Racing cars, food and floors

Well, the sun shone for us for the Food Festival - in fact, at one point it was a little too hot (never satisfied are we?).  The Smallholders' stall looked pretty good with home grown/made produce, a beehive, books, posters and leaflets and we had a lot of people to talk to who were interested in the group.  So, we'll see if they all turn up to the next meeting - goats is the next subject.

On Sunday we had a day out at Loton Park just a few miles away.  In its normal life it is a deer park and country estate I think, but for a few weekends a year they hold hill climbs.  This time it wasn't us climbing the hils though, it was cars and motorbikes.  They race (one at a time) up the course which is a little road that winds its way up the hill through trees and grassland for about a mile.  There were all sorts of vehicles there old and new.  Bob was particularly interested in the motorbikes (he has two himself).  There were quite a lot of Ferraris and they were rubbish - the little Peugeot 205 went as fast as did some of the little 3 wheel Morgans (maybe it's because the Ferraris cost so much that they were a bit shy of hammering them).  Anyway, it made a good day out with enough mishaps to keep the public happy without anyone actually getting hurt or really damaging their vehicle.  Bob also took me out for Sunday lunch - what a treat, a cheeseburger and chips from the van with a '99' for pudding (actually it was quite nice to eat rubbish for a change!).

Work-wise, Bob has dug some more holes for the drains from the extension gutters - pretty heavy going with some solid rock to get through (he did work up quite a sweat).  That's all ready for the pipes, we are just waiting for the builders merchant to get some of the bits we need.  We'll be glad when that's all filled in as there seem to have been holes all over the place for ages.  We have actually got a draw-bridge at the moment - Bob's always wanted one, but this should only be temporary so he'd better make the most of it.  I spent yesterday doing more Victorian housework, this time scrubbing the kitchen floor (with the chemical cleaner) then rinsing it and sealing it.  That done and dried, we spent this morning grouting it which is a long job I can tell you!  As you know, we have re-laid the original quarry tiles.  When new I think they would have been laid without gaps and that's the job done, but because they are worn and slightly different sizes we couldn't do that.  Some of the gaps are too small for ordinary grout though (and it wouldn't look right).  So, we have invented our own system (well, it may be used elsewhere, we don't know).  We mix some builders sand which is quite red (seived to get rid of the bigger grit) with some very fine kiln dried sand which is quite pale and some lime.  This makes a fine pinky-colour powder.

We then feed this into the gaps between the tiles making sure it fills them up as much as possible and at the same time making sure the rest of the tile isn't covered with lime by brushing it in with a paintbrush.  Some gaps just fill up really easily and others feel as though you're filling the cellar with sand and take ages!  Once all the gaps are filled we sprayed water along all the gaps so it can go off (that's builder's speak for going hard).  We should then be able to clean up the tiles and apply another coat of sealer.  Filling all the gaps in just makes such a difference to the look of the floor and I think we're quite pleased with it.

I'm off to Scotland on Thursday to visit Laura and the midges - looking forward to seeing Laura, but not the other little pests!  I think a trip to Tesco is planned for her to stock up on essentials and she did mention that some chip shop chips would be nice!  She has a Tibetan lesson on Thursday afternoon, so I may go along to that too and see what I can learn.  Tashi Delek is about all I know so far - that is a greeting.  Bob is staying behind to chicken-sit, but I think he may have a trip out on his motorbike to go to the Harley Davison shop for a part he needs and then to Axminster Tools to look at router tables (we'll need one of them for making window frames).

The plumber should be coming again tomorrow (although he hasn't rung to confirm, so watch this space) - another leaking joint on the solar pipes and to fit a flappy one-way valve so the solar panels don't carry on heating the radiator.  He is also going to bend some copper pipe for us to make a rail for the shower curtain downstairs.  It has to go up the sloping ceiling then straight for a bit and then round a corner, so this seems to be the simplest way to do it.  There is a company on the industrial estate that can powder-coat it for us fairly cheaply, so that should be that problem solved.



The chickens inspecting Bob's handywork on the kitchen floor. There's just a
little bit left to do in the corner under the stairs, but we need to sort out oak
newel posts and things before that, so a job for another day.  We should have about
three spare tiles and some broken bits left, so that was close!



Yesterday we put the shower screen in.  It was relatively easy once we'd got our
heads round all the parts and which way round they had to go.  I siliconed
around it straight away - get it over with! So, if it hadn't been tipping down all day
and the sun had come out, we could have had a solar heated shower today
 . . . . maybe tomorrow.



Yesterday afternoon we lit the Ironheart for the first time using the rest of the
little logs that had been drying in the bread oven for the last 40 years and a
couple of small 'new' logs.  You have to start with a couple of gentle burns to allow things inside to dry out and settle - it wasn't really cold enough for a roaring fire anyway. 



