab.  Bob mixed it up and I flung it at the wall.  It didn't seem quite like I remembered it, but that was a while ago so I dismissed the thought and we went ahead and pressed the plasterboard into place.  It just didn't seem to grab like it should, so we took it off again (it hadn't stuck at all).  It had set quite hard though in just a couple of minutes and stuck very well either to the plasterboard OR the wall, but not both.  So, we then spent an age scraping and chiselling it off!  We later found out that once the bag of bonding compound is opened it should be used within a few days or it goes off and we'd had this open for months - well, you live and learn!

Anyway, to put the remainder of the morning to good use we thought we'd start moving the stones away from the site of our next wood pile.  We had stacked useful big stones there ages ago when the septic tank was put in and they were now pretty much covered and overgrown with creeping buttercups.  So we got the wheelbarrow to move and dump them up the garden where we'll be building a wall to do a bit of terracing.  Got the first huge stone humped into the wheelbarrow and . . . . . . flat tyre!  Oh, the morning wasn't going well.  So, we just unearthed the stones and left them where they were and, once again, it was time for me to go to work and nothing much to show for our morning's effort.  To catch up, Bob got some more bonding compound in the afternoon and we did the dot and dab walls when I got home and it worked beautifully.  So, we have now finished the plasterboarding, taped the joints and filled the gaps against the stone wall and are all ready to get back to skimming.  It looks quite different down there.  I didn't realise quite what an interesting shape that end of the hall would turn out to be.  With the sloping ceiling and door diagonally across one corner, it's quite unusual.  It's also very high, unlike everywhere else.

We also have door number two up.  That's the one to the utility room, so we can now put the washing machine on overnight to take advantage of the cheap electricity without Bob having to jump down the ladder in just his slippers in the middle of the night to see what the noise was (as he did the first time we put the washer on timer!).  I slept straight through without hearing the noise this time, but Bob said it still woke him up, but he got back to sleep . . . . maybe when we have a bedroom door he won't hear it.  We have put some hooks on the back of the door for visitor coats and it all looks quite good.  We got some material this afternoon to make a blind for the utility room, but I'm not sure when I'll get round to that - it's not really essential and the oak room is priority at the moment.  This afternoon we also bought some roses for round the kitchen door - cliche or what?!  There were loads and loads of bits of wire, hooks, nails and pins in the wall around the door, so I assume that in the past something was trained up the wall and around the door.

Yesterday the settee was delivered.  I joked with the delivery man about it being a flat-pack settee and took his serious nod as a dry sense of humour.  Nope, we have a flat-pack settee!  We haven't built it yet, or even unwrapped it as it will have to live in the oak room while we plaster around it and so is bound to get splattered.

We had our first dinner guests last night and had a debate about when having friends round for a meal becomes a dinner party.  We decided this couldn't possbily be a dinner party as we haven't even got any table mats, we didn't have prawn cocktail to start and there weren't any estate agents or lawyers there (and you probably don't drink beer from bottles at a proper dinner party).  Definitely friends round for a meal - Phil and Ann in honour of their unerring support, help and chicken-sitting over the last couple of years and a very nice evening we had too.

Tommorrow, we will have owned this cottage for three years - can you believe that?!  Here's what the outside looked like when we got it - doesn't look so bad from outside as it did from inside and, looking at this picture, the garden actually looked a whole lot better then than it does now!  Do you see how the garden joins seemlessly with the inside (as they say on all the Grand Designy programmes) with the tree growing through the roof from the inside - bit extreme maybe?

A door is dry!!!

Oh, this blog is really suffering at the hands of Marks and Spencer isn't it?  I never seem to do my normal hours and always get asked to do extra - oh well, I suppose it puts a few extra pennies in the bank account.  My initial contract is up in a couple of weeks and I haven't heard yet if they need me to stay on until after Christmas - I guess I'd better ask, because if not I'd better start looking for something else.  That'd be a bit of a pain wouldn't it?

