...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

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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'...

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March 2015
The INCUBATOR MORE sign takes a sinister turn

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

Attack of the killer-ish bees

I really had no intention of blogging as much as I have been recently, but things just keep on happening...

Take today for instance.
There I was minding my own business up the scaffolding, scraping paint, when I heard the hum of a tractor engine heading up the road from the village. Usual stuff.
It got steadily louder and louder to the point where it really should have been in sight by n... HOLYMARYMOTHEROFGOD IT'S A MASSIVE SWARM OF BEES!!!1!!

Gravity certainly played more of a part than it should have as I departed the scaffolding and near-teleported myself in to the house, slamming the door firmly behind me. I even briefly thought about locking it... it's fair to say that I had a little bit of a panic on at the time.
So I did what any man in my position would do - I rang Dawn at work 20-odd miles away and demanded she do something about it. NOW.

I calmed down a little during our brief-but-urgent conversation, during which time I worked out that the swarm hadn't been looking to settle right on my face like a humongous undulating bee beard - as I had naturally assumed it would, but instead it had decided to take a break in the front garden, right in front of the shed.
Dawn managed to persuade me to go gingerly back outside "and take lots of photographs", and still high on the unexpected rush of adrenaline I did just that. At great personal risk, I must add. I mean, what if they were the mutant killer kind from Africa or something?

...and the sound as the swarm swamped a scabby old fir tree in the garden was absolutely astonishing. It was as though the air was full of white noise, but on a lower frequency and at deafening volume that drowned all other sounds out of existence. It was very, very impressive.

While I took pictures, gradually getting braver and closer to the big ball of unpredictable stinging things, Dawn texted me some telephone numbers for people who could come and rescue me. Fortunately one of the blokes was just 10 minutes away and I was still staring mesmerised at the swarm when he arrived.

I instantly snapped in to Must Ask Lots of Excited Questions mode, and the summary of what I learned was that it was a reasonably small swarm - about 15,000 bees, and they had probably split off from their main colony, maybe because they had outgrown their hive - the Queen had just upped and left, leaving loads behind. It's also possible that another Queen had been hatched, and because there would normally be a fight to the death between the two, the original had got while the going was good, taking a loyal band of followers along with her.
They were also at their most docile while swarming because they would have had a good old feed before heading off and their bellies would be too full of honey to bend much to get the stinger in anyway.
I also learned that amateur beekeeping is a cutthroat world - my saviour reckoned they had likely come from an apiary over towards the village but because he was collecting them he was going to stick them in one of his own empty hives. Finders keepers and all that. That's why there would be no charge.

Bee-proof socks

Did you read the post about me asking the deer hunter if I could join him for a little while a few days ago? You might remember that the question just fell out of my mouth without any intervention from my brain.
Well, that's how I ended up in a bee keeper's suit today. I quite like this new impulsive me, although the bee keeper seemed to be a little bit perplexed by my enthusiasm. He kept looking at me funny.
Because the suit in question was only the top half with the mesh hood, I took the sensible route and tucked my trousers in to my jazzy pink socks and found some gardening gloves. I looked every inch the proper pro.

Two minutes later the bee keeper had snipped the fir branch the swarm had settled on, dropped it in to a wicker basket and popped it on the ground with a blanket over the top to keep the sun off... and that was it. The idea was that the rest of the bees would head inside through a small hole that had been left for them. 
He pointed out that of the hundreds of bees hanging around just outside the basket, the ones with their backsides in the air were calling the stragglers over by emitting pheromones, while a couple of thousand still in the tree were confused by pheromones still up there, so he would leave the basket where it was for an hour while he headed off somewhere else. Which he did.

On his return he snipped another branch off in to the basket but there were still a good couple of thousand bees hanging around that had gone uncollected, so he decided to abandon those ones and let them take their chances. At that he popped the basket on the passenger seat of his little hatchback, put the seatbelt around it and pootled off with a cheery wave. And that was that.
Ten hours later as I type this the remaining bees have consolidated in to a tight ball in the tree for the night and have gone almost perfectly still and silent. It's a bit eerie to watch.
It remains to be seen what they'll do tomorrow, if anything, but I hope they find a good home to go to because honey bees are important. The future of the human race depends on them or something, so I hear.