With just a small fire it did start to heat the water in the heatstore
(just a couple of degrees) and the oven got to the 'cool' setting, so I could
have made meringues!  We did use it to keep the teapot warm.  The chickens
seemed to like it and at one point were walking around underneath - do they
count as combustable material?  The manual is very specific about distances to
combustable material but it doesn't say anything about chickens!



Here's me doing my Victorian housework - blacking the bread oven.  I don't
suppose they used rubber gloves and a toothbrush though, did they?



And here it is in place.  We got the door from the reclaim yard and Bob just
had to do a bit of fettling today to get it to fit.  Jolly good it looks too.  Inside the
bread oven is quite big and arched from every direction to the centre - very clever.
I'm not sure the bricks are still solid enough to try heating it though which is a shame.



So, that's what we've been up to for the last few days.  We had home-grown potatoes for tea a couple of times.  They are so different to shop ones.  I did intend to leave the skins on, but just a gentle rub to clean the soil away peels the skin away too - none of this scraping away with a knife!  It is a very weird feeling to forage around in the soil with your hands and find potatoes.  Today it rained so hard that when I went to look at the builders bag plants, four potatoes had dug themselves up and even washed themselves - they were just sitting on the surface ready to gather!

This weekend is Oswestry Food Festival and the smallholders group has a stall there tomorrow.  We volunteered ourselves to set up, do the first hour, do the last hour and dismantle, so that is tomorrow pretty much taken care of.  Phil and Ann have invited us for dinner though, so that is a bonus - no tea to cook.  The food festival completely transfoms the town centre and it is buzzing with loads of stalls and thousands of people so it should be quite good - just hope the sun shines!

The baby wrens have arrived

Yes, we have babies!  We've seen the adults busy with worms and grubs in their beaks, so guessed that the eggs had hatched and when Bob looked this afternoon there were several bits of shell on the floor under the nest.  I tried to take a phot of the shells on my hand or next to my finger to give an idea of scale, but I'm not clever enough to hold eggs and hold the camera still the same time, so they were too blurry, anyway the eggs are smaller than my finger nail (you'd need a lot of them for an omelette!).  The chicks will be so tiny at the moment, it's hard to imagine.  We can't see them because the nest is quite deep with the entrance hole near the top.  If I remember rightly from last year, wren chicks are incredibly quiet, so I don't think we'll hear them for a while.  When they're a bit bigger they do cheap a bit when the parents come with food, but the rest of the time they are very good and sit quietly.  Not like woodpecker chicks who make a racket all day long which just gets a bit louder when the adults visit with food.  Talking of woodpeckers, both adult Greater Spotteds have been on the peanut feeders almost constantly for the last few days, so I think they have hungry mouths to feed.  They take the nuts to the telegraph pole across the lane and wedge them in a crack then peck at them to break them up before they take them to the babies.  I watched a blackbird collecting twigs for a nest this morning - as the twigs were very fine and he had a whole beakful, he looked as though he was wearing a big false moustache, quite funny.  I assume this will be a 2nd nest - it seems a bit late for the first brood.

We had a rootle through some of the stuff we have stored in one of the barns the other day.  We haven't looked at it all for two and a half years and we've forgotten what we've got which makes it all quite exciting.  Bob wanted to unwrap it all I think.  We didn't though.  We were looking for some cupboard doors to go on the cabinet under the basin in the en-suite as they did in the old house (we replaced them with birch ply doors before we moved!).  We found them and they are lovely - made from rippled sycamore with quite a bit of character in them.  When they are closed you can see a face which I used to call a devil's face, but looking at it now, it's quite cheery and smiling - must just be glad to be here I guess!

Bob has made the bit the basin will sit in so we can put the little square slate tiles on it and fix the sink in before the plumber comes to connect it all up.  The good thing about doing all this ourselves is that we can have the sink as high as we like (less bending to clean your teeth . . . . how old do we sound?!!).

You'll be pleased to hear, we don't need to plasterboard the whitewashed walls.  Colouring the whitewash wasn't as scary as we thought and we now have creamwashed walls - if anything they are a bit too pale!  Never satisfied, eh?  We also mixed some red ochre and yellow ochre to make a deeper colour for one wall in the en-suite.  It made a lovely rich terracota colour . . . . which has now dried to a pale apricot colour.  Well, that's OK - not what we intended, but fine.  You could get a bit addicted to this - it'd be quite interesting to see if you could get a darker colour.  I think you have to be careful as too much of the pigment can spoil the way the limewash dries and it'd just be flaky.