So, what've we been getting on with in the last few days.  Most exciting is that one of the doors has finally dried enough to hang (how sad is our life if that's the most exciting thing, eh?).  So, the bathroom now has a door which seems really strange.  The bathroom is the most modern room in the house, so this old pine door is quite a contrast.  I quite like that though, it kind of reminds you that this is a new bit, but it is part of an old cottage.  I'd quite like to get a little old cupboard or set of drawers for in there for the same reason.  We need to finish painting the architrave for round the door opening and sort out some sort of latch.  Do you like the way the decorating and picture-hanging goes right up to the point where the house is still a building site?

We have finished plasterboarding the ceiling in the oak room.  Next is the dot and dabbing on the wall adjoining the bathroom and the bits around the door and then we'll have to try and remember all we know about skimming.  Might have to read earlier blogs for instructions!  It's funny how these things get filed away in some far recess of your brain the minute you start on something else.  Hopefully, we've done enough of it for it all to come flooding back - just like riding a bike!

On the solar front, the news is not too good.  The plumber came and put it all back together again and fitted the new pressure release valve, re-pressuried everything and toddled off happy that everything would now be fine.  Well, it appears to have held its pressure which means there are no leaks.  As I'm sure you noticed, we had a brilliant few days of hot sunny weather, so ideal testing conditions.  We haven't lit the woodburner and, as we were away for a couple of days, we switched the immersion heater off.  So that was all perfect to give the solar chance to prove its worth all by itself without us drawing off hot water and blurring the results.  So, when we got home from our two days away in the sun (in Peterborough and Norfolk) we had high hope of a tank of good, hot, free water . . . . alas, it was not to be and the temperature had only risen by 10 or 15 degrees in the whole time.  Oh, boo hoo, if I wasn't numbed to it all I could cry.  What the heck is wrong with it?!  The plumber says he's fitted a couple more systems the same since ours and they're working fine.  Don't really know what the next step is.  I guess we wait for the plumber to have his heart monitoring done at the hospital tomorrow and then get him back.  He did seriously suggest that if it doesn't work he takes the whole lot out and we fit some other system!  Seems a bit extreme, be we're running out of ideas.

Our days away in the sun involved doing the Autumn tidy up in Bob's dad's garden which was easy compared to trying to do any sort of tidying up in our own garden!  We also had a night with my mum and dad in Norfolk which was nice.  We then did shopping on our way home which included John Lewis in Peterborough to spend our house-warming vouchers from my sister.  I was quite surprised to get house-warming presents when we moved in, but apart from the vouchers we got homemade jam and cookies from Phil and Ann and a cake from  another neighbour - how nice of people.  Anyway, we then called in at our favourite place on the way home - yep Ikea again!!  Not very successful - we wanted to order a settee and a mattress for the spare bed to be delivered together.  Trouble was that Ikea mattresses don't relate in any way to British bed sizes.  We knew the bed was a kingsize, but because of the different mattress size we needed the exact measurements to make sure it would fit.  So we ended up not ordering either and poor Bob had to go again today.  Anyway, if they can find us, they should deliver on Thursday.  Blimey, that'll be a luxury won't it?  A sofa!  Apart from our trip away last week, we haven't sat on a soft seat for three and a half weeks!

Bob's chickens have been being naughty again.  We had the kitchen door open in all that nice weather and when Bob went in the kitchen one afternoon all the damsons had disappeared from the bowl on the table!  Yep, the twins are apt to come in and jump up on the table the bad girls.  Elvis doesn't of course - she doesn't really do jumping.  So, every time they come near the door now they get a washing up bowl of water thrown at them and now, if you hold the red washing up bowl out, they run a mile!  Wonder if we could just leave a spare washing up bowl in the doorway to keep them out?  Guess they'd soon realise that, by itself, it doesn't really pose a threat.  We'll have to think of something though because we certainly don't want them making a habit of standing on the table.