Gate-work

Since building the wall at the side of the house the old gate has been barely fit for purpose. As it happens we were wandering around around Snowshill Manor and Gardens a few months ago and spotted this:

Joe was inspired. It was also a good excuse for a trip to our local timbre merchants which is always a dangerous move. They have several rooms full of hardwood planks, oddments and off cuts - unique pieces that are perfect for bespoke woodwork; we always seem to come away with more than we went for.

On this occasion we found some sweet chestnut that is going to look great as a gate, particularly when it weathers in and goes all silvery in colour. We've come up with a design heavily modelled on our National Trust inspiration, though for a single gate rather than a pair: two solid uprights, with three horizontals, and 5 sets of batons filling in the gaps.

Joe's been slowly chiselling away ever since - in odd 5 minutes here and there - though that's not to say that a few power-tools haven't been put to good use where it makes sense. He's now most of the way through the mortise and tenon joints that will hold the main structure together and relishing the challenge of a some proper woodwork to keep him busy.

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Raspberries

I'm fast becoming convinced that my favourite part of our garden is the fruit. I love reaching that time of the year when you get a complete glut of one thing or another. The effort required to sustain them - pruning the trees, or tying up bushes, is minimal compared to the potential rewards.

At the moment this joy is coming from the raspberry canes as we go out every few days and collect another tub-full. Mostly we're just eating them, often with ice-cream. So good. There really is very little to beat soft fruit fresh from outside.

The hens, of course, would heartily agree. They are complete gluttons over all things fruity and always hang around while we're picking in case any manky bits get thrown their direction for them to fight over.

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The Mechanical Doorbell, Part 2: Bash

One of our very first posts on The Urban Cottage was talking about our slightly fantastical doorbell, created from bits and pieces found around the house (follow the link for a reminder). This has been quite a talking point and provides us with much amusement when we open the door to a new visitor to be greeted with "is that your doorbell?! Please can I see it?".

The intention was always to expand this beyond it's initial "ding" to also include a "dong" but a couple of years later we ended up skipping that plan (for now) and instead went straight for "bash".

A very tired cymbal, looking for a new home, has been lined up next to the guitar. A short section of pipe left over from the bathroom is then carefully positioned to catch the marble as it speeds off the end of the original shute and directs it into the cymbal. 9 times out of 10 this then bounces and is caught in an old weaving shuttle.

All in all an excellent addition - not least because the previous incarnation was only just loud enough. If you were in a far corner of the house you were more likely to pick up the sound of a marble hitting the floor than you were the guitar. The cymbal certainly solves that problem!

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Oiling the Floor

One of the biggest projects we undertook while we were "off-air", was a transformation of our living room. I might have mentioned before that when we moved in we painted almost every wall in the place - but did little else, and now we're slowly working our way back through each room giving it a little more time, care and attention.

The living room for us is a place we spend much of our free time. It's somewhere for sitting with a laptop and planning our latest project, making music, doing crafty things and whipping up a blog post, and when all that's done it's also the place to relax and pop on the TV. The design of the house also means that this is the main thoroughfare - the only way of getting from the front door to the kitchen, conservatory and upstairs.

And it was a struggle. The furniture we'd brought with us from our previous house just didn't fit. Well, it fitted physically - but that was about it. The room isn't tiny (though by no means large), yet it felt cramped, crowded and messy. You had to zigzag your way around it all to get through the room, and more than a couple of extra people was a squish. After much debate we decided to go all out in getting this room sorted and that meant a couple of new bits of furniture.

(As we weren't thinking of blogging this we failed to take any "before" shots and as it turns out we've taken hardly any photos in this room over the years. To give you a small idea of what it was like here's the best of the bunch; a christmas photo of our decorated tree sitting in front of the piano, and a shot of us playing a card game on the floor with all the furniture pushed to the edges. Sorry if that's not much help!)

Changing our large three seater for a corner sofa, along with passing on our acoustic piano for a much more compact digital version allowed us to rethink how the room works with startling results. There's now a clear path from one side of the room to the other, space to pack in a few extra friends, and even some clear floor space for laying out that tangle of yarn that needs unpicking. The new piano is a marked improvement on the old one, inspiring much more regular playing even if we do still both have a definite fondness for the mechanics of a traditional instrument. More than anything, the room feels like it has doubled in size despite having almost as much stuff in it and that's all down to the change in layout.

Much much smaller piano, plus a clear path from the front door on the right to the kitchen on the left.
The understairs cupboard is more accessable and a new chair that can be both tucked
into a corner and pulled out into the main seating space.

But all of the above is a complete tangent - I was going to tell you about the floor!

There was one major flaw with the living room when we moved in (in our opinion anyway), and that was the cream carpet. I'm not adverse to using pale coloured carpets in the right place - but the highest traffic room of the house is definitely not that place. It constantly needed hoovering, and even then was never quite clean.  We were also starting to have problems with the chipboard underfloor having rather a lot of bounce to it. It either needed replacing or reinforcing before we found ourselves with a hole in the floor.

Our solution was to install an engineered oak floor, something solid that would wear well over many years as well as taking the pressure off the ageing chipboard. However, as we were fitting the planks into place we noticed that the finish on them was very uneven. There had been foam strips between the planks to stop them being damaged in transit and where the foam had been was much paler than the edges of the planks. After a few months of back and forward with the flooring company they agreed to send us enough of the hard wax oil they had used so that we could refinish the floor.

Uneven colouration can be seen around the edges of the central plank.

