World of more

I made cider.  Lots of cider.  With a few bushels from our own apple trees generously augmented by Jonesy I’ve made about 70 litres of the stuff.  Bottles now fill the wine racks in the garage. It turns out that it’s remarkably simple, and as Jones himself said, you can’t really fuck it up.  Here’s how to make cider: Pick apples Mash ‘em up a bit Squash ‘em a lot Put some yeast in Leave for a bit Bottle Drink And now I have so much free and delicious booze that it is merely a question of will and desire as to when and whether I have a glass.  Time will tell how that particular equation resolves.

Seb has submitted  our plans  to the might of the council for approval.  The presence of a planning notice on our front gate post rather wrong-footed us, as we hadn’t told the neighbours to expect it.  One or two fairly hasty visits to slightly worried looking neighbours later and all seems smoothed over (although comments are still open so who knows what will come).  And who can blame them, the new people in the village suddenly submitting a planning application, which could have been anything from adding an unsightly extension to knocking it all down and starting again. In fact though, we’re making such minor changes to the house’s appearance that the only reason we need to get planning permission is because the insulation we are adding will increase the apparent size of the house by approx 10cm on three walls, which means that on balance the council would like our planning fees. As that is what we have decided, despite my imagining all summer a completely different ...

Sometime around April, in a fit of excitement and enthusiasm, I moved stuff out of what will be the media room (to be filled with consoles and gadgets) in preparation for getting it looking good.  Or more realistically getting it looking like it has been decorated in the last twenty years, not much we can do just yet about the two types of carpet that decorate the floor. But, just as I was about to start sugar-soaping the walls and filling the manifold cracks and holes, spring hit the garden like a dose of growth hormones and I was forced to spend what seems to have been the entire summer outside nervously grappling powertools and hateful brambles.  The media room has languished, bare and unused apart from Ula’s frequent flings onto the beanbag. During that period it has loomed large in my guilty conscience, and as a result the apparent work has grown ever bigger as I procrastinate or forget to get the tools and just get on with it. Well, no more.  Islay forced me to pick up bucke...

With an ever-increasing pile of hedge trimmings, pruned roses and lopped branches, I thought it time to take a match and lay waste to the waste. Success.  I singed my hair, got the neighbour’s fence smoking (but not actually burning) and reduced all the clippings to a circle of pleasing white ash.  And I managed to disappear the two bookcases we dragged out of the media room some months ago.

Seb, our architect, has spoken. (As an aside, I still cannot really grasp who I have become.  My mental self-image struggles to adopt to me being someone who talks about having an architect, or gardener, or tennis court.  It seems like it must be happening to someone else and I’m just along for the ride.  There’s a Talking Heads song in there somewhere). So anyway, Seb has spoken and suggested external insulation instead of internal insulation for the ground and first floors.  Which is good.  I suspect it might be slightly cheaper (thus justifying the cost of an architect), will reduce internal disruption and give us an excuse to redecorate the outside of the house. And combined with that guidance and his more detailed spec for the rest of the insulation, we’re on the finishing straight for this stage of work.  All (all!  Ha!) that we need to do now is commission the builder and get on it.  The list will now be: the insulation changing the boiler changing the lights in...

Next door have a lovely lawn.  Really lovely.  I didn’t think I was much of a lawn man, but it looks simply sumptuous.  Ours does not.  We have what’s nominally known as the tennis court - it’s the right size and when we moved in the net was erected.  There’s even a line marking machine in the shed.  But Wimbledon it is not.  It slopes and bumps, and thistles threaten an entire service box in the far corner. Turns out that next door’s secret is they have a gardener.  He turns up once a week and makes it lovely.  We spoke to him the week we moved in, and he’s a nice chap and went to school with Islay’s sister.  Anyway, we asked him to come and give us some advice and a quote for doing some hardcore pruning work to help us get the trees.  His patter is obviously quite good, because he persuaded Islay that he should come and work for a few hours each week up until Christmas to do all the pruning and lopping and everything over an extended period. S...

So the first phase of our building work is now complete.  And relatively painless it was too.  It included: comprehensively rebuilt dormers, complete with some insulation and nicely fitting lead work the top three courses of the chimney have been replaced, as have some rotting bricks, a pot has been placed on top and the lead work has been re done the decaying satellite dish and unused analogue aerial have been removed the roof above the corner of the lounge has been refilled numerous slipped tiles have been replaced new drainage has been dug new manhole covers have been set and the appalling piece of gutter routing that was cut through the render on the corner of the house to expose part of the timber frame to the elements has been redone and re-rendered. So the house is much more weather-tight than it was before. Now on to the next phase.  What we’re planning is to rip out all the walls in the old bit of the house to stuff insulation into the space.  At the same time we’ll...

Warning heavy plant. The cherry picker lurks outside the front door.

