Tuesday 2nd August - Yesterday

So, as well as making cake and bread and eating blackberries yesterday, we did a massive amount of gardening.

Both of us in unison said words to the effect of "I wish I'd taken the 'before' photograph", but we didn't. so you will have to use your imagination. See the way my compost bin has been engulfed? The bit we tackled was further down, and the tangle had filled an empty patch, and taken over three or four shrubs in this sort of manner.

I've dealt with the bin, and it is back in use again. Just as well, the worms were getting ready to make a break for it in search of food.

Anyway, step one was to attack the "flower bed" the strimmer, which cleared the brambles and goosegrass down to ground level. He did that a couple of days ago, to this session started with using a sort of grapping hook on a broomhandle contraption to haul the debris out of the border. The various lumps of broken concrete buried in amongst everything (something to do with the original vegetable garden when we first arrived back in 1984) amounted to a sizeable pile.

Demolishing a rotten fence panel was the work of minutes, but cutting down some mature ivy and trimming back the laurel hedge took a leetle bit longer.

A salvaged not-yet-broken panel fence panel (rescued from a neighbour who replaces panels when they are beginning to break rather than when they are broken) was re-made to fit the gap. See those massive laurel trunks? I planted them all just behind our back fence back in about 1986 - cuttings that were only about one foot high, that a work colleague was selling for "£1-and-can-I-have-the-posts-back".

"A proper bit of farm-yard-style DIY" he called it, as he sawed and chopped and hammered and nailed. The gate was a bit of a challenge (we brought it from the house-before-last and it's had a hard life). The hinge had to be reconstructed as the lower hinge-pin had broken off - that involved drilling through a metal bar in order to fix a bolt to act as a hinge-pin.

The next ingeniosity was to create something for the latch to latch into; a metal plate and a dozen washers works perfectly.

    

Job Done, as least as far as the gate goes.

Meanwhile, I had set to work on reclaiming the path to the gate. That's probably why I've got aches and stiffness when my arms join on to my shoulders at the moment. I didn't finish the job, partly due to the arms and shoulders (and hands and knuckles) protesting, and partly because I would have got trodden on or bashed on the head while the Farm-yard-DIY was in progress.

 

Did I mention that he mowed the lawn AND trimmed the pink jasmine as well?

Look at the agapanthus; I divided and re-potted them earlier this year, and expected them to sulk, but all four pots are full of flowers!

We've slightly miscalculated: this week is recycling collection, so the garden waste bin won't be collected until next Tuesday

and as you can see, we've all this lot that won't fit in the bin!

 It's a day off from gardening today - rain has stopped "play".

Thursday 11th December - This house

So, about this house....

1. When we moved in, we soon discovered, the hard way, that the loo was not bolted to the floor. (The bathroom had been completely re-fitted a couple of months earlier by the previous occupants).

2. A day or so later we found that the overflow in pipe for the bath was not connected. Guess how we found that out?

3. The previous occupant took the lower part of the 2-part TV aerial booster with her (presumably it was attached to her television set). However half an aerial booster is definitely worse than no aerial booster at all.

4. We checked ALL the electrical sockets when we moved in with a tester gadget. That's when we discovered the additional sockets were all wired up wrongly. Live/Neutral reversed, or whatever.

5. Some years later, the bathroom basin blocked up. It was a simple matter to remove the pedestal to get at the U-bend; however, that's when we discovered that the basin was merely resting on the pedestal, and not screwed to the wall. Luckily I was within earshot of my husband's frantic cries for help, and rushed upstairs to catch the basin as the hot and cold water pipes slowly distorted under the weight...

6. We wanted to replace the ancient, noisy and uneconomical gas fire and back boiler in the sitting room. The plan was to put the boiler in the kitchen and have a nice new gas fire in the sitting room. We called in a builder to take out the old fireplace and reduce the size of the opening ("why not do it yourselves? It's a relatively simple task?" queried our friends - but we were getting wiser). The unfortunate builder discovered that the chimney support had been removed, but not replaced. The whole chimney was resting on two lengths of copper pipe, which had had the end flattened and wedged into the brickwork on either side of the opening. And were buckling under the weight of the chimney.

7. The gas engineers discovered that the old heating system had been installed incorrectly, with the water flowing the wrong way round the radiators and various safety extras missing entirely. A two day job took them two weeks and miles of extra copper piping.

8. The sitting-room door squeaked and wouldn't close properly. Oil was not the answer - oh no! It took several hours of work involving removing, reshaping, adjusting and rehanging the door to solve that one.

And so it goes on....

I expect getting the double glazing done, and replacing the garage, and sorting out the driveway will all reveal more opportunities for improvisation as we work through these projects. It is just so fortunate that my husband  has such an aptitude for fixing, mending, problem-solving and perseverance in the face of all obstacles.

You might be forgiven for thinking that we live in an ancient building, much altered and reshaped over hundreds of years. Not a bit - it's just a 1950s semi. Everything should be easy - no?
 

Thursday 11th December - Another typical little project

We moved into this house over 30 years ago.

It very quickly became clear that NOTHING would be straight forward. How quickly? Like, the minute we wanted to hang the curtains - the previous occupants had taken all the curtain hooks with them. All the curtain tracks are different, so getting new curtain hooks was a bit of a challenge.We could have replaced all the tracks, of course, but we had pretty much busticated the budget buying the house (£46,000 was a terrifying amount of money back then, and interest rates were MUCH higher).

Anyway, that's all history now. Except when it comes back to bite us.

So, neighbours across the road have installed a bright, motion sensitive security light, which just catches our bedroom window. Our cheap unlined curtains that we hung on the second night of moving in (because, or course, we had no hooks on the first night) have coped with the street light and people driving up and down the road in the middle of the night, but this security light is another matter.

Step 1 - order black-out curtains from John Lewis. We ordered them yesterday, and collected them from Waitrose at 2pm today. Brilliant! Buy new curtain hooks while we are at it, as the plastic is bound to have gone brittle by now. Shop helps us choose matching hooks.

Step 2 - open the box - they have delivered red instead of blue. Hmm. Okay. We'll go with red. Red is fine.

Step 3 - Start hanging the curtains. They won't slide on the rail. Turns out that the hooks are slightly too roomy for the rail.Looks like the hooks we've been using all these years were wrong too, which explains why the curtains have never run smoothly.

Step 3 - It is late night shopping. Zoom into town and buy the other hooks. And buy a cheap curtain rail while we are at it. Why not. Perhaps the curtain track is worn out - could be, after all these decades. Belt and braces time.

Step 4 - Try the new hooks. Still not right. Replace the old curtains for tonight. Tomorrow is another day.

There's no use being irritated. Every job in this house throws up unforseen problems. That's another blog post all on its own.

You learn to adopt important life skills, when you tackle any kind of decorating, repairs, improvements in this house. Like....

1 Do your research. And then check the facts. And then go over all the figures again.
2 Research it all some more. Ponder. Think it through.Revise time and budget estimates upwards and then double them.
3 Never start any job, however small, without having at least twice the "book time" for the job free.
4 Never start any job without having every single conceivable bit of equipment ready, fully charged, tested and available for use.
5 Always be able to reverse engineer your work so that you can regain some kind of functionality in the event of total catastrophic failure.
6 Set your expectations low, and be prepared to revise your success criteria downwards as you proceed.
7 Be happy to have survived the experience. Don't examine the finished result too closely. Good enough will do.