Tag Archives: bedroom

Friday 10th January 2014 – MAKE THE MOST …

… of this photo for you may never see the like of it again.

I spent the morning cleaning out an area of the floor and I’ve put two old pallets against the old chimney and stacked the bags of cement and plaster on there to keep them off the ground. So now I can start to move things around.

But right in the centre where you can see the steps, the big black mortar-mixing bucket and the empty space, that was where there was a huge mound of rubble, stones, old insulation, all kinds of rubbish and it’s that which I’ve been emptying this week.

There’s still a huge pile of junk to be moved and I was planning on moving it this afternoo except that I had a little interruption. Terry rang to ask me if I was still interested in going to Montlucon. Do bears have picnics in the woods?

We stopped off at the LIDL by the river where they had a couple more of those LED light bulbs and then we went to Brico Depot. Terry bought his huge rainwater-harvesting tank and I took advantage of the 3m40 length of the inside of his van to buy another 20 shuttering planks. Like I’ve said before, they make excellent shelves and I’m in shelf-making mode right now.

A few other bits and pieces too, but the highlight definitely has to be some more 12-volt LED bulbs. 4-watt this time – even brighter, and €5:99 this time – not for one but for two. so I bought 5 packets of those and they will light up the barn a treat, I reckon. All I need to do is to invent a light to house them, and I have a cunning plan …

So by the time I was back home and had a coffee, it wasn’t worth starting work again for the last half-hour or so. But I had half a day off on Thursday morning and half a day off Friday afternoon so what I reckon is that tomorrow I should put in a few hours work in the living room again and crack on there.

There’s a reason for that. The long-range weather forecast reckons that by the end of next week this Indian Summer will be over and we’ll be in the depths of winter again. If I have an empty room on the ground floor I can move my workroom down from the bedroom. And when that’s empty I can crack on in there. That will keep me out of mischief in the cold weather and if I can break the back of that and finish the wardrobes in there I’ll have space to put my clothes and spare bedding.

And then I can dismantle the two wardrobes in here, and won’t that give me much more space?

I won’t know myself at this rate, will I?

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Friday 8th November 2013 – GUESS WHO …

… spilt his mushroom and lentil curry all over the floor of the verandah this evening? And that was a shame because it was even nicer than on the two previous nights. Ahh well.

Anyway, this morning I had another one of these lie-ins – I’m taking it easy until Monday when I’ll be starting work in Earnest – and after breakfast I carried on with the tidying up. Another two sacks of rubbish have been filled and I’ve also been sorting out a huge pile of papers that have now been filed away correctly and I’ve collected together a pile of stuff that needs to be taken outside into the barn.

I’ve made a few useful finds too, not the least of which being the business card for the car wash that I used in Montreal in 2012 and was trying desperately to find a few weeks ago when I was there. I’ve added the address to the list in the Canadian notebook

Strangely enough though, despite all of the work, you can’t see much difference – in fact, the place looks even more untidy than it did before. Even worse, places that were comparatively tidy, such as the what will be the bedroom, are now starting to look cluttered. I’m not quite sure how that is possible but then again anything is possible when I am trying to tidy up.

This afternoon it was far too wet to go to work outside and so in a rare departure from normality I started to tidy up a few boxes on the ground floor. They had been in the way for over 2 years. Curiously (or maybe not), a lot of the stuff went straight into the bin. I can’t think what possessed me to bring it back here from Brussels when I sold Expo. Pressure of time, I suppose. But now I can actually move around much easier on the ground floor and if I spend another hour down there sometime, I might even have free passage all around the place. You never know.

I’ve also tidied up around the stairs and the landing so there’s even a free run up to my attic without stepping on anything. It’s all looking terribly impressive around here now, except of course in the attic 🙁

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Saturday 20th July 2013 – I HAD A DAY OFF TODAY

Not like me, a day off on a Saturday, but there is method in my madness.

I’m leaving here to go back to Brussels on Monday evening and as we are radioing all day that day, it would have meant that I would have had to load up Caliburn and clean up around here on Saturday.

And on Sunday, my day off, I would have been messing up the place and looking for stuff that I’d already packed away.

Didn’t seem logical to me, hence the decision to have a day off today and do the work tomorrow.

Mind you, the photographer guy came round this morning and took my pic, and instead of having taken against my house (which, quite frankly, given the weeds around here, would have been a silly thing to do) I had it taken against Caliburn.

Let Caliburn share in some of the limelight.

But it was scorching this morning, really hot. And I soon put a stop to that. After going down to the Intermarché at Pionsat for some bread at lunchtime (I’m not shopping as I’m not going to be here) I cleaned out the solar shower and refilled it.

Of course, that was when the weather changed and we had heavy clouds for the rest of the day.

Cécile skyped me for a chat and I took advantage of having a notebook computer with built-in webcam and gave her a guided tour of the new shower room and the tidy bedroom.

I could make a habit of this – anyone else like the guided tour?

So really, that is that.

Tomorrow I’ll still have my lie-in but then I’ll be working. I need to tidy out Caliburn, collect all of the stuff that I’m taking to Brussels, and then have a good tidy up and clean-up around here.

And if the weather holds up, I might even have a solar shower.

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Friday 19th July 2013 – I HAD A QUIET …

… day today.

And although it might not look at first glance that I’ve done much, first thing that I did was to deal with a huge amount of correspondence.

I’ve done most of it (still a few bits and pieces left), especially the important stuff, and I feel rather better about it now.

Amongst the piles of mail was one from Trixi. The house that she was buying has … errr … fallen through and so now she’s hot-foot after another one. That’s in the same neck of the woods as where Nina lives and they’ll get on like a house on fire.

This project of a woodburning stove with back boiler, and solar tubes for hot water in the summer, exactly like what I’ll be doing here, is still on though and so my usual late-autumn voyage to the UK might have a purpose just for a change.

It was nice to see her last year when I was in the UK – doesn’t Facebook have a lot to answer for?

Apart from the post, I finished up tidying up in the bedroom.

All of the plasterboard is now flat on the floor where it’s supposed to be, the rest of the floor is comparatively empty, and I have also fitted a work bench.

It even has power – mains AND 12 volt. Luxury indeed! You won’t recognise it in there.

That took me until 19:20 – yes, POETS DAY indeed – but I would have finished earlier except that I had a mid-afternoon interruption.

It seems that there’s a project to photograph everyone in the village (all 280 of us) and they wanted to know when it might be convenient. So tomorrow at 11:00 it is. I shall have to smarten myself up.

In other news, the city of Detroit has gone bust. That’ll teach the Septics to laugh when an EU country goes bust.

But, interestingly, when an EU country goes bust, the other members rally round to help the country out. I haven’t seen a single offer of assistance from any other American city for Detroit. Serve them right.

But Detroit is a depressing place.

In the 1950s it had almost 2,000,000 people. Now it’s down to just 660,00 and consequently huge areas of the city are abandoned, derelict and decaying.

I was there in early October 2010 on my way to the Trans-Labrador Highway and the place looked appalling.

They have serious trouble in that city, that’s for sure, with the dereliction, decay, murder and violent crime, and having no money to pay for support isn’t going to help them.

I’ve seen some poor neighbourhoods on my travels but Detroit beats them all.

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Thursday 18th July 2013 – MYSTERY SOLVED

It wasn’t the old abandoned house that fell down the other night. I managed to have a wander around there to see, and although I walked past it twice without seeing it, because it was so covered in ivy and weeds and so on, it’s still there, or, rather, what’s left of it is,

But I know what it was that made that noise.

I managed to make my way down to the compost bin today (high time I emptied the composting toilet – it certainly needed it) and I’ll tell you what – a cordless Ryobi Plus One hedge trimmer makes a magnificent strimmer for dealing with tall grass and weeds and the like – it’s a long time since I’ve been as impressed as this.

But back to the plot

There are piles of dead wood and twigs and branches covering the bottom end of my garden and there, in the next field where Lieneke had a huge old tree of some description, well she doesn’t have it now.

There’s about two metres of stump and then there’s absolute carnage. I’m not surprised that it heaved me out of bed.

As for the shower room, well, it’s all finished as far as I can go until I buy the tiles.

And it was finished at lunchtime too (mind you, it was 14:45 when I stopped).

The good news is that the sink is not 50cms at all but just 43cms. That means that I can have a 45cm worktop instead of a 52cm one and that will give me much more room.

I have to admit that, in all honesty, my shower room is not going to be the place to be for anyone suffering from claustrophobia.

But there will be plenty of shelving and even a very small 20cm deep linen cupboard.

But seeing as I had finished by 14:45, how come I didn’t knock off until 19:45 then?

The answer to all of that is that, as I explained just now, I fought my way down to the compost bin, and that wasn’t the work of 5 minutes either as you can imagine.

And once I had finished attacking the vegetation, I emptied, cleaned and recharged the composting toilet. And it needed it too, as I have said.

After that, changing the habits of a lifetime, I attacked the the room which will be the bedroom and which I’ve been using as a workroom.

A pile of wood went straight out of the window for a start, and then I started to sweep up and tidy up. 3 large bin bags of rubbish and a bin full of sawdust for the toilet, and it’s not finished yet.

But it’s amazing the space that you can make if you put your mind to it.

I’m going to have a serious go tomorrow and see if I can’t make enough space to lie flat all of the sheets of plasterboard instead of having them propped up against a wall bowing away to themselves alarmingly.

They ought to be lain flat but I’ve never really had the space to do it.

Tons of tools recovered, as well as tons of nails and screws, and I bet that there will be others recovered tomorrow. But I’m not going to do too much – I have a pile of correspondence to deal with and some of that is urgent.

I felt like cooking tonight too, and ended up with a gorgeous meal – potatoes, carrots, cauliflower in a cheese sauce and a veggie burger. Absolutely marvellous.

Went down a treat with the ice cream sorbet that I bought for myself as a treat for finishing the shower room.

And we’ve had a storm tonight. First rain since July the … errr … 2nd? And we needed it too as the water situation was getting desperate.

I’m glad that I cleaned out the filters the other day.

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Tuesday 2nd July 2013 – *@ç#%§µ ¤£&€ù+§ cheap flaming useless tools!!!

That’s the arbour off the core drill kit that I bought (and spent a lot of money on) 18 months or so ago. The drill end is totally burnt out.

What’s been happening here is that the arbour has not been a precise fit in the chuck of the SDS drill. With the 4 hours of constant pounding that it received yesterday, the percussion effect of the play slowly but surely enlarged the groove in the arbour until it burnt through.

Mind you, as I said yesterday, the impressive thing about this is that everything else – the inverter, the batteries, the wiring, even the LIDL drill, stood up to everything that I could throw at it.

I expected loads of other things to burn out before the arbour would give way.

And it took me hours to dismantle the SDS drill too before I could extract the arbour, and I can tell you absolutely everything about how an SDS drill works now because I’ve seen it first-hand.

Anyway, once I’d freed the arbour I cleaned and greased everything and then reassembled it.

I’m not sure how the automotive circlip will stand up to the pounding but then that would be hammered to death in the con-rods and pistons anyway with much more force than an SDS drill so it should be okay.

Took hours, as I said, and it didn’t make any difference to my work programme because I couldn’t have drilled anything anyway.

Look at the rain cascading off the verandah roof. We had the most amazing tropical thunderstorm, as you can see.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen rain like we had this afternoon although believe me, we have had some here for sure in the past as you know.

Not much good for working in but impressive all the same. And for a while there was no solar energy getting through at all. No chance of doing any drilling today of course, but there is still plenty of work to be going in with.

Later on in the afternoon I did manage to get into the shower room. I started cutting and shaping the horizontal supports for the stud wall between the shower room and the bedroom.

I cut and shaped four of them before I ran out of demi-chevron (and I wasn’t going outside for another one in that weather) and I managed to screw one of them in place before the batteries in the Ryobi Plus One drill and screwdriver went flat.

It just wasnt my day at all.

Mind you, it was 19:40 when I finished off so I suppose it was time enough. But I need to get cracking tomorrow.

I’m wasting far too much time and I don’t have too much to spare.

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Thursday 8th November 2012 – I’M BACK!

And I bet that you didn’t know that I’ve even been away.

You may remember that a couple of weeks ago a small group of us went round to Nan’s for some kind of soirée – well tonight, we all went round to chez Gilles.

6 of us there were – Nan, Cécile, Zoë, Gilles, Yours Truly, and Isabel. We wined and dined and then played a board game.

