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.

Oh, rats! (part II)

WARNING

There is a reasonably grim photograph of an expired rat at the end of this post.

If that kind of thing makes you cry, look away now. Think about pandas and butterflies and kittens in cardboard boxes and stuff. Not all three at once. You'd never get a panda in a box, not with a cat chasing a butterfly around in there already.

If, like us, you're a bit morbid and that kind of thing doesn't really bother you, feel free to skip all of the following words and go right to it. It's near the bottom.

I guarantee you'll wince and say: "oooo, right through the head".

A few years ago the Water People decided to renew a load of underground pipework right outside our old house and across the whole estate.

It was weeks and weeks of carnage - diggers, mud and chain-smoking monobrowed neanderthals everywhere from 9.01am until 4.59pm exactly, with about seven hours off for lunch.

Presumably unrelated, at the same time we spotted a new squirrel in the garden.

A couple of times a day we'd see him running across the fence at the back, often carrying acorns or bread from a nearby bird table, and once or twice we saw him burying his nuts in one of Dawn's long-dead pot plants. He was a grey, yeah, but we quite liked him.

Ratatouille.
This is the cute non-disease-carrying face of the Rat PR Machine, as spearheaded by Disney-Pixar.
Don't believe the hype.

At the same time both of those things happened, we started hearing noises in the loft. To be totally accurate, we started hearing noises in the kitchen cupboards, up the cavity walls and in to the loft.

Being a semi-detached bungalow our neighbour (Chris) also started hearing things going bump in the night and was getting quite concerned. But that was okay because there was a new squirrel in our garden so it was obvious that it was him getting up there. He'll nod off for the winter and never bother us again. Nothing to see here. Move on.

A month later and driven to the point of nocturnal distraction by Colin, as we'd named him, I ended up freaking out and found myself sitting in the pitch black loft with my air rifle at the ready, presumably waiting for a house-trained glow-in-the-dark squirrel to come bounding by and pause helpfully while I lined up my shot.

The turning point came when I was midway through thumping the bedroom ceiling at 4am in an attempt to scare it to death while Dawn muttered extremely rude words at me in her sleep. My lovely wife is a somewhat determined sleeper and nothing much wakes her but she can still do most everyday things while totally zonked-out. Including driving to work. It's astonishing.

Anyway, it was at that moment it occurred to me... what am I doing?

Still convinced it was a squirrel we ended up calling A Man With A Trap who basically told us to stop deluding ourselves - we had rats which had probably moved in because of the water works outside.
Half a dozen generous doses of poison later, some in the loft and some under the kitchen cupboards, Colin the SquirrelRat's fate was sealed. We never heard from him again and there was no poisonous smell/fly combo either, which would have been a big problem in our little house. I often picture him on a beach in the Bahamas sucking on a pineapple chunk and preening his sun-bleached whiskers.

I'm telling you this tale to illustrate how much we've changed since then.
The recent cold snap here at The Lodge has brought with it kitchen ceiling invaders, scampering around over the woodwork and skittering over the lath and plaster.
Of course by 'scampering' and 'skittering' what I actually mean is 'partying' and 'caber-tossing'. I swear I even heard music at one stage.
Our reaction this time, rather than having a screaming fit and calling the Army, was to barely shrug our shoulders and carry on making tea. We've turned so... so... so Country.

At first, still clinging on to my squirrel-based naivety, I convinced myself we had mice and set a wee trap just inside the tiny ceiling hatch, baited with the only available lure in the house - lemon curd on a bit of bread.

Of course the bread vanished without the trap being sprung, so there was only one thing for it. No more Mr Nice Muz. Out came the rat trap for the second night..

Dawn liked his "pretty" fur
I liked how his eyeball didn't explode all over the place

Weirdly, although rats are gregarious mammals that hang around in herds, this fella appears to have been by himself. We've had no more noises in the ceiling, the new trap we have up there hasn't been sprung in a week and all of our remaining lemon curd is still in the fridge.

Finding how he got in will be a challenge for another day, but because the suspended ceiling is so small and packed with rockwool insulation it's going to be impossible to get up there.
The only reasonable point of rat access that I can see is the drainpipe running up the kitchen wall outside. I'll check it out when I get around to it because we don't want his mates launching search parties and moving themselves in too.

One was enough, thank you very much.

EDIT (just a few hours after this was first posted)
It has taken me a week to get this blog post written and uploaded, and as fate would have it I'm standing in the kitchen right now where I can hear movement in the ceiling. Terrific. This could well turn out to be a saga.

Oh, rats!

An unlikely combination of our weekend shenannigans in the loft and SausageTheCat has caused us a little bit of concern today.

As I mentioned a few days ago, Dawn and I ventured into the loft on Sunday and dragged out all of the fibre glass insulation to help with moisture problems.
At the time we noticed what we thought were mouse droppings as well as a couple of empty poison sachets, but we didn't hear or see anything else to suggest there was an ongoing issue.

In retrospect this may or may not be related, but less than 24 hours later my dad and I twice heard clattering downstairs in the house that we couldn't quite place, but as it was raining pretty heavily at the time I assumed it was chunks of cement throwing themselves down the drainpipes from the gutters (which hadn't been cleaned out by Roofer #1 despite him promising to do so).

But SausageTheCat's latest rain-soaked gift to us today has raised some questions.

