Roses round the door

For the last few days we have been doing outdoor stuff as a change from all the crawling round in the batloft, etc.  The weather has just been so fantastic, it seemed a shame to waste it inside.  I took the thermometer just outside the kitchen door the other lunchtime and it was 25 degrees . . . . in March!  Mind you, it's all changed now and it is really hammering down outside.

We have finally planted the roses that Bob's
dad bought me for my birthday last year.  They
are deep orange, small flowered ones which
should look lovely when they've grown up a bit.

AFTER we'd planted the first one we thought we ought really
to point the wall behind it before it grows.  Bit of a silly way
round to do it I know, but I did I say once that we weren't
too good at forward planning!  My shoulders went pink while
I was doing this . . . March sunburn!

On the other side, we had help from the chickens.  Bob
just tipped the soil in and they did a good job of spreading
it out and levelling it off!

And here's where we're up to now.  Bob has been step-building
again, curved of course.  We have a bench that will sit nicely
between the steps and the kitchen door - ideal for breakfast or
lunch outside.  The ground level will be a bit higher so you
won't see so much of the edging on the plant bits which is made
from the offcuts from our hogsback ridge tiles on the roof for the rounded
corners and cut up floor tiles for the straight bits.

It's quite exciting to see some of the outside coming along at last.  We have some flat pieces of limestone which were used for paving and so we are going to use those outside the kitchen door.  That should be fun because to say they are random is a definite understatement!

Oh, nearly forgot to tell you - we have got our planning permission through to build the workshop . . . . three weeks early and with no onerous conditions attached.  A-mazing!  We have also had a copy of our Energy Performance Certificate.  There are two main sections to it, one is the energy rating and the other is the environmental impact (or CO2 emissions).  You get a rating for each in a similar way to fridges and washing machines with A being excellent and F being very poor.  They also give you a score for each against a potential score for the type of building it is.  We were within a point of both potential scores which I think is really pretty good, especially when you consider that she forgot about the solar panels which should improve both scores.  We should get the revised certificate with them on tomorrow hopefully.  So, we got a high C for energy and a high D for environmental.  That doesn't sound too brilliant, but for an old cottage it's actually pretty good.  We checked the scores for some purpose built eco homes and they only got Bs.  We also checked an old cottage in a nearby village and that got an F for both!  So, we are quite pleased with all that.