Mud and candlelight

Greetings from the Somme!  We have been working outside for the last few days, but it has also rained a fair bit and the ground outside the kitchen has turned into a real quagmire - really sticky and squelchy.  The chickens love it!

We have been building a posh logstore.  Oak-frame with a slate roof don't ya know!  Actually, it's not that posh.  We have loads of old roof timbers in a pile and most of them are oak.  They have too many nails in them to use for much (although we did make a very nice beer bench out of some of the better ones ages ago), so we thought we'd make a logstore outside the kitchen out of them.  We found some bits of feather-edge board which Dad gave us, so we used that to board the sides and back.  The logs will sit on pallets to keep them off the gound.  We seem to have loads of pallets for some reason, so might as well use them.

We then had to think about the roof and decided the cheapest would be slate - we have loads of reject slates from the various roofs (or should that be rooves?) we've done - anything else would have to be bought.  So slate it is and all it cost us was a few roof battens and a bag of nails.  It was quite good fun to make, especially the slating because we didn't have to be too careful with it (unlike all the care we took with the house roof).  We finished it all this morning and Bob spent the afternoon while I was at work barrowing logs down from the top of the garden.  These are the logs we can use now, so it is good that they are now close by and that they will stay dry.  Good job done!

We had a power-cut last Wednesday.  How typical - the one night for ages when there were a couple of things on telly we actually wanted to watch and the power was off from 7.30pm until midnight!  Aaarghh!  So, we finished cooking tea in the woodburner oven and had a candlelit dinner, and washed up by candlelight, and tried to read by candlelight before going to bed by candlelight.

Talking of cooking on the woodburner, we bought some coal-type stuff to see how that works in the woodburner.  Boy, does it burn hot when it gets going - quite impressive really.  The oven got well into the 'very hot' setting, so we decided to cook Sunday's tea entirely on/in the Esse.  We were having toad in the hole and roast potatoes and I wasn't sure it'd be hot enough for the Yorkshire pudding - it was!  How's this for impressive Yorkshire?!  The potatoes boiled within a couple of minutes on the top too - brilliant.  Bob can take all the credit - I have had a horrible cold for the last few days, so he took pity on me after I'd spent 8 hours sneezing and sniffling my way around Marks and Spencers (mmmm, nice!) and cooked tea.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that, after three years without a cold (except that silly two day sniffle I had in August), as soon as I start working inside where there are lots of people I catch one.  Or maybe living in a heated house has made me soft already!  Anyway, I think it's on its way out now.

When we went to the Roofing & Salvage yard to get the battens for the logstore, we had a look at their pile of snooker table slates.  Under the green baize, snooker tables are made from thick slabs of smooth slate (about eight of them) and the slavage yard must have bought a job lot of them.  We had an idea that perhaps we could make one of the worktops on the kitchen out of one of them, but soon changed our minds when the chap said they were £180 each!  Then we spotted a broken one and luckily the bigger piece was just the size we'd need.  So the chap went off to ask how much that'd be - he was new.  Happily, the lad we usually see was there and said we could have it for £40 as we'd had so much off them in the past (that's where we got all the slates and other stuff for the roof).  He even said he'd bring it round for us which was quite a relief as it is very heavy and two hours later, there he was.  And, to add to our good day, he even said he'd buy some of our old floor tiles off us if we cleaned the mortar off them and the price he'd give us would cover the cost of the kitchen worktop and the battens.  Yeah, that's like bartering floor tiles for worktop isn't it?  As it happens, a girl I work with is re-laying her old floor tiles and I think they may be the same ones, so she may have them off us if she runs out, but the principle's the same.

I forgot to show you what Bob's been working on lately.  We only managed to salvage one Suffolk latch from the old doors (the one I told you about for the bathroom) and nice ones are at least £30 each.  With eight doors to do, that's quite a lot of money we don't have, so Bob has been making wooden Suffolk latches and they work brilliantly.  Now he's made the first one and got his template and everything worked out, the rest should be much easier.

More birds are discovering where we've moved the birdfeeders to, so we're getting back to normal on that front with nuthatches and marsh tits as well as the blue and great tits.  The robin seems to have given up on using the feeders, but is quite terratorial about them and chases off the other birds.  I guess once it realises that they all drop bits that it could easily pick up from the ground, it may have a re-think.  The chickens have already discovered this!  They can be quite bright when they want to be.

Wild tomatoes and goldcrests

My goodness, how time flies when you're having fun!  It's ages since I wrote anything here - sorry.  As I've said before, work gets in the way of this sort of thing (and of getting on with anything worth writing about).

So, we've had our second lot of overnight visitors and we've already managed to poison one!  Poor Mum was fine when she arrived, but felt ill during the night and spent the rest of their stay in bed with just half a piece of toast to keep her going the whole time - well, we don't want to overdo the hospitality you know!  No seriously, I don't think it was anything we did - we went out for a meal the first evening and between us all we had the same as Mum without after effects, guess it must be a bug.  Anyway, she felt a bit better by Friday, but they went home again instead of carrying on up north as planned.

After our meal out, but before the bug took effect.

Yesterday, Bob moved the bird feeders from outside the caravan to the silver birch trees across the mudpatch from the kitchen door.  So, this morning we were a bit more attentive to the birdlife out there again.  Over breakfast I watched a robin trying to learn how to use the feeder.  Unlike the great tits and blue tits, it just doesn't seem to come naturally to a robin.  It gets marks for persistance though.  After a few attempts using the hummingbird technique of flapping like mad to hover without actually landing, it had a bit of a sit down and think on top of the logpile before having another go and actually managing to land on the feeder.  It then looked a bit puzzled about what to do next, so went for a fly around to have a ponder and then came back, landed, pecked at the nuts and I think managed to dislodge something because it then spent a while pecking around the ground under the feeder.  Later in the morning, we were working upstairs with the windows open and could hear a lot of tiny, very high-pitched bird noises - either long-tailed tits or goldcrests was our guess and so we hung out of the window to see.  Goldcrests - loads of them.  They are really tiny (I think they are Britains smallest birds, but don't quote me) and they just never sit still, so it's quite difficult to get a good look at them.  We had the binoculars though and managed to watch them for long enough to be sure.  They are quite cute (they make wrens look big) and have a very distinctive yellow stripe front to back on their head.  It was lovely to see so many just outside our window.

We now have another door in place - the ensuite now has privacy, how posh is that?!  Like the bedroom door, this has to fit under the tie-beam and so is tiny, but the pair of them look really good.  You know its funny but, now that there is a door on there, we feel the need to shut it when we've never worried about it before - just because we can I suppose. 

Like the bedroom door, we salvaged some old hinges we had lying around, cleaned them up and blacked them and they look really good.  These hinges have a separate, square spike which knocks into the door post and the loop at the end of the hinge drops onto the round peg attached to the spike.  It takes a fair whacking to get the spike into the oak post (even pre-drilled and chiselled out) and there is a worry that plaster will start dropping off with the thumping, but it seems to have survived - phew!


I finally got round to making the Christmas cake.  I was all set to do it on Monday and had decided to bake it in the woodburner oven.  So I lit the woodburner after lunch to get it up to temperature, but then various things happened and by the time I was ready to do it, I couldn't really be bothered and sat and read instead, now how bad is that?!  So, I did it on Friday instead and in the normal oven because it was really too warm to have the woodburner lit all afternoon.  I had to get my old Kenwood Chef out of storage for the occasion and was happily chopping nuts and cherries while the Kenwood worked away on creaming the butter and sugar when I looked up to see smoke billowing out of the mixer - darn it, another thing bites the dust!  So, I had to finish the cake with the hand-held mixer.  Bob took the Kenwood apart and there was one very obvious burnt-out bit (the capacitor I think).  We've had a look on-line and I think you can get a new bit, so some day we may try to repair it I suppose.  Anyway, the cake seems to have turned out OK and is now soaking up several spoons of brandy.

The other thing to bite the dust was our mouse (the computer mouse that is - I'm sure the real mice are still running round as healthy as anything).  The last blog I did was using the pad thing on the laptop and it took me ages - a real pain.  So we went to buy a new one in Currys - how many different sorts of mice can there be?!  All too complicated, so we went to a little proper computer place on the industrial estate and told them what we use the computer for and they told us what we needed - much simpler!  So we now have a wireless mouse which goes to sleep by itself if you ignore it for too long.  This means we are now the proud owners of a nano-dongle as well - impressed? We are!  I assume this is the tiny little thing you plug into the side of the laptop which 'talks' to the mouse itself.  You learn something every day!

I found a wild tomato plant this morning.  Bizarrly . . . . bizzarely . . . . bizzarley . . . ? . . strangely, it is growing in the stones behind the trailer.  It is about two feet tall, has flowers on it and some little green tomatoes - who said you need growbags, geenhouses and sunshine?!  I can only think that it must have grown from a seed planted by one of the chickens - they love tomatoes you know.

Happy Bonfire Night!

Happy Bonfire Night!  Well, we have our own little bonfire (in the woodburner).  There is a proper bonfire and fireworks at the pub in the village and we should really go along and support it and have a pint in the pub, and we were going to, but Bob doesn't get excited about fireworks and  the accompanying karaoke and disco does kinda put you off!  So, sausage casserole here and our own little fire will have to do.

This has been an odd week - I went from having very few extra hours at work (which was quite nice) to working late one night, going in early another day and working eight hours on my day off!  So, being, there until gone 8pm last night and back in for 7am this morning, it felt as though I might as well have just stayed there overnight.  I'm in at 8am tomorrow too, but at least I have Monday off in place of Friday and I'm going to say no to any extra this week!

House-wise, we now have a bedroom door which seems really strange.  We're used to seeing light from the rooflight above the 'stairs', but now there is just blackness in that direction.  Bob took the old door apart, cut it down to size and re-attached the ledges and braces to make it fit the hole. Once he had cut it down and laid it out downstairs, he had to go back up and check the measurements several times because it looked so tiny.  In place, it reminds me of the door in Alice in Wonderland that she has to drink the potion to get through - quite cute really.



I guess this should have a person in the picture to emphisise
the titchiness of the door, but Bob wasn't available to pose!

And this has been my contribution this week - I've painted the boxing in in the oak room.  Bob has also chopped the bottom of the bed, so that can now be put back together ready for our next visitors.  Mum and Dad are coming on Wednesday for two nights on their way to the Lake District.  They have been to 'stay' many times while we were in the caravan, but following a very cold December week in the caravan the first year we were here, they have opted for the local Travel Lodge ever since!  So, it'll be nice to be able to offer them proper accomodation at last!