...one year later

Today marks exactly 8,760 hours since we moved to The Lodge and started trying to knock the place in to shape.

Other than the fact that living in a shed for a year isn't as bad as you might think (for the most part), we've learnt a lot of things on the way that we thought we would share to mark our anniversary, so we’ve put our thinking caps on and concocted a list each, which I’ve mixed together below. If you're considering setting sail on a project of your own, take heed because I guarantee that almost all of these will prove to be relevant one day.

We also thought we'd share a few random photographs that haven't made it into the blog before, mainly because I had no idea what to say about them. Nevertheless, many still tell tiny stories all on their ownsome.

So, our one-year anniversary. Some of you may be wondering how we’re going to celebrate this landmark occasion.
Well tonight we’re going to cook pies, peas and chips and eat tea in our camping chairs in front of the wood-burning stove which has been lit just once in the last 10 weeks. We’re going to sing Kumbaya, spend a fruitless hour looking for the Scrabble board then talk about light fittings.
(Disclaimer: some of this is not true but the pies, peas and chips in front of the fire bit is).

Dawn and Muz

putting the why? in to DIY since April 17, 2015

---

Yesterday
Dawn decided to go scrambling around on the roof to look at a missing tile.
She does that kind of thing whereas I don't. Ever. She found three in all, knocked
a fourth one off herself then came back down having waved at passing cars.
I've told her she's not going up again. We're getting A Man in to sort it out.

• Your 'best' T-shirt is the one you've done least angle grinding in and/or has fewest holes
• Tradespeople are utterly hit-and-miss. If you find a good one, keep hold of them
• Hooting and screeching owls are wonderful at 10pm but an air rifle target at 4am
• Small talk gets easier - although not easy - with practice
• Glamping is fun. A big shed with your own bed is way better than a poky old caravan and much more versatile when you move out
• Glamping is less fun after a year of getting fully dressed and traipsing to an entirely different building every time you need a wee [EDIT: not every time though, eh? Dawn? Eh?]
• Consider putting a Portapotty thing in your shed

June 2015
After the bee swarm emergency in the front garden a small colony stayed behind
to set up shop in a pile of patio slabs for a few weeks. By the time we returned
from holiday they had left for warmer climes.

• Tradesmen don't always know what they're waffling on about but will still try to talk you in to doing it their way. If you know you want it a different way, don’t cave in
• Friends are excellent providers of food, shelter and gin
• If you stand in the shower long enough your eyes will actually prune
• The things you need most will be: tape measure; Stanley knife; gaffa tape; pencil; bumper box of screws; cordless driver
• The things you will lose most often will be: tape measure; Stanley knife; gaffa tape; pencil; bumper box of screws; cordless driver; patience

August 2015
Bedroom 2 has been a no-go zone since the beginning when we decided to use
it for storage. One day Dawn went missing. I found her trapped under an avalanche
of boxes, where she had been for 20 minutes. She was less than impressed
that I then made it 21 minutes by taking a photo or two. Or three.

• Time is fluid. If a tradesman tells you he'll be there at 9.30am today, expect him a week on Tuesday when you're getting in the shower at 7pm. If he tells you he'll see you tomorrow... don't bank on it
• Randomly turning up on people’s doorsteps in similar situations to yourself can end up in unexpected friendship, sometimes with added coffee cake*
• Oil-filled radiators take all of your electricity, chew it up, spit it out and demand more NOW!
• Mentioning 'Blue Tits' (the bird) continues to be amusing even when you’re surrounded by them day in, day out
• You'll know it's time to change your jeans when you forget which month it was when you first put them on

* Not a guarantee!

October 2015
British Telecom has the worst customer service in the history of the universe.
After problems, complaints, compensation and more problems relating to half a dozen unconnected things (sometimes literally) we eventually got hooked up to BT Infinity Broadband. Or did we?
Here I decided to set Dawn a fun text quiz to work out this week's excuse for why the engineer, who was at the door, couldn't make our broadband run any faster after we'd been paying for it for six weeks.