Bob has carried on with the kitchen floor - it's a bit back-breaking, so has to be done in shorter sessions.  It's coming on well though and the bit for the woodburner is done which is the most important part as we need to get that delivered so the plumber can connect the backboiler. 

We had a mega-shopping spree earlier in the week  . . . . . although we only came home with a tub of PVA glue!  We ordered the tiles for the bathrooms, the sink for the utility, all the sockets and switches, heat and smoke detectors, extractor fans, bathroom and hall lights, showers (electric for downstairs and mains for upstairs) and a water softener!  We should be able to collect some of it tomorrow and the rest next week  . . . . . and then pay for it all - gulp!  The floorboards haven't arrived yet.  It was pouring down on Saturday, so they didn't deliver which is fine as we don't want them spoiled by getting wet.  We'll have to arrange another time, but trying to find a dry time is proving a little difficult - we had a huge thunderstorm on Monday.

Tomorrow morning we have the electric company coming to change the meter to Economy 7 so we'll have to find some jobs to do that aren't reliant on electricity.  Perhaps I'll do some more painting - I'm trying to do all the bits that'll be awkward to do once the electrician has been and fitted lights and so on.

We've had surgery today

Indeed, yes, we've had major surgery today - limbs amputated and everything.  You'll have guessed, I guess, that I mean tree rather than human surgery.  There's an overhead telephone cable runs down our little lane and there are rather a lot of branches either leaning on it or propping it up.  A while ago we pointed this out to the Quarry Manager (the quarry owns the land on that side of the lane), so he obviously took it on board and a team of three came this afternoon with their chipper and cherry-picker.  They have only made a start, but already the lane looks lighter - you can see the outside world down there!  They said we could have some of the timber so we went along and collected that up when they'd gone and there should be more when they come to do the next bit.  The lane looks a real mess now though.  Over the last week or two it had really dried up, but last night's torrential rain and their tyres with the addition of twigs, leaves and woodchips have made a real mess.  Not to worry though, the council roadsweeper'll be round I'm sure . . . . . not . . . . . I don't think we don't exist as far as they're concerned except to pay council tax!  Potholes get filled and lanes swept elsewhere and the snowplough clears other lanes, but not here - they actually left the piled-up snow across the entrance to our lane one year!



Bob doing the housework -
hoovering up the concrete dust before sealing
it with watered down PVA
(or cleaning it so the chickens can pooh on it!!!)



We've started the dreaded job of laying the kitchen floor - not actually as bad as feared, but still quite time-consuming.  I think most of the really worn tiles broke when we took them up.  The rest vary a fair bit, but we started with some of the thickest, used a thin mortar bed and so we can, hopefully, even them out with slightly thicker mortar.  Before we took the tiles up, I quite liked them.  By the time they'd been stacked outside for a winter, covered in mud and green, I'd gone off them a bit.  Even when we'd cleaned them and stacked them I was a bit dubious - they still looked quite grubby. 

A dry-run of laying some quarry tiles in the kitchen



But now that we've laid a section, I'm coming round to liking them again.  They certainly have character!  They are probably about 150 years old, so that's understandable.  They will definitely look right with the old bricks of the inglenook, the oak and the limewashed stone . . . . just quite different to the wipe-down lino I'm used to!!

We have also got all the limewashed areas up to the same stage.  Laura and I did a couple of coats on some bits a few weeks ago, so we had to get the rest up to the same stage - done.  Next is to have a go at colouring some limewash with the hope that we'll end up with a lovely cream colour.  We now have some yellow ochre, but I haven't a clue how much to add.  Really is a leap of faith because you can't tell what it'll look like until you've done it and given it a day to dry.  When you first put it on it'll look really bright yellow (as all you'll see is the pigment) until it starts to dry and the white of the lime starts to come through.  It'll be a bit nerve-wracking I think . . . . or quite exciting?  I like yellow anyway, so it can't be too bad and if it's too bright I'm guessing you could do a coat of plain limewash which should lighten it - oh, we have so much to learn!  You'll know it's been a disaster when I start telling you we've decided to plasterboard those walls!

Quck update on the bird-front.  The wrens are still sitting on the nest in the lounge.  They stay there when we are in and out doing stuff taking no notice of them, but if we stand in there talking to visitors they fly out and wait until we've gone to come back.  I was a bit worried that we may have scared them off while Mum and Dad were here as we didn't see them for the few days after, but this morning we spotted a little face looking out at us.  I would think that, if they haven't already, the eggs should hatch any day.  It must be a couple of weeks since they started sitting which is about the right incubation time.  I expect we'll see a flurry of activity with both adults constantly in and out very soon.  The blue tits in the quarry-sign pole are busy in and out, so I think they may have babies.  There are also a pair of blue-tits nesting in an outside wall of the house which we haven't re-pointed yet and maybe another pair in one of the top barn walls.  There's no sign of activity on the old beech tree, so I think both sorts of woodpecker and the nuthatches have scared each other off.  Chickens - Bonny was looking a bit forlorn again this afternoon and Bob has just got back from shutting them up for the night and says she was under the house with two of her shell-less eggs - no wonder she was feeling off-colour - course one of them may have been from last night and we just didn't notice it.  Hopefully she'll be feeling better now with that out of her system!



Our second bath in two days . . . . forgot the wine, tut!
Do you like the 'public toilets colour scheme?
The green's the moisture resistant plasterboard which has a chamfer on the edge
(filled with plaster to level it for tiling - the pink line), then the ordinary plasterboard
above.  I expect you'll be surprised to learn that we've decided not to keep
this colour scheme but to go for white tiles instead!



Scary Monsters!

No, they're not the scary monsters, cheeky!  That's Mum and Dad, who've been here for a few days.  We put them to work cleaning the kitchen floor.  We had lovely weather, so it was a good time to do wet stuff.  We borrowed a pressure washer and got a production-line going with Mum on the washer and the rest of us laying tiles out on pallets, turning them over, loading them into wheelbarrows then barrowing them down and stacking them outside the kitchen door.  It was certainly easier than scrubbing them by hand and made easier by having help.  So, we're now ready to lay them.

We spent some time this afternoon in the kitchen trying to decide on where our centre lines should be.  Nothing lines up, there are no right angles and none of the walls are straight so it's a bit difficult to decide.  The oak post in the middle of the room won though, so that will be the centre of the cross.  We also got the kitchen sink out of its box and balanced in in place on some work benches to decide where it should go.  We're going to sit it on brick pillars with wooden doors between - we saw similar in the cafe at Laura's monastry which we liked and thought we'd copy, so we marked out where that'll go.  We have a problem of lots of deep recesses in the kitchen which will be awkward to get to . . . so, lots of storage space for things that don't get used very often, but nowhere for the everyday things.  One such place will be next to the sink down the side of the inglenook.  Too big to waste, but awkward to use!  The access to it (under the worktop) will be quite narrow.  So we think we will invent some free-standing shelves on little wheels - three sets which will wheel into the opening and then push sideways into the awkward space.  The last one (ie the one that's easiest to get to) will hold the bins.  So, to get to the others you pull the bin trolley right out, pull the next one sideways and then towards you out of the opening and so on.  It's not ideal, but is the best we've come up with so far - work in progress I think. 

This morning we trawled around electrical and plumbers merchants getting prices for sockets, light switches, etc, etc, looking at light fittings, extractor fans, showers and so on.  Now need to decide where to get what and get on with buying stuff.  The electician is coming on 25 May to start 2nd fix and the plumber is booked for 6 June.  He did come on Tuesday to fit the bath and shower tray - bit frustrating as he didn't have a waste for the bath and the one Bob dashed into town to get wasn't right.  While Bob was out he got on with the shower tray, fixed all the little legs onto it, put it in place and put his spirit level on it and realised that it was bowed in every direction.  In effect there was a slight hump in the middle of the tray, so we would have ended up with a swampy moat around the edge!  Must have been a manufacturing problem because a cast resin tray wouldn't bow from poor storage.  Anyway we rang the plumbers merchant and they said they'd get another one for the next day, so the plumber picked it up and came back and fitted it as well as the bath yesterday.  So, at last we have a bath and we enjoyed relaxing in it this afternoon, lovely and deep - what luxury . . . . . shame there was no water in it!  Oh, we also ordered the floorboards for upstairs (should arrive on Saturday) and booked the electricity company to come and fit an Economy 7 meter (Friday, 13th!!!  Is that really a good idea?).  We need E7 for the underfloor heating which acts like a storage heater.  So, a busy day, but not really much to show for it.

Now to the scary monsters!  Just look at this  . . .

. . . . it's one of those May Bugs I told you about.  Somehow it must have got one of its feet stuck in the seal around the window and so was buzzing there for ages while we looked on horrified and took photos.  It kept buzzing really loudly trying to free itself and then it just sat quietly waving its antennae.  I felt quite sorry for it and couldn't just leave it there so, very bravely I thought, I got a ruler and opened the top of the window and gently pushed it along to free it - I guess it could have lost a foot, but it would certainly have died if it had stayed trapped.  All the time I was hoping it wasn't going to fly in through the window as soon as it was free.  Phew, it didn't - instead it went to get its friends and they carried on bombarding the window!   Yeargghhh - horiffying, but quite fascinating (when there's a pane of glass between!).