Kids these days - too much pocket money

It's not a vole, it's not a shrew and despite its humongous ears it's definitely not an elephant... so what is it?
Although I have recorded it on the StC Killboard as a mouse he's yet to actually present one to us after four months here - so could it be a baby black rat? A ratlet?*

The Rentokill website says that black rats (Rattus Rattus - imaginative) have tails that are longer than their bodies, and with our little thing here measuring-in at 5.5" in total with a 2.5" body it certainly fits the bill. They also, apparently, have big old ears going on and as you can see in the picture these are like yacht sails, although they look a lot bigger than any of those I've seen on Google Images. Perhaps his mum said he'd grow in to them...

The main reason for our concern is that Rentokill also says that black rats are known commonly as 'roof rats' because they're climbers and can easily get up there. And as The Lodge doesn't have cavity walls to provide an escape route, did my dad and I hear one abseiling down the inside of a drainpipe?

Mischief

Have we disturbed a nest in the loft?
Could it just be coincidence?
If I scrub that pound coin with Swarfega will I still get bubonic plague?

Dawn wants to chuck more poison in the loft whereas I'd rather they didn't expire up there and stink the place out (flies, too) so I want to set some traps before we get replacement insulation so we can know for sure.
It's likely that we'll do a mixture of both, so watch this space...


* Yes, I know they're called kittens but I didn't want to confuse anyone.

Survey day

Today we had the specialist period property survey on The Lodge, and because this was the point where The Mill fell apart (not literally, but almost – see the About page if you don’t know what we’re talking about) we were pretty nervy about it.

The estate agent selling the property told us that we weren’t allowed to be present when the survey was done, but because that was silly bollocks we skulked up the road and rocked up when he dropped the keys off for our surveyor and left.

We spent about five hours with Pete (check out http://www.heritage-house.org/ - this man really knows his historic onions… and then some) and the upshot is that from our perspective the survey went really, really well.

Lime torched loft with damp-causing fibreglass insulation

Everything appears to be structurally sound and the entire building has been left pretty much untouched since it came into being in the 1800s – lots of lime plaster and mortar (including original penny-struck mortar); original quarry tile and elm flooring; lath and plaster ceilings; a “perfect” lime torched loft space; original (albeit hidden beneath many layers of gloss paint) doors… etc. There are a few relatively minor question marks about an historic crack in the west elevation, which seems to be the result of old movement and nothing more; the (possible) void below seven inches of solid concrete floor in the dining room; why there’s an RSJ (steel beam) in the dining room that has been disguised as a wooden beam and the dogleg in the living room which, along with the downstairs loo, was obviously a different room altogether some time ago. But overall it’s pretty promising.

Original elm floorboards in Bedroom 3

There’s a bit of doubleplusungood gypsum plaster here and there; a small amount of cement pointing outside; waterproof paint on the external window lintels; the odd wobbly roof tile; condensation-based surface damp on some of the internal walls; non-breathable rubber carpet underlay adding to the general dampness and the condensation forming on the fibreglass insulation in the loft is causing an ugly damp patch on the ceiling just outside the bathroom door, but it’s all cosmetic and fairly easy to resolve. In fact we’ve already cracked the uPVC windows open to get some airflow going (some of the vents had been Sellotaped-up!), so that’ll help with the surface condensation.

Then there’s an issue of rats chewing through some of the electrics beneath the floorboards, so that’ll have to be looked at sharpish.

Surface mould in Bedroom 1

One thing we’d already noticed, but was confirmed by Pete, is that the chimneys are in a bit of a state. Neither have been blessed with a flue during the last 130+ years, so the brickwork has absorbed all manner of poisonous crap and damaging salts, which are leaching out both internally and externally. The unfortunate solution is that they’ll have to be swept thoroughly and, once the wallpaper has been stripped off the chimney breasts, left to breathe and dry for an as-yet unknown amount of time. This will probably be measured in years, although once they are flued they can be used as normal. Meanwhile the stack closest to the road on the east side needs to be repaired and we need to source a second Victorian crown chimney pot from a reclamation yard to make up for the one that’s missing. The lead flashing also needs to be looked at around both stacks because there’s a small amount of internal water ingress.

And then came the small matter of working out the age of The Lodge. A little while ago we found it on the 1884 Ordinance Survey map (pigsties and all), but there might be more to it than that – looking at the brickwork on the east side where it forms part of a boundary wall relating to a much larger estate, it seems that it could have been a rebuild or add-on to an older property.
The Lodge itself is constructed using sandstone on its lower half on the north, south and west sides and brick on the upper half, but on the east wall the brick is in two halves – the lower half that marries-up with the stone is constructed with Georgian brickwork (1714 - 1830), while above those, and in line with the brick on the other three sides of the house, the bricks are Victorian-era (1837 - 1901). It’s a little difficult to explain having spent around four hours in the pub with Pete after the survey…

The east side is part of a much longer estate boundary wall

One possibility is that the bottom sandstone part was an original one-storey Georgian property, and the upper part of The Lodge as it stands today was a Victorian addition. Another is that the boundary wall was built in the Georgian era and then in the Victorian era the house was built making use of part of the existing wall. We plan to dig around in the local records office to see if they have any more information, and given the fact that the larger estate is steeped in history, we’re hoping to get lucky.

So what’s next?
Well, we heard yesterday that the seller wants to complete on March 17, which is no time at all, so it’s full steam ahead.
There are lists to be made, decisions to be taken, things to be organised and worrying to be done. Solicitors need to be contacted, mortgage surveys need to be arranged and virgins simply must be sacrificed without delay.

Hectic times await.