Romantic Valentine Serenade

Well, my nine days off work just flew by (as they do!).  When I got back yesterday nothing much had changed except that sales of ready-made lasagnes and mince are down - people are actually going to real butchers and making their own lasagne so they don't risk eating horse meat!  It'll be interesting to see how long that lasts.  My hours are a bit different next week and I'm working on Wednesday instead of Saturday!!!!  That means I'm having a Saturday off without booking it as holiday for the first time ever!  And it's my Sunday-off weekend so I have a whole weekend - can you believe it?  I couldn't and had to check the rota about six times.



Think the camera lens needs cleaning!

So, while I was off we cracked on with the lounge.  We took the temporary loft boards out of the crog loft and laid proper floorboards and it now looks quite posh up there now Bob has given it three coats of floor oil.  It's a shame we have to spoil it by storing boxes up there, but I guess that's partly what it's for.  Eventually, Bob's record player will be installed along with all his LPs (I don't have any of mine any more - they disappeared in divorce proceedings somehow).  We'll also get a squishy sofa bed up there and make it into a den-type place. 

There, I've cleaned the lens

Ellie, my 16 year old neice has bagged it as her sleeping place already!  Along the low parts of the walls we'll build some cupboar/storage aort of things which will be very handy as we don't have a traditional loft to hide junk in.  The black line you can see along the floor is the other tie-bar we put in - didn't plan this very well did we, we could have put the joists a tad higher and then the bar would be hidden between the floor and the ceiling below.  Not to worry, it's not where anyone would trip over it and in a way, it's nice to see the workings of the building - there's not much that's hidden here.

Once the floorboards were down and we'd finished banging nails in, we got on with skimming the ceiling below.  Oh, what a nightmare that was!  We have got on fairly well with all the rest of the skimming we've done, but this just didn't go well at all.  I suppose it is quite a while since we did any and se we're out of practice, but this is also the only expanse on horizontal ceiling which must be the most awkward to do.  The only other horizontal we've done is the kitchen, but that is borken up into small segments by the oak joists.  As we were doing it it didn't feel as though it was going too well, but it didn't look too bad when we'd finished, so we were happy.  Then I went in there in the evening and switched the lights on - oh my goodness, what a mess it looked.  I suppose the lights and shadows highlight all the flaws.  It was bad enough for us to mix some more plaster and have a go at putting it right.  It's better, but is definitely not our best piece of work - cottagey you could say if you were being kind!  Anyway, tis done and painted, so that's that.  Since then I've done some wall painting.  It takes ages because, being bare stone, there are all sorts of nooks and crannies to cover, so that's an ongoing task.  You know, from our New Year's Day planning list which filled an A4 sheet with tasks, Bob has been able to cross off loads of things, but I've only been able to cross off one thing.  It doesn't take much to write 'pointing' on a list, but it took weeks to be able to cross it off and 'painting' will be similar I think.

We've also has some 'us time' while I've been off and had the friends from the caravan on the farm over the hill over for dinner - I don't think they wanted to leave our cosy kitchen because it was about 2am before we went to bed!  It was a good evening though.  The next day Jan (Bob's stepmum) came over for lunch.  It was a lovely sunny day and so we went for a bit of a walk and then sat on the beer bench for a cup of tea and a piece of cake (sticky marmalade loaf from the February page of the 'Bake-off' calendar Ben and Lucy gave us for Christmas - yummy-yummy-yum-yum!).  It was just so nice to sit in the sun for an hour or so - we seem to have waited a long time for a nice day.  Do you think that's this year's summer gone?  We also went over to Montgomery to the auction (didn't buy anything yet again) and a look round their little shops and galleries which made a pleasant change.  For Valentines we planned a romantic meal (bargain steak - reduced at M&S at Christmas to just 40p each) with all the trimmings and I was really looking forward to it.  Unfortunately, just as the steak finished cooking, I splashed a bit of redwine into the pan to loosed all the tasty bits which splashed cooking fat over the top of the woodburner, causing smoke, causing all the smoke detectors to blare out.  Because these are the proper hard-wired things, you can't just take the battery out which is what we used to do in the caravan (well, we actually used to take it out before we started cooking!) and wafting the newspaper under them makes no difference.  So we started our romantic meal to a fanfare!   Spoiled the ambience a bit!

Oh, nearly forgot - I've finished typing up my early diary, so there should now be three parts over on the right under the 'Pages' title.