After a summer of faffing we eventually commissioned Neville Francis to do the work on the roof that we got a quote for about five months ago. So we’ve two builders (I’ve not met them, but Islay speaks highly of them) who are conducting various roof improvements.  The major job was to replace the lead work on the dormers, and judging from the incredibly rotten wood shards littering the lawn, not a moment too soon.  They’ve extended their work to pretty much rebuilding the dormers.  As I write the lead work is done and the windows await the render. They’ve also done some nice neat leadwork above the porch, and coming up this week (weather permitting) they’ll be repairing slipped tiles, replacing the top courses on the chimney and adding some chimney pots. It’s surprising how much the house is improved simply by tidying up the dormer windows, and I’m convinced that the inside of the dormer is less damp than it was before.  It’s also satisfyi...

Where did the summer go?  Two places I think.  First up a lot of mowing and hacking as I got to grips with how to at least keep the place presentable. And second, with patchy attempts to get someone to provide us with a credible quote for a ground source heat pump.  We hadn’t planned to look into a heat pump as a new heat source for the house, and had budgeted and expected to simply replace the existing oil-fired boiler with another (much more efficient) one. But I got my head turned by a discussion with a plumber back in March and then spent a few days looking at various forums and websites.  The result of the research was deciding more serious investigation would be good.  In theory, what’s not to like: cheaper heating, eco-credentials, no more dependence on oil and the lure of a government tariff sometime next year. Yet, despite all the press you can uncover about such heat pumps, based on the people we spoke to it seems like cutting edge tech that hasn’t got the de...

Has progress slowed, or time sped up, it’s difficult to tell.  All I know is that I’ve not updated this list in a while, but I think we’ve been busy. The frogs laid their spawn, left a couple of dead females at the bottom of the pool and departed.  They might as well have evaporated for all that we saw of their diaspora.  The spawn has hatched and now the pond is full of little tadpoles basking atop water lily pads and nibbling the edges.  However, the continued dry weather is resulting in the pond slowly dropping and drying out.  Rain is needed fairly soon. The good weather has lead to more time in the garden.  Islay has been particularly busy, weeding a good array of flower beds and planting out over half the vegetable patch.  The greenhouse is full of seed trays.  It’s like the good life.  I’ve been mowing.  Until the ride-on mower just decided to stop this last Monday.  I refilled it with petrol and it wouldn’t restart.  It is now a useless lump, ...

A big writhing knot of froggy love. Spring has arrived.

Last night, whilst eating dinner, the security light outside the kitchen tripped on to cast a glare over the back garden.  Nibbling delicately from the bird feeder was a pair of muntjack deer, which explains why the seed in that feeder had dropped so quickly.  Islay is now worried for the vegetables she has (not yet) planted. Since the last update, we’ve had a couple more contractors round, and I’m starting to get my head around what we want. Our friendly local plumber Ian came around for a half hour look-see.  That turned into an hour and a half long discussion with me about options and the like.  He confirmed what we already knew - that the boiler and heat pump was very old - and added some more subjects for discussion.  We’re now hoping to get from him a quote for replacing the current oil boiler with a) a new oil boiler, albeit a much more efficient one, or b) an air source heat pump.  The latter sounds pretty interesting, with an approx £6k cost for the device, we...

The fridge. Kneel before its awe inspiring glory

We always knew Walnut Tree House would be cold and/or expensive to heat.  That much was clear from the EPC we got pre-purchase which suggested it might cost a mind-melting £4k a year in oil and electricity.  Having had to top up the oil tank a mere four weeks after 500 litres went in there, I can now believe it. Ula’s room aside the house is quite warm.  The Aga does a good, if expensive and almost certainly inefficient, job of heating the kitchen, and our room, sandwiched between under eaves storage, lounge and Ula’s room remains plenty warm enough. The main problem is that there is almost no insulation anywhere in the house.  Most of the walls are timber framed with a coat of render on the outside, plasterboard on the inside and only air, fraying electric cables and escaping heat in between.  Add to that a boiler that we believe is older than Islay and you can see why burning fivers to keep warm might be more cost effective than the current arrangements. But, we’ve p...

This blog seems to be little more than a list of works completed to date, but I’m going to keep it up so we’ve some way of looking back and seeing what we’ve accomplished. In that spirit, here’s what’s gone on since last week: We got an Aga engineer out to service the cast iron bad-boy.  According to him the smell of oil is not unusual, it’s just that our valvework is stored in a kitchen cupboard rather than just tucked away around the back.  Other than that it’s in rude health, and that’ll be £90 for the privilege.  Googling after his visit I found out it consumes 40l of oil a week .  A WEEK.  It’s a middle-class lifestyle affectation and, much as Islay’s enjoying it and I quite like its warmth on a cold day, I’m going to start plotting its downfall soon enough. Islay played host to many contractors.  We got two quotes for plastering the media room (£110 and £630.  I think they’ve offered different things).  A quot...