• If you find yourself at the mercy of a million angry bees, log on to http://www.bbka.org.uk/help/find_a_swarm_coordinator.php and stick your postcode in the box. Rescue is just a phone call away.

The surroundings

I thought I should give The Lodge a little bit of geographical context before we get into the nitty gritty of the renovations further along the line.

One of the criteria we set ourselves while we were looking at houses was that we wanted a rural property - trees, wildlife, stars, silence - while at the same time not leaving ourselves stranded miles from civilisation in the middle of winter when that one day of heavy snow arrives.
We looked at barn conversions, derelict buildings, an old windmill and various other things, but for one reason or another none were suitable. That's why, when we first found The Lodge in the summer of 2014, we set our hearts on it only for our hopes to be dashed when the sale went to someone else. Lesson learnt - don't obsess about something that isn't in the bag. I say 'learnt', but we still haven't dotted all the Ts and crossed the Is on The Lodge now that it's 'ours', so we could still get bitten...

As you can see in the first picture, The Lodge fits the bill: it's in the countryside; it's surrounded by fields and trees; the closest neighbour is a five-minute walk along a track through the woods and there's a nice village with local produce suppliers, a butcher and a couple of pubs a mile-or-so away. So it's fairly isolated without being totally cut off.

The managed woods to the west aren't ours, of course, but they're literally on the doorstep, meaning we can go for walks and, if the inclination takes me, I can shoot rabbits and buffalo for tea.
The only real compromise is that we're on a road with a junction to the east, but although it's a through-road between villages it's not particularly heavily-used and the gated boundary wall shields us from the majority of traffic noise anyway. Traffic at the property itself is limited to comings and goings from the neighbour along the track (and maybe some arborialists now and then), so that shouldn't be a problem.

We still need to investigate this properly, but the estate seems to issue permits for horse riders and game hunters on the land to the west (which stretches a loooong way), but it's not terribly busy and that kind of thing is all part and parcel of the rural lifestyle anyway. The fact that The Lodge is no longer a gamekeeper's lodge probably means that things will be quieter than previous decades anyway, although the occasional gunshot in the distance isn't unusual. As long as nobody shoots our cat.

This second picture shows The Lodge itself and general associated areas.

The buildings in the rear garden area are all gone now, leaving hard standing in various states of disrepair, so that'll take a bit of work to make garden-y, and even then I'm suspicious about the condition of the earth beneath. Being shielded from the environment for so long (at least 16 years according to Google Earth - but probably much longer because a blurry 1945 image also shows something there) means it will be severely deprived of nutrients and we have no idea what kind of chemicals and harmful materials will have been used there in the past. So it's possible that this will only ever be grass and sheds rather than spring onions and the like.

The front garden is a moot point and something we've asked our solicitor to take a look at.
As things currently stand, although we can use it as part of the property, we have to lease it from the estate we bought The Lodge from, which is a bit silly. Nevertheless, this is more useable land. As you can see in the picture there have been allotment patches in the past and although it is unkempt and overgrown nowadays, there are signs that poultry was also kept in a large enclosed area - so at least it'll be fertilised!
This is where we'll probably grow some veg and, at some point in the future, house free-range chickens or ducks which will no doubt wander in to the road and get squished (our friends at Renovating an Old Stone Cottage recently lost a cockrel to a cement truck) or get eaten by foxes or our cat. We'll see. Oh, and I'd like to build a bee hive or two at some point, but that's a long way away and well beyond my current DIY abilities.

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Finally, and back on the subject of the wider geography, this is where you might be able to help with something.
We discovered this abandoned machinery deep in the woods a couple of weeks ago when we went for a walk, but we don't know what it was used for or when. Close to agricultural land and housed in a sunken (brick walled) rectangular pit it comprises what appears to be wheels, pulleys and some kind of rig that rocked from side-to-side on metal half gears/cogs, presumably sifting grain or something.
Any suggestions? Drop us a line at incubatormore@gmail.com or leave a comment. Ta!