It’s quite rare this – me socialising, isn’t it? But I think that I really ought to get out more, and that’s an opinion which everyone else shares.

This morning I didn’t have my usual go on the website.

In a change to the advertised programme, straight after breakfast I attacked the shelf unit and varnished it all. This would give it much more time to dry, of course.

And then I had a problem.

When I went to take off the lid of the varnish tin, I discovered that it had rusted on and so I had to chisel it off. And what I had to do to it to make it come off meant that it was clearly in no fit state to go back on afterwards.

It was a large tin – and expensive too – and so I had to find a few more paint tins, throw away the content, clean out the tins and pour the varnish into that.

Such is life.

Once the varnish had dried I fitted it all into the cupboard – not without having to do a few little alterations, it has to be said, butnow it fits beautifully – exactly as it should.

7 shelves there are, and soon there will be 8.

The metal shelf unit that I had brought upstairs and put in the shower room to store some of the bits and pieces that were loitering around – what was on there didn’t even take up one shelf on the new unit.

Yes, it’s a monster and quite right too.

Actually I’m impressed – it goes quite well in there and fits the little cupboard quite nicely.

And it’s amazing – with that I’ve already managed to put on there, there’s already so much more room to move around in the bedroom and work

When I’m organised – whenever that might be – and the house is well-advanced, there will be tons of room in there to store all kinds of stuff – you can’t have too much storage room.

Tomorrow I’ll finish off rounding things up and stacking them on the shelves. and once it’s all done I might even have enough room to start cutting plasterboard again.

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Tuesday 19th June 2012 – WE’RE BACK …

… in winter again§

Yes, folks. it’s been raining for most of the day. And quite heavily too at times. To such an extent that sod the shelving! I’m going to build myself an ark!

But not so heavy that I couldn’t nip down the garden and see what was happening in the vegetable plots.

And here’s a complete surprise.

If you look very closely at this photo you will see a pile of light green shoots rearing their ugly heads – or rather their very pretty heads – through the soil.

Yes indeed, the Indian corn that I had brought back from Canada and for which I paid just 33 cents for a packet, has burst into life in a major way and this is so impressive.

I planted them very closely together thinking that I would be lucky to have half a dozen but it seems that almost all of them have come to life. This is so impressive.

Even more bizarrely, the bean plants that grew this year, all … errr … four of them, all of which looked a short while ago like they would be struggling to survive, have burst into life as well.

They seem to be throwing tentacles everywhere too. Not has-beans by any means!

In fact later this morning after I had finished on the laptop, I went to gather some wood to make a climbing frame for them, but I was beaten back by the rain. That will have to wait for another day

After lunch, seeing as it wasn’t possible to work outside, I mixed a pile of polyfilla and sealed all of the joints and screws on the plasterboard walls of my little cupboard. I want to crack on with that.

The plan is next to sand it all down again, add another layer of polyfilla, sand that down, paint the walls with some of that cheap pinky-orange indoor crepi stuff that I bought ages ago, lay the flooring, and then build some shelves in there.

That will give me a place to put everything and hopefully tidy up a pile of stuff out of the way so that I can continue in the bedroom and the shower room.

I hadn’t finished either.

You may remember that last summer I cut down a pile of herbs and hung them up to dry in the attic, where they have been simmering away for the last 10 or 11 months.

Today I decided to pot them all.

The chives didn’t work. That was just like dry grass, but the mint, lemon balm, tarragon, rosemary and tansy worked fine and now they are all in jars.

The lemon balm smells gorgeous, it really does. I just wish I knew what to do with it now Maybe sprinkle some of it on a salad – I dunno.

Tomorrow afternoon I’m going to Rosemary’s. She needs help tidying out her barn and seeing as my house door will be living there for a while it seemed only fair enough that I should help her make the space.

In exchange she’s offered to come round for an afternoon next week and help me weed my garden.

That should be fun. I often lack motivation when I’m on my own. Two of us doing it should accelerate things quite nicely.

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Thursday 1st March 2012 I’M GOING …

… to have an early night in a couple of minutes. All of this paperwork in the morning is wearing me out

But still, it’s nice to be up early (well, early for me, anyway) and spend the morning with a pot of coffee.

Ohh what luxury!