Between three different sets of guests and Islay’s 16 mile marathon training run we weren’t able to fit too much work in this past weekend.  Chief achievement these past days was to rip out the manky and dank smelling cupboard from the family/media room and take it to the tip.  Doing so revealed some musty smelling carpet of an entirely different pattern to the rest of the room and some strange expanses of blown plaster on the back wall - we concluded we’ll have to get a plasterer in to strip some of it back and make good the rest. On the very positive side I finally took delivery of my new projector .  I had intended to clean, fill and paint the appropriate wall of the media room, but with blown plaster and guests I just didn’t.  I was finally allowed to fire up the new toy at 11.30 on Saturday night and despite a filthy yellow wall and masses of keystone correction, I was stunned by the quality of the picture.  TV will never be the same again. Of course by 9am ...

Why bother finishing the plastering when you can just cover it up with chipboard bookshelves?

So we’re in now, the boxes are mostly cleared and most things are unpacked.  And now the fixing up starts.  Here’s what we’ve done in the last ten days: Islay’s done more cleaning than I can comprehend, including attacking limescale with screwdrivers, bleach and a jutting jaw of determination.  The cloakroom taps now gleam where once they, er, didn’t. Islay’s also resealed the en-suite shower cubicle, after four showers in rapid succession left a damp patch spreading across the hall ceiling she hacked it back with (again) a screwdriver and a jutting jaw and neatly resealed it.  The damp patch seems to be getting drier. I spent £80 on rock wool rolls and, together with my dad, tackled insulating the loft above Ula’s room, disposing of a wasp’s nest in the process.  The loft space is now basically full of insulation.  We can’t tell if it’s making much difference as the weather is changing so much.  I’ve still quite a lot of...

Now that we live in the country, I decided to try to sleep last night with the curtains open so that the first light of the day might wake us.  Instead, neither Islay nor I slept well, minds churning with the enormity of the job we have just taken on and every time I woke the blackness outside the window consumed my view. A cup of tea later and things felt a little better, so we started, once my dad had turned up to help with Ula babysitting, to unpack the kitchen. But it took ages.  Just a seemingly non-stop grind of moving boxes around, steadily unpacking them and discarding mountains of wrapping paper, putting items on the side so that Islay could find an appropriate cupboard and then breaking the boxes to lay them flat in the hall. By the end of the day we could see most of the kitchen floor and the pile of boxes in the hallway had grown to knee height. Today’s delightful discovery was a pungent smell of oil from the cupboard next to the Aga, I don’t think that’s n...

Yazz had pretty much cleaned home, Doris, the old house, whatever we’re supposed to call it now top to bottom by the time we pitched up at 8.30.  A brief poke around the empty place, some tears (from Islay) and showing a trepidatious looking Dick around his new home and we were off again. Walnut Tree House was nearly quiet when I arrived, a nervous looking Simon and Sarah finalising the cleaning and leaving of their own childhood home and the claggy fog of a February day.  They left just at Butch, Jon and Julian pitched up and reversed their vans, shouting at each other, into the drive. It was pretty intimidating to walk through the new house in its empty state.  With each room unfurnished the fairly careworn state of the place was abundantly clear - “not so much tired as exhausted” as Betsy commented.  And as the rooms filled up with cardboard boxes, furniture and dirt tracked across the carpet it only became more intimidating. I busied myself erecting furniture so th...

Drizzle and tea.  And a chance to take Ula to the chaos of Church Mice in the morning. I found moving out to be unaccountably stressful, and I didn’t really have to do much.  The burly removal team rolled up on the dot of 9 - Jon, Julian and the correctly named Butch - and even whilst being shown around the house managed to come down the stairs carrying boxes to load on the lorry.  They seemed to work slowly, but the volume of boxes in the house went down and the volume of boxes on the lorry went up in a simple monotonic process.  Yet I fretted.  Worried about whether it would all fit, worried about how much would break, worried about whether they’d finish in time. Islay despatched me to Church Mice to spend two hours with carousing toddlers and friendly mums, which helped calm me.  Then we left them to it, spending the afternoon at Granny’s whilst the guys slowly stacked it into lorries. We had more stuff than anyone predicted.  The abiding image of the day was watchi...

Boxes consume the kitchen

D-day minus four and I’m sitting in the lounge surrounded by bare walls, cardboard boxes and scattered toys.  At then end of this week we’re moving into Walnut Tree House.  We’ll be nearly doubling our living space, more than doubling our mortgage and taking on a list of necessary and desire improvements so long I can’t even begin to think about writing it all down. This is the biggest life change since the last one (Ula, not yet two years old) and somehow the most daunting.  Life here in Doris is comfortable and easy.  I’ve developed a happy routine and Islay and I have have created a lovely, if slightly drafty home. And at Walnut Tree House, who knows what new routines will develop? Like my father, I’m a worrier, so in no particular order, here’s what I’m worried about: There’s so much work to be done, and so much work we’d like to do.  How can we afford to do it, and what will it be like if we can’t I won’t be ab...