• Parish newsletters (available by wandering randomly into your village church and posting 50p into a slot), are a handy source of local tradesfolk
• Productivity decreases dramatically as the weather deteriorates and picks up again when the sun comes out
• Using your own two totally unskilled hands to make something out of wood - which doesn't then fall apart and/or over - is incredibly satisfying
• Community Facebook page recommendations for tradespeople are often just nods to their useless pals rather than actual useful tradespeople. Don't learn this lesson the hard way. Ask your neighbours instead
• Shaving is for office workers
• Even if you aren’t full-time ‘on-site’, you will find yourself living in a uniform of walking boots, thermals and waterproofs most of the time

June 2015
This is on our doorstep. Literally almost literally literally on our doorstep.
It's easy to forget how gorgeous it is come winter when the rain drips through the Living Room window and you can still see your breath in the shower.

• Flytippers, who are much more common that you'd care to think, need to see the business end of a shotgun
• The most important question to learn during a renovation project is: "Do you have a cash price?" but because circumventing VAT-based legal stuff is generally frowned upon by the Government, make sure the words don't leave your mouth unless you're in a soundproofed room by yourself
• When you don't watch UK television for a year (apart from the Moto GP) you realise how mind-numbingly banal most of the shows were anyway, but...
• ...an Amazon Prime subscription is a sanity-saver

October 2015
At £400+ a pallet of 120mm Kingspan (seconds from eBay) isn't cheap - and Dawn needed some persuading - but it made the winter more than bearable in the shed, it made it pleasant.
We only covered about a third of the inside in all, concentrating on the bed end, and the rest of the packs are still cluttering up the Dining Room where they are likely to stay for some time yet. When the shed eventually becomes our workshop we'll get the rest in then.

• Deep in the countryside, wing mirrors are sacrificial
• Your best 'casual footwear' will be walking boots that you have to run under the outside tap to get the plaster dust off
• Neighbours whose houses you can’t even see are often exceptionally friendly
• If you want to meet said neighbours, owning a dog - or them having a dog - greatly increases those chances. If neither apply, take cake

February 2016
Back when we had some form of heating in The Lodge

• Blue Tits

March 2016
Dawn's IKEA bag full of soggy washing can't save her from a trip to the iPhone repair shop courtesy of an untied pair of bootlaces. Again.

• Kevin McCloud is right - every job you do will cost 3.6 times as much and take 73 times longer than you think it will
• You won't be in by Christmas
• Cats are lovely when they're all curled up asleep at 10pm but when they're scratching to be out at 4am only to want back in at 4.05am you'll consider lining them up next to the owls

March 2016
Having looked at old maps as part of our research, we found an old quarry (1700s-1800s) within the estate boundary which was just a half-hour walk away through the woods.
It took us nearly a year to make the journey but we found a gorgeous 60ft steep-sided horseshoe-shaped scar in the sandstone, beneath which were deep pools inside low caves that we couldn't see the end of.
The best thing about the place isn't that it's almost untouched by latter-day humans (other than a tiny bit of fly-tipping) it's that the sandstone is pinky-red which is exactly the same as that used back home on the outside of the house.
We're now thinking of this quarry as The Lodge's birthplace, which is ace.

• Don't assume that getting hooked up to gas will cost an arm and a leg - check with the National Grid before you buy a million litres of fuel oil for a smelly old boiler that heats neither water nor radiators. It might be much cheaper than you think
• An electric blanket will take the immediate sting out of winter, but…
• …when your other half suggests spending good money on good insulation for the shed that you were only planning on spending the summer in, just agree. You won’t regret it
• Surrounding farmland throws up all manner of new and overwhelmingly-nauseating smells but sometimes, just sometimes, it's you

• This is the final bullet point. On to the photos:

April 2016
This, I think, is a female Smooth Newt.
I found her on the driveway at the back a week ago, hidden in some damp leaves under a bag of rubbish.
She was very dry and nowhere near a water source so I took her to the front garden where there used to be a koi pond in the 80s. Underneath a bush there's a small murky pool-thing which used to be a water feature of some kind to feed the pond. It's permanently full of rain water and leaves and yummy newt stuff so after spending 10 minutes on a leaf making her mind up, in she plopped never to be seen again.
No calls, no emails, no chocolates, no nuffin'...