But once the paperwork period was over, I excelled myself by doing a little tidying up in the bedroom where I’ve been working. I can actually see some floor now, and that’s real progress.

I’ve also been tidying up a little in the barn, and outside I’ve fought my way further down the garden and hacked out a load of brambles.

What I’ll be doing tomorrow afternoon if it stays nice (and today was easily the nicest day of the year with over 120 amp-hours on one of the solar banks) will be to have a garden fire and burn a load of dead vegetation, and then move one of the compost bins to its final position.

Won’t that be a cue for a torrential rainstorm?

The hour-meters for the solar banks, those that I installed yesterday, are giving me the results that I expected, but the hour-meter on the overcharge is not quite so good.

It seems that there’s some current seeping through the overcharge controller once the voltage passes 13.4 volts. Not much – a question of a couple of milli-amps or so – but it’s enough to start the hourmeter working.

These things are so sensitive that this one is feeding off the current that is seeping. The old car clock that I was using before couldn’t detect that current, and so tHe figures are going to be a little distorted as from now on

Another thing that I’ve been doing, or at least, trying to do, is to continue to drill this 48mm hole through the wall between the lean-to and the house in order to pass some electrical cables through.

But for some reason, the first 25cms went through without any real effort whatsover but ever since then it’s been making no impression at all, and I’m not halfway yet. Today with an hour or so, I reckon that I made almost one centimetre.

There’s definitely something not quite right about this

Thursday 23rd February 2012 – HAVING FINALLY …

… broken the back of my presentation, I can get on and do other things.

This morning I cut up another pile of wood for in here, and doesn’t the lean-to start to look empty now, especially as I discovered that a major proportion of the heap in the middle is actually bricks and stone from when the wall collapsed all those years ago.

Moving some of that stuff out has made quite a difference, that’s for sure.

It’s going to be a while though before I can finish in there though – a term of years is not unlikely. The more wood I cut up, the more that I seem to find.

I also had a good look at the window in the bedroom. Having given the matter considerable thought, I now reckon that I know how I’m going to do the surround. And the next chance that I have to work in there, I’ll be making a start.

But tomorrow I’ll be printing off my notes because the presentation is at 20:00 tomorrow evening. So just you watch the printer break down or run out of ink

But assuming that we do go ahead, everyone is invited!

20:00 at the village hall in Virlet

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Friday 17th February 2012 – I FINISHED THE CEILING …

… just before lunchtime. And I’m really impressed with how it has turned out, even if it did take ages to do.

And there’s 60mm of insulation underneath that tongue-and-grooving, and that is what is probably helping to keep my little attic warm. I remember just how cold it was in here when I first moved in and there wasn’t any insulation at all.

But it was colder in here this morning too – a mere 14.4°C. Positively arctic, I mused to myself. And that’s a difference too from 9°C from the other day, although the difference between 0.3°C outside last night (first 24-hour period for ages that it didn’t get below freezing) last night and -16°C the other night is even more spectacular.

So after lunch I cleaned the pathways outside now that everywhere is warming up. I can walk about the place without sliding over now.

And then it was back into the bedroom. All the joints in the plasterboard on the wall by the window are now sealed and filled, and I’ve almost finished sealing in the window.

I started off using mastic for that but then I remembered that Terry gave me a load of mastic-type glue that he didn’t think too much of, and so I used a pile of that.

That has gone in from the inside, but I’ll buy some proper stuff tomorrow to do the outside.

Once the window is properly sealed in, I can do the window= framing in the bedroom. The two sides and the top will (of course) be in tongue-and-grooving and I’ve some pine board that will do for the windowsill.

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Thursday 16th February 2012 – WHEN I WOKE UP THIS MORNING …

… der der der der der …

but doesn’t that have all the makings of a really good blues song?

However, to coin a phrase, since I’ve been on the Prozac I haven’t had the blues for years.

Anyway, when I woke up this morning the temperature in here was a massive 15.4°C. And it’s been a long time since it’s been that warm in here without a fire. It just goes to show, firstly, how much things have warmed up outside, and secondly, the benefits of heaping a pile of scrap wood on the fire just as you go to sleep

It was warm outside as well – all of 2°C – and it’s been a long time since it’s been that warm as well. 4mm of rain we had through the night and while it hasn’t washed away the snow, it’s now a messy sticky quagmire outside.

