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.