Butter and barter

There's been more exciting news all round in the last couple of weeks.  Firstly, Ben has a place at Aberystwyth to do a Masters in something like Conservation and Managing the Environment.  As I said a while ago, his girlfriend Lucy will be doing her teaching thingy there so it's brilliant that Ben has got in too and they can have a year together back in their old university town which they really like.  Big step for them both to give up their jobs to go back to learning, but good for them.

Our exciting news is that, after more than four years of trying, we think we've finally done a deal to buy a bit of the field next door.  The chap that owned the field and cottage it belongs to always said we could buy part of it, but never kept to his promises, was something of a money-grabber and generally just messed us around for three years.  The young couple who moved in last year are much more straightforward and amenable.  We talked about it last summer and they said they'd be happy for us to have some of the field and last week we got round to talking details and agreed on where to put the boundary and also the price  . . . . we are going to do some tree-planting and hedging for them in exchange.  How cool is that - just like the olden days, a good old bit of bartering. 

So, this is the bit we're having which is actually a fairly small proportion of the whole field, but will make a huge difference to us.  It means that we can park the cars in one corner and have room to turn around so visitors don't have to reverse down the lane.  It's surprising how many different cars we've reversed down there because no-one else likes doing it!  We will probably also plant some fruit trees and perhaps have some wood or timber stores.  It also means that the bit of ground nearer the house which would have had to be carparking can now be a veg garden which in turn means that the other side of the house can be a more traditional cottage flower garden (eventually!).  You know, it's funny but the chickens don't really go in this field although there's nothing to stop them, but when we turned round after shaking hands on the deal, there they all were happily pecking around - so they approve.  We've spent this afternoon trying to get to grips with the jargon on the Land Registry forms - oh what fun!

I have now finished painting for a while.  I ran out of the yellow claypaint with just a couple of square metres left to do - it's behind the settee, so that doesn't really matter does it?!!  Don't worry, I will do it and we've ordered some more paint but will wait for the decorators merchants to put together a bigger order so we don't have to pay £10 delivery.  I pulled a muscle in my shoulder a few days ago and it was quite painful, so I had to rest it for a couple of days and so just did bitsy painting like door frames.  Shoulder's much better for the rest, but I hope it can withstand the next three days of humping boxes around at M&S!

Bob has built the hearth in the lounge for the woodburner to stand on.  The bricks are wet on this picture - they'll look better once they've dried out and had a good wire-brushing.  Fitting the woodburner has given us nightmares.  We could quite easily buy the flue and other gubbins and do the work ourselves.  The trouble is that you are supposed to have a HETAS certificate to say it is properly installed - without one the house insurance may be invalid.  HETAS engineers won't sign off someone else's work which I guess you can understand, but if we pay them to do it it costs twice as much.  The alternative is to get Building Control to inspect it, but of course you have to pay them several hundred pounds, so it's not that much cheaper than getting someone else to do it for us.  So, the woodburner itself cost about £500 - we had one quote for £1,200 to fit it!!!!  They obviously keep the woodburner costs down and then sting you with everything else you need.  We've gone with a much cheaper chap to fit it (still way more than the price of the burner itself), but he seemed really professional and conscientious.  So that is being done in a couple of weeks. 

Today we completely cleared the lounge, vacuumed all the dust up and sealed the floor with watered down PVA.  We have done it before, but it had obviously worn off and there was just sooooooo much dust everywhere.  It looks so strange in there now - it has been a building site and workshop for so long.  Hopefully now we can keep it fairly clean in there.  Next job is to move all the boxes out of the end bedroom and lay the floor in there - hopefully we can get on with that next week.  Then curtains - tee hee that is exciting.

Bob has also been doing a bit of furniture restoration.  Some friends offered us an old cupboard and a set of drawers, but they have been stored in an old container and are a bit the worse for wear.  So, they've had a good douse with woodworm treatment and Bob is busy taking drawers, etc apart to clean up and re-glue.  They should look good when they're finished though - very much in keeping.  He has also been cleaning up a big pile of oak joists that the builder who helped us with the extension brought round.  They are from a bungalow that he is adding a second storey to.  He is having a coffee table out of some of it, but Bob can have the rest.  We're busy thinking of all sorts of things to do with them.

Another of Bob's skills - he's a chimney sweep!

We had one of those 'This is what it's all about' moments last week.  At the end of the day at work there were some tubs of organic cream which were going to be thrown away, so I bought them for 10p each and made butter out of them.  It's really easy - you just over-whisk the cream until it splits.  You then pour the butermilk off (the chickens adore this!) and put the butter into several changes of cold water and squidge it around to wash the rest of the buttermilk out.  Then you sprinkle some salt on and squidge that in and dah-dah you have home made butter.  Four half pint tubs made the equivalent of three packs of butter all for just 40p.  Anyway, back to our 'This is what. . .'  moment - Bob had made bread as usual and so we had warm bread spread with butter that was just a few minutes old and it was delicious - sounds corny, but what more could you want?  I'm a simple soul at heart!