First job was to look at this solar spotlight thing that I bought a few weeks ago and which didn’t want to work. Once I’d worked out how to dismantle … “dispersontle” – ed … it, the rest was easy.

The battery wasn’t fitted correctly. It was only a 600mAh battery though, and so I charged up a spare 2500mAh battery and fitted that.

This evening it lit up at last. It’s not very bright but from where I’ve installed it, it lights up the pathway from where I park Caliburn down to the side of the house. And that was what I wanted it to do.

Next job was to fix the anemometer that didn’t want to record its data. A flat battery (that’s the third it’s had since I bought it in the autumn!) and a badly-seated mounting sorted that out, but each time the battery is relmoved, you need to recalibrate the computer, and I can see that being a pain with three batteries in five months

The rest of the day, in between the phone calls, I spent on the roof of the bedroom. I cracked on as well and I reckon that there’s about 3 hours’ work to do there.

Once that’s done, I need to deal with the sealing of the joints in the plasterboard – and now I have the water to do that. I also have to seal the window so that I can build up around it.

Tonight I had a gorgeous tea. Baked potatoes of course, but I put a baking tray in there, lightly oiled, and cut up an onion and some garlic to fry on it. Then, a small tin of mushrooms and a ladle of tinned vegetables. All finished off by some curry and gravy powder into the resultant liquid. It really was nice.

But a downside of this warm weather is that with having to heat up the oven sufficiently to cook the food, the temperature soared to an astonishing 24°C. It’s now 5 hours since I last put any fuel on the fire, I’m sitting here in shirt sleeves (not even a pullover) and it’s still over 20°C.

And in other news, I was chatting on the phone to this Canadian guy whom I’m working with. We were talking about fires and I was saying that I was looking for a woodstove that has an oven and also a water boiler, to fit in the cabin that I’m going to build on my plot of land in Canada.

“Ohh – I have an old one of those that I took out of here a few years ago. It’s in my shed – I’ll sort it out for you”

Blimey!

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Wednesday 15th February 2012 – THIS WATER ISSUE …

… might have solved itself.

And for several different reasons too.

f you see that icicle in the photo here that I took a week or so ago (the weather was nothing like that today of course) it started to melt today. And so I simply stuck a bucket underneath it.

Meantime, I took one of those plastic drinks bottles, the type with a very long pointed neck, and cut the bottom off. Then I stuffed a load of fine fibreglass mesh up the neck.

Each time a bucket was filled, I poured it through my home-made filter into one of these proprietary jug filters and let it filter through there, and then I decanted it into my water container.

I managed to capture about 40 litres over the course of the afternoon and that’s eased the situation considerably.

However like most things, solutions don’t come on their own. Like London buses, after you’ve been waiting for hours, three turn up all at once.

And so it is with this. By the end of the afternoon the water butt had started to unfreeze itself.

Not that that’s a quick solution, because I looked inside the rear tank and that’s a frozen mass of ice, but I still managed 5 litres out of there as well.

And the third solution? Well, after all the freezing weather that we’ve had just recently, it’s p155ing down outside. All the snow will be gone by tomorrow if it carries on like this, and then we will be in the floods again. Then we’ll be having a different kind of water problem.

Despite a constant stream of interruptions today, I’ve now started on the final row of the tongue-and-grooving in the bedroom.

That involved finishing off the previous row, moving piles of stuff around the room, and then mixing some polyfilla to fill in the joins between the wood and the insulation that is already in the ceiling.

Maybe if I have a decent day tomorrow I can crack on with this. It would be nice to have it finished for the weekend.

One thing that has helped is that this row is by far the narrowest of them. When I’ve been doing the other rows and cutting down lengths of tongue-and-grooving, I’ve always been left with leftover bits that wouldn’t fit anywhere.

I’ve been labelling them with the size, and these are all fitting into the row that I’m doing now. This will save me a load of time cutting up full-size lengths.

For tea tonight I had ratatouille, green beans and baked potatoes. This time the potatoes were done properly and it was one of the nicest meals I’ve had for ages. It was definitely a good plan to move the kitchen up here for the duration.

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Monday 13th February 2012 – I HAD MY FIRST …

… culinary disaster tonight – almost inevitable that there would be one sooner or later.

Returning home after the Anglo-French group meeting (hardly a group meeting, there was just me, myself and I there) it was a wicked 6.4°C in my little room. That called for some desperate measures.

I’d finished off the beans and chips last night and so that meant pizza this evening. And I soon had a roaring blaze going – one that had the room up to 18°C in under an hour.

Unfortunately it was rather too roaring and it burnt the base of the pizza and of the garlic bread. I’ve never ever had that before – it just goes to show you what you can do when you really try. Especially as the rice pudding was cooked to perfection, and that’s a first as well

But this morning, in the cold and damp overcast weather I had another marathon woodcutting session in the lean-to. I’m cutting up the wood that is in there. It’s perfectly dry and been that way for years hence I can burn it up here straight away without having to leave it standing for a year or so.

That explains the roaring inferno that I had this evening.

Apart from that, I’ve been working on the ceiling of the bedroom again. It’s taking ages to do, but it won’t half look nice when it’s finished.

Tonight it didn’t go cold again. It just stayed hovering around the -3°C mark.

And at 18:00 the heavens opened and we had about a ton and a half of snow dropped on us.

It’s still snowing now in fact. Haven’t times changed?

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Friday 10th February 2012 – THIS WEATHER IS STARTING …

… to get on my wick a little bit.

Yes. Deep-frozen veg and deep-frozen chili beans for tea tonight.

No big deal, you might think, but these were deep-frozen vegetables and beans from out of tins. And when your tins of food are freezing then you know that you really do have problems.

Not much water today either. It’s becoming harder and harder to melt the solid ice that is in the water butts.

We are at the stage where I’m beginning to think that the next time we have a really decent day’s solar energy, I’ll take the halogen heater outside and use that to melt the ice.

So I spent a major part of the day in the lean-to. I’ve stacked some of the wood so much better, moved some bricks outside, moved some stones upstairs, shovelled some bits and pieces out of the way, made up three large containers of wood for up here, and that’s given me plenty of space to move stuff from out of the house.

But you’ll be amazed (or maybe you won’t) at just how quickly the space is filled up, and things don’t look all that much different in the house either, which is really rather sad.

Anyway, there’s tons of old waste paper and old waste cardboard so if I have a huge bonfire once the weather improves (whenever that might be) it’ll make the place look emptier (I hope).

I’ve also done a bit more on the ceiling.

I was going to have a really good crack at it but Rosemary rang up and we had a big long chat instead. It’s her first winter living here, and she needs encouragement. Luckily she decided on moving here more-or-less full-time to sell her old rear-wheel drive saloon and buy a 4×4. She’ll certainly benefit from that decision.

Confronted with the deep-frozen tinned food, I’m now moving more and more stuff up here. The washing-up stuff is now in the attic (the sink in the verandah has been frozen up for over a week anyway) and so all of the crockery, cutlery and saucepans will be staying up here.

It’s pointless taking them all downstairs to wash, leaving them there overnight and then bringing them back up here the following evening. It’s the coldest winter for decades, apparently, and no-one expected it to go on for as long as this.

Consecutive minuses in double figures for well over a week – something that’s unheard-of. But I have done the roof in the lean-to and I have a really good wood stove, so who cares?

-4

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Tag Archives: bedroom

Friday 10th January 2014 – MAKE THE MOST …

Friday 8th November 2013 – GUESS WHO …

Saturday 20th July 2013 – I HAD A DAY OFF TODAY

Friday 19th July 2013 – I HAD A QUIET …

Thursday 18th July 2013 – MYSTERY SOLVED

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 – *@ç#%§µ ¤£&€ù+§ cheap flaming useless tools!!!

Thursday 8th November 2012 – I’M BACK!

Tuesday 19th June 2012 – WE’RE BACK …

Thursday 1st March 2012 I’M GOING …

Thursday 23rd February 2012 – HAVING FINALLY …

Friday 17th February 2012 – I FINISHED THE CEILING …

Thursday 16th February 2012 – WHEN I WOKE UP THIS MORNING …

Wednesday 15th February 2012 – THIS WATER ISSUE …

Monday 13th February 2012 – I HAD MY FIRST …

Friday 10th February 2012 – THIS WEATHER IS STARTING …

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