And so we found ourselves, just a short while after finishing the decoration of the room, emptying all of the furniture out again so that we could put a fresh layer of oil down. Fortunately, it has been completely worth the effort. The finish is much more even and the wood has a much warmer feel to it.

Transformation complete.

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Veggies, or a lack of...

Do you know what the most successful thing to come out of our veg plot was last year? Raspberries... yes, not even a vegetable! We had courgette plants eaten by slugs, sweetcorn that got to about half height then turned black, and leeks that looked more like spring onions. We also had a very poor germination rate for peas and beans both attempting to start them inside and then planted straight out. Generally not our finest year.

All of that caused us to take a step back and think about what we're working with. When we converted this area of the garden the soil was in a very poor state. We dug in a lot of compost initially and have done so a little more each year, but the reality is that the ground is probably in need of some T.L.C. 

So this year we're planting no vegetables at all. We're leaving the area fallow, though instead of leaving a nice empty space to fill with weeds we've planted green manure. A couple of cycles of that followed by a healthy dose of compost or manure and fingers crossed we'll have a better success rate with whatever we decide to grow next.

While that ticks over we'll be enjoying a regular box of fresh, seasonal vegetables from a local farmer instead, and looking forward to a good harvest of fruit from our various trees. 

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Hidcote Manor Gardens

A couple of weekends ago we took the opportunity of a sunny Saturday to take a trip to Hidcote. Just over an hours drive away, and conveniently National Trust where we have membership, we set out hoping to find ourselves some inspiration for our own garden, along with a good spot for a picnic!

Hidcote was the private garden of Lawrence Johnston who divided the whole area up into a series of rooms, each with it's own identity and character. While the arts and crafts styling wasn't what we wanted to achieve ourselves, we eventually stopped worrying about that and set to looking at how he had attained that unique feel to each space and found that a limited plant range, colour palate and textures seemed to be at least part of the key. On top of that there were a few themes that carried throughout the garden to give it a sense of unity. Brilliant planning on the part of Mr. Johnston.

Careful thought had also been given to the line of sight as you moved through the garden. High hedges and walls obscured your view in most directions, so when you did get a glimpse through you could be sure it was deliberate - a tantalising peek at what was to come next.

It's certainly given us some food for thought as we're in a definite planning stage with our own space. We often think about our garden as distinct areas, each with a different purpose - the veg patch, the chickens run, the pond, the patio, the lawn. The patio is next up for a change, but our trip to Hidcote has also inspired a look at our garden as a whole - thinking about the differences of these areas while considering themes we want to carry through each. Debating how each section works with it's neighbours and maybe planning a few tantalising sight lines of our own...

It proved to be a lovely day out, sunshine, plants and good food. Perfect.

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Wall Building

Where best to start blogging again than a project that's been going for almost as long as The Urban Cottage, and was finished just last week. We have a lot of projects around here that are half finished. Some tucked neatly away in a corner waiting for the right moment while some are deliberately left where we can't ignore them until they've been there long enough that that's exactly what we do. Some take forever in the planning stage, and some linger endlessly in the finishing stages.

This particular project has been all of those and more! Three years ago we were offered a large quantity of stone that we decided was just the thing for replacing a hedge we weren't particularly fond of. We sat it in an unused corner of the drive "temporarily". It's also been three years since we bought a set of lavender plugs to go in a new flower bed we would build with the stone and gave them a temporary home.

Skip on a bit to last summer when we moved all the stone onto our patio, sorted by size and shape. It took over the area somewhat! Then the old hedge came out thanks to brute force on Joe's part, and it was time to start being constructive. By the end of the summer we'd successfully put in the two smaller walls that now form flower beds alongside the drive, and had made a start on the main wall that will divide the front garden from the back. Progress at last.

Once more the project lay dormant, this time for a just a few months. Wind, rain and generally winter got in the way.

And then it was spring again. Looking at what to do next we decided it was more important to get the plants in place and finish the construction around them, than leave them in their rather overgrown temporary home any longer. The beds got a good filling of muck and grit and the lavender finally got space to breath. We also popped in quite a few allium bulbs that had been in the conservatory all winter and were starting to sprout. Both are showing excellent signs of new growth already which is very pleasing.

The last few weekends have been just right for a final push. Joe's steamed ahead and I think we can now say that is is done. All in all this has definitely been a successful transformation.

There's so much more to do in this area of the garden and we're both really excited by the blank canvas that this wall has given us. The phrase "courtyard garden" has been bandied about, sometimes accompanied by "Mediterranean"; we'll have to see where our ideas take us with this one.

Before:

After:

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Done, finished, complete!

Yes, it can only be the bathroom!

While we knew we were going to be squeezing a lot of this work in around the rest of life, I don't think either of us predicted it would take three and a half months! To be fair, most of the last month has been dealing with the things that didn't work first time. Finally though, we can say that it is finished. Finito. Done. Hooray!

First up though, a reminder of the "before" photos:

 

And now it looks like this:

Worktop with countertop sink and plenty of storage

Draining board for lots of bottles

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Weeds or um, harvest?

I was really hoping that this would be a finished bathroom post, but a kerfuffle with the flooring means its still not quite finished - though a lot closer than last weekend. Instead we've been getting on with other things, including returning our conservatory to a dining room rather than a workshop - removing large quantities of dust as we went. Happy days!

Joe recently inherited some demijohn's from a friend who no longer had use for them and has been contemplating thoughts of homebrew ever since.  When he came home from work one day recently to find me tackling the stinging nettles that were threatening to take over part of our veggