Work on the house has slowed to a veritable crawl these days, hence the lack of updates, but I thought I'd stick up a few shots from around the house. The first couple show some of the new stuff we got for the garden recently, and the second 2 are the new frames Henry put up in the spare bedroom. Each frame has some nice shots from each of the holidays Sara and Henry have been on together - Rhodes, France, Portugal, New York, Scilly and Prague.
After putting it off for much longer than we needed to - mainly due to Henry not wanting to move all the furniture out of the way - we finally got around to redecorating our bedroom today. Henry took 2 days off work, and the bank holiday meant we had a good 3 or 4 days to get it all done in. Easy you say! Well no, not really, and it was once again due to the bloody woman who lived here before us...
Like in the spare bedroom, the plastering in this room has obviously been redone rather recently. However, rather than doing a layer of watered-down paint on top of the plaster like you're supposed to, the previous occupent obviously realised she couldn't be arsed with that and decided to paper over the whole lot instead. All well and good for her, but she has clearly got no skills in papering either, as they all overlapped each other by a good centimeter or so.
So we took the old paper off, which was a good days work in itself, and then started to chip away at the numerous layers of paint around the different walls. Once we'd done the best we could at that (it's by no means perfect, but it'll do) we did an undercoat, then the two layers of beigey-white paint, then Sara did the wood work to boot. Henry decided the carpet had to go, so we cut that in to tiny pieces as well (since we still had all the furniture in the middle) and eventually got rid of that too.
Another recent purchase from the magical land of Ikea was a new bookcase for the hallway (extra slim to fit in the small space available) and a new light, also for the upstairs hallway. Both have resulted in the hallway looking much brighter in general, and they were only slightly painful to put up! The bookcase is actually bolted to the wall to stop it falling over when we charge down the stairs, so hopefully it should stand steady for a good while yet.
The final touches in the garden today, with Henry finally getting round to wiring up the rock speakers, and Sara buying him a new MP3 Stereo, especially for the garage, to hook them up to. Don't worry though, it only cost £30! As well as those, we bought some nice candle-holding flower type things from Ikea, though we've not had a chance to try them out yet...
So we finally decided that we couldn't have the garage powered by that crappy extension cable coming from the house any more, and got the electricians in to sort out a proper power supply. Luckily, they were able to use the existing consumer unit that Mark gave us and fitted way back on Day 16, and could plumb that in to our existing electrical box of tricks in the lounge. So all that really required doing was to thread the cable from the garage under the patio (which we luckily did when we laid the slabs on day Day 571) and then through the 1st floor. However, this did then mean we had to move most of the furniture from the spare room and our bedroom, so it wasn't as simple as we'd have hoped.
It's all sorted now though, and they've hidden the cabling quite well where they could (we should really have laid it under the steps when we built them, but hey - you can't win them all!).
Reinforcements arrive to give our backs a bit of a break. The slabs are laid quickly, holes are dug for the bamboo, 21 bags of gravel are bought and hey presto, its done!
Mum arrived on Friday night and was itching to get going on the garden, so she started moving the pots off of the grass.
On Saturday morning we were up really early and started digging up the grass while waiting for HSS to open so we could get a wheelbarrow, spade (sorry shovel) and a skip ramp. Two attempts were made to HSS but eventually they delivered the lot instead. We made good headway with removing the grass. The slabs were delivered along with a tonne and a half of sharp sand. The thought of moving all of that was not a good one, especially as it was now chucking it down with rain, but being true brits we soldiered on until we were soaked to the skin and could move no more!
After a winter of pretty much no work on the house or garden, plus a nice Holiday in the Isles of Scilly, we finally decided to get on with some garden work today.
Sara hit the garden centres on Good Friday, and on the Monday set about plating all the new flowers in pots. Henry meanwhile got to work on painting the new rendering by the back door, along with the wall around the steps.
Well would you look at that - over 100 days without an update? What sort of an SEO expert must I be if I think THAT's the way to maintain a good website... a bad one, that's what. But hey - it's wintery now and we're very poor, so we can't afford to do much to the house. Plus of course we got Married in New York and have the New Kittens to worry about too.
Either way, the time has come for the Christmas decorations to go up and since our friend Alex was visiting we decided to make a move on it. Unfortunately, as you can see below, the kittens decided they'd help out (see the site for more details - Our First Cat(s)) and we ended up with a trashed tree. So after the third time of standing it up and putting decorations on, Henry got cross and packed it all away again, declaring that "the cat's have officially cancelled Christmas!". So we drove off to B&Q and found a lovely (anc cheap, and cat-proof) light decorationy type thing which is now where the tree was going to go. I think you'll agree it looks rather nice - and I can report that so far, it has survived...
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