*

March 2015
The INCUBATOR MORE sign takes a sinister turn

*

March 2015
Technically-speaking we started work before we officially got the keys. We can probably legally admit this now that a year has passed but telling you how we got in will likely get us jailed. I must brush up on my property law.
One of the very first things we did was to set my folks (let's call them Viv and Ken for legal reasons) to work stripping wallpaper in the Living Room so we could begin to work out what we were dealing with beneath. This pic is shot through a window looking in to the Pantry from the Courtyard, in case you get confused.
Important note: we're outside, not inside. Outside of the building. Completely.

*

March 2016
Beyond the woods are thousands of acres of farmers' fields followed by more woodland. Living among that lot are muntjac deer which are no bigger than old, fat labrador dogs but more delicious to eat with a little rosemary and ground black pepper.
This one couldn't have given a stuff that I was there and came to within about 30ft before meandering off, chewing the crops with little more than a sniff in my direction.

*

April 2015
Just lined up in jars, looking all squidgy and that.

*

March 20, 2015
Total eclipse of the sun over The Lodge.
You can only really tell because of the lens flare towards the bottom right, though.

*

May 2015
A few miles away is The Old Post Office, which is in a different village altogether.
Identical in almost every way to The Lodge and also a former Crown Estates property, it had just been bought by John and Jess (who we later made friends with) and was about to be gutted. We reappropriated much of the skipped timber, some of which was used to build the woodshed.

*

July 2015
Just two samples of the wallpaper which once tastefully adorned every vertical surface in the Living Room.

*

June 2015
An early version of our NatureCam CCTV caught a tawny owl landing on a patio chair which had previously been used to dry washing in the front garden.
Despite NatureCam moving elsewhere every now and then we've never seen another one on the cameras.

*

October 2015
After a brief stint as 'OUR BACON REMIT' this is how the garage door
sign has remained ever since.

*

NOW
Dawn is giving the front garden its first mow of the year while I sort this blog out.
In fact I've just heard the mower go CRUNCH!
When I set this post live I'll pretend I'm still doing it so I don't have to help because I'm mean like that. Besides, I've pulled my neck, etc...

EDIT: Monday, April 18

By coincidence, after my thoughts about flytippers not 24 hours ago, I drove past this today. It's about a mile-and-a-half from here on a beautiful country lane, right in the gateway to a field and around the entrance to a peaceful footpath/bridleway.

Seriously. There's just no need. I can normally at least understand how other people think about certain things even if I don't agree with them (see my fox hunting posts) but this... I just don't get it. I mean, that's a perfectly decent bucket.

Fox hunting again - lines are crossed

Before I begin: Pest control is perfectly legal, and that's fine. Foxes are regarded as pests and can therefore be killed, and that's fine too. I am not against the killing of foxes in a quick, humane manner. It has to be done, so just shoot 'em. Full stop.

What I am against is the jolly old British tradition of hunting foxes with packs of hounds, which is quite rightly against the law of this land.
I think it's a cruel, torturous way for a terrified fox to die as it is chased relentlessly through the undergrowth then literally torn limb from limb the moment it makes a mistake. I don't care what the Countryside Alliance thinks and I don't care about what legalisation would do for rural economies, hunting foxes with hounds is wrong.

Deadly serious: me and Dawn yesterday

That said, I uphold another British tradition by protesting quietly under my breath and not actually doing anything about it. I don't lay false trails, I don't protest at meets with a crackly loudhailer turned up to 11 and misspelled placard and I don't drag bugling horsemen off their trusty steeds and beat seven shades out of them, using their blood as warpaint in front of the world's media and gaggles of baton-wielding police officers.
I pretty much just keep it to myself.

I'm telling you this so you don't go thinking that I'm a sandal-wearing, yoghurt-weaving type of tree-hugging, handcuffed-to-railings nutjob - I'm just a regular bloke who can't see any justification whatsoever for hunting foxes with hounds.

So, now I've told you that, go and read my post from November about the first time our local hunt barreled through unannounced and my reaction to it...

...welcome back. The quick update is that we had our suspicions confirmed that there was nothing we could really do about the hunt coming through, so we decided to let them get on with it. Nobody said we couldn't try though either - it was more a case of shrugged shoulders and vaguery.
As promised, the Hunt Master dropped by a few days before the next hunt was due just to give us fair warning, and we (Dawn, too) had a chat and a bit of polite laughter while making it clear that while we don't condone the activity we're prepared to be civil for the sake of peace. This has happened three or four times over the last few months and sometimes we hear or see the hunt running past the end of the front garden or don't catch them at all. They haven't entered the estate through our gates again.

In retrospect - and I was kind of aware I was doing this at the time while deliberately not dwelling on it - I had somehow convinced myself that the hunt was just following pre-laid scent trails and the dogs were getting a good run out. A bit of fresh air. In the back of my mind I knew differently, of course, but it was the only way I could stay calm about it all.

Yesterday's hunt turned everything on its head, though, and for perhaps the first time in my life I have consciously decided to stick up for my principles instead of rolling over and pretending they're not there because it's less hassle. Such was the significance of the occasion that I forgot to get any proper photos, so CCTV screenies will have to do. Sorry about that.

It all started normally, with the Hunt Master forewarning us a few days ago that they might be around on Saturday.
Yesterday afternoon came about, somewhere around half four, and we were both outside when we heard bugling from the woods so we stood at the top of the trail leading away from The Lodge to watch. I have to admit that the sight of a full hunt powering through is one to behold if you put aside any moral objections.

The hunt was pretty scattered, which is seemingly normal, and one huntsman appeared at the bottom of the track and plodded his horse up to stand with us while the rest of his group sorted themselves out.

The arrival of the cavalry
We're stood in the top right corner - you can just see a pair of feet

We did the polite chatter thing again, then a few minutes later two quad bikes came along another track and joined us. Four people were aboard the quads, two older blokes, one younger bloke and an older woman. Every one of them a pig-squealing redneck.
When they motored off down the track and in to the trees, we asked the huntsman what part they played on the hunt. His answer was vague at best and he didn't really commit. Maybe something to do with dogs... maybe not... nice day, isn't it?

Right then a fox came running like hell through the undergrowth, crossing the track right in front of us and crashing off in to the trees.

Caught on our front garden cheapo NatureCam CCTV, this is what a petrified fox looks like when it's running for its life.
It crossed the track in front of us a few seconds later, followed 30 seconds after that by a hound.

And I'm not sorry to say this, but I lost the plot.
There was no time for me to consider my reaction, no time to think about what to say - I lost it in an instant.

All of a sudden I effing hated the man on the horse beside us and I hated everything he represented. Never in my life have I experienced such a sudden surge of... what? Revulsion? I literally started to feel sick and developed a pain right across my stomach. All of a sudden my passive compliance was out the window. In fact I was so angry that I was close to tears - do you get that? You're not sad or scared but you're suddenly so furious that your unconscious reaction is to blub? That's me. I hate it. I'd be a terrible professional boxer.

As always with sudden adrenaline rushes, I don't really remember what I said shouted in his general direction but I strode off down the track at the same time ready to take on every hound with my bare hands before it got past me. Fortunately the main pack was crossing the track further down, but one hound was right on the fox's scent and followed in its wake 30 seconds later only to be faced by a mental version of me, screaming and waving my arms at it. It ran off in a different direction.

I continued shouting and gesticulating wildly at the huntsman while fending off a confrontation-hating Dawn as she tried to calm me down and he quickly left the scene without another word, presumably before I could locate a weapon. I managed to inform his firmly-turned back that I'd had enough of being polite and I'd be closing and locking the gates whenever I know they're out from now on.

Then, in something of a surprise move, Dawn left too.
She wandered straight ahead in to the trees without saying a thing and vanished for 20 minutes. She didn't even look back. It was like a preamble to a bad psychological thriller.

It turned out that whereas my lovely wife was in full agreement with the sentiment of my message, the range of words I chose to use from my otherwise pretty extensive vocabulary was somewhat limited and, often, too 'specialist'. And loud. The delivery was perhaps a little off too. She wasn't terribly pleased with me for that, but that wasn't why she wandered off - she wanted to give me time to settle down while she looked for fox remains in order to justify blasting a blunderbuss at the hunt next time it passed through.
She didn't find any, but she did hear suspicious human noises coming from the undergrowth a short distance away... so we went to investigate.

The noises were at the end of the quad bike tracks in the grass, off the path in a secluded part of the woods behind thick rows of rhododendron. Voices, chopping, snapping branches... manual labour sounds. But there was no way to find out what was going on without being totally obvious about it and putting ourselves at potential risk. Anecdotal accounts that I've heard over the years from people who actually know these things suggest that hunt participants can be just as... er... defensive and unpredictable as their saboteur counterparts.
Then, as luck would have it, we heard the quad bike engines start up so we did what any fully-grown adults would do and ran away to hide in the trees with our hoods up as they drove on by.

Pictured from inside the enclosure looking out, the
only pathway to and from the den was crudely hidden
from view with pulled-over foliage

The area of rhododendron they had been in was kind of horseshoe-shaped, with one way in and one way out, which the people had tried to hide by pulling foliage across the entrance. Beyond the 'barrier' (being careful not to step in any traps) we found five large entrances to what appeared to be a reasonably-sized earth. Four of the fox holes had been dug out but there was no blood, no bodies and no signs of anything violent having taken place.
So we took some photographs then went back home.

Now here's the thing: Which, if any, laws have been broken?

Organised hunts like this aren't allowed to specifically target foxes with hounds, but by digging out an earth while hunting with hounds is going on in the immediate area thanks to a group you're clearly with, isn't the Hunt Master blatantly ignoring the law?

But here's the other thing: I know what they were up to and Dawn knows what they were up to, but everything can be easily explained away by the hunt if it came down to it. They were just out for a run with the hounds. Maybe the quads weren't part of it. Maybe the quad people had guns to shoot anything they found - it's not illegal. Maybe they thought they'd do a little ad-hoc pest control while they were out... all of that easy, indisputable bullshit which hunts no doubt rely on up and down the country all year round as they deliberately circumvent the Fox Hunting Ban.

I don't exactly know the purpose of digging out fox holes
without doing anything else. My thought was that they'd be
back later with terriers. Either way, doing it as part of an
organised hound hunt has to raise some questions, right?

I know that there are bigger things to fret about than what effectively amounts to simple pest control, but they've pushed my buttons and I want to do everything I can to disrupt them now. I want to get the police involved, lay false trails, dig a pit for the quads to fall in to, shoot stuff... but I'm not going to, no matter how angry it has made me.

Nevertheless I'll still unleash my tiny anarchic side next time they pass through - I'll not only be closing the gate but I'll lock it this time, too. Even if the horses don't always come through that way, it'll still mess things up for the quads and other hangers-on.

EDIT (March 19) - The word 'Terriermen' has been mentioned to me. Not being a country boy I had never heard of them. Terriermen. Apparently it's a real word.
That's what they were.

Gertrude wreaks havoc - a round-up

Do storms in the UK feel worse now that we've decided they need names? They do, don't they? Is it just me?

It has been a few days since I last updated the blog so I thought I'd do a quick no-particular-order-round-up of what has been going on.

Simply-put, quite a lot of things have been happening although nothing worthy of a post on its own yet. So here's a wee summary while I wait for Dawn to get her hair cut and return bearing both a bonny new barnet and pizza. It's warm here in the shed with the electric blanket and SausageTheCat curled up at my side. It's bloody Baltic out there.

We've bought a horse

A workhorse, that is. Although it's more like a wallowing hippo.

The assorted misfits bid a tearful farewell to their
quadruplet chums. Whisked away, crammed in to the
boot of a Renault Megane. The shame of it.

Back in the excited planning stages before we bought The Lodge we pondered the merits of getting our hands on a cheap van to haul dirty stuff around during the renovation - bags of lime, pallets, timber, bricks etc.

We never quite got to the completion stage of that idea though, and instead settled for pretending our regular 'town' cars - my Renault Megane and Dawn's Ford Focus  - were Transits, getting them grubbier and grubbier. We got to the point where a boot full of sawdust and mud was a good thing because the mess hid the rips and scratches. With the benefit of hindsight that really wasn't very good at all.

So having thought about it for a few weeks we finally took the plunge and bought a 2.5l Mitsubishi L200 4x4 pickup with a tow bar and roof rails. A truck. We've bought a baccy-chewin', ale-swillin', arse-slappin', mother-cussin' ManTruck.

In hairdresser white.

Don't judge me.

I almost did myself an injury getting up there, mind

It's a few years old, a bit lived-in inside, has windey-windows, 116,000 miles on the clock and has been used for its intended purpose, but these things are (hopefully) bombproof and with a good valet and engine steam it should do us for a year or two. The bonus is that because the Megane is getting the elbow to make way for it, we should get a little money back to put in to the house.

The downside to that, of course, is that this thing is huge and I'm a bit scared of it. It's the size of a bus and I can't see out of the back window so I'm going to have to investigate getting parking sensors fitted just to underline the whole 'hairdresser' thing.
Also, you know in old movies when someone's steering a car by turning the wheel a few inches left then right over and over, but the background shows a perfectly straight road? It drives like that.

Too grrr to give it a name, The Truck is currently being used to store a couple of m2 of dry (bought) wood because we've got nowhere else to put it without it getting wet. It's a mobile woodshed. And I've already pancaked a meandering pheasant with it. I'm not sure who was more traumatised.

But anyway, as an impressed neighbour said the other day: "Well done - you're Country now." Just wait until I get it stuck in the woods on a joyride and I have to trek to their farm begging to be winched out with a tractor. That'll show them just how Country I am.

War is declared

We are fighting them on the beaches, we are fighting them on the landing grounds, we are fighting them in the fields and in particular we are poisoning them at the side of the shed rather than above the kitchen ceiling, where the expected bloodfest failed to materialise.

Rats.

As a very quick recap, I mentioned a while back that we had rats in the kitchen ceiling and we were setting traps baited first with lemon curd, then lemon curd and raisins, then finally peanut butter in an electronic rat trap. Yet we only caught one rat back in the early days of the problem - and that was with a mechanical snap trap.

We heard them a few more times after that but failed to bag any more, and eventually I killed the plastic electronic trap when it dropped out of the hatch and shattered everywhere on the tiled floor.

We haven't heard them since Christmas Eve and we still haven't found where they're coming in... although we haven't looked very hard, to be fair.

Procrastinate all you want, Mr Shiny-eyed MouseRatThing,
but your fate is sealed. Sorry and that.

Meanwhile a couple of weeks ago, when Dawn and I were lying in bed one night watching yet another US TV series on the laptop (we've just finished Transparent - it wasn't great), we heard something nibbling away at the aviary mesh around the bottom of the shed between the railway sleeper footings, which is there to stop anything setting up home under the floor. It spent a good 20 seconds sharpening its teeth and only paused briefly when we banged on the wall.

Next morning we decided to take no prisoners and out came the big guns in the form of a 5kg tub of bright pink poisoned grain and two horizontal drainpipe-type bait stations with clear vertical feeder pipes offering tasty death from above.

One went in the front garden on the far side of the shed near the back corner (mere feet away from Dawn's side of the bed), and the other went at the very end of the back garden area on the other side of the house as far away from the building as possible to minimise anything crawling back to the kitchen ceiling and going toes-up. Although not many, we're still getting flies in Bedroom 1 after something died in the chimney four months ago and we want to reduce the risk of it happening again, naturally.

Now I know I can be a bit odd from time to time, so it should come as no surprise to learn that I decided to set up a spare CCTV camera to watch over the shed poison to see how popular it was.

And crikey, was it popular. It was like a food bomb had gone off.

We forgot to watch it the first night, but by the second there were frantic comings and goings all night with rodents (Mice? Rats? Voles? Shrews? All of the above? It's difficult to get scale from the CCTV) scurrying back and forth like mad, then sometimes just sitting in the pipe filling their faces for five minutes or more. It was genuinely fascinating and has given me a whole different view of the beautiful countryside - it's riddled with rats and stuff. Riddled.

Anyway, I had to refill the shed bait station after just a week, but activity understandably started slowing down a little after that. The back garden station isn't quite so popular but it has had a half-refill and I keep finding pink areas on the ground nearby where a feast has taken place and only the husks are left. So hopefully the kitchen invaders are among the greedy masses somewhere, God rest their furry little souls.

Gertrude and Henry leave a trail of destruction

I wrote about our wood woes a couple of weeks ago here, and in an effort to plan ahead for next year I started work on a woodshed made from reclaimed timber, pallets and box profile steel sheets (essentially corrugated iron, but a bit less 'chicken sheddy').

Unfortunately I didn't check the weather forecast first, and before I knew it along came Gertrude, with Henry hot on her heels...

Before
Resting against the wall, testing things out for size

After
Mother Nature, you cruel, cruel mistress

It was carnage. New Orleans all over again.
When it was safe to venture outside without risk of being decapitated by an airborne cow I had to stand all the pallets back up again, which literally took minutes.
After that I decided to actually screw some of them together, chop some bits off and kind of loosely connect sections with lengths of timber, screws and blind faith, but I've only got a corner done so far and even then I'm not sure how to plan the roof in such a way that it doesn't end up in the village next time the breeze picks up.

I've taken some pics of the progress and would eventually like to write a post explaining how to make such a beast, but as I'm totally winging-it already I'm not sure how useful it would be. I'll see how it all pans out when/if it gets finished.

£90 for a bag of old junk?

With progress in the Living Room hitting a near-glacial pace (until this week*) we idly turned our attention to decor. Specifically arty farty stuff.
The fireplace and exposed chimney breast is lovely and all, but what do we want above the mantelpiece? We'd both like an original piece of art of some description but both of us are a little vague about the details, so we decided to keep our eyes open and our thinking caps on.

They even smell nice

Meanwhile I discovered an online auction site that isn't the one you think, full of fascinating stuff up for grabs - everything from Bulgarian farms to defribrillators to actual tanks and Royal Air Force 'practice bombs' - among which I found a lot offering 32 antique pocket watches in various states of disrepair, although there were no other details - just general photos of the collection which was nestling in the bottom of a Sainsbury's carrier bag.
"Aha!" thought I. "They're likely to be Victorian or thereabouts and we could do something pretentious with them!"

So we bought them. And they're absolutely lovely.
All but two or three have a beautiful patina of age, appearing very old indeed in Watch Years, and all of them are missing bits and pieces somewhere: glass fronts; metal backs; hands; cogs (gears?); springs; numbers; most of the above etc, and although some are pretty similar there are loads of different designs and sizes. Some even have small hand-engraved inscriptions inside: BA, EH and Queens 1974 (not an antique, I know, but it still has history). All the auction place could tell me when I asked was that they came from a house clearance, so not much to go on.

The plan is to display them somewhere - maybe or maybe not above the Living Room fire, and although we have a vague idea of how we might do that we're still on the idle hunt for alternative ways in case we're missing something obvious, which is entirely possible.
We're in no rush though, so shrouded in a 5p bag of bright orange modern-day corporate greed they shall stay until we're ready for them.

*We're getting plastered!!!1!

Oh, Mila.
Mila, Mila, Mila.

It's finally happening!
The lime plasterer is here!
Hallelujah!

Andy S, our very own Restoration Man, has spent the last four or five days prepping and plastering the Living Room and fending off stupid questions from yours truly.

Conversations have included serious highbrow issues such as the legal and moral obligations of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and the considerations and problems faced when referring to an Ulaanbaatarian in polite conversation.
Slightly lower-brow, yet arguably more important, topics have included: 'Other than our respective partners, Mila Kunis is the most beautiful woman on earth - discuss', the importance of waterproof pyjama bottoms, 'Steve Wright in the afternoon - eaten alive by tortoises or trampled to death by dachshunds?' and gimp suits.

We had help

Meanwhile I have been lifting, carrying, collecting supplies, generally skivvying and regularly spraying the plaster down with water so it doesn't dry out too quickly... and the room has been utterly transformed. I can't stop putting the light on to look when I pass.
I'll save the details for a post of their own when it's all finished, but it's safe to say that we're delighted with the progress so far and there's still a week or two - and another room - to go.

...and finally

Randomly, here's a photo of Terminator Trevor, pictured yesterday during a quiet meal in a country pub, demonstrating how he motivates me when I'm flagging. Never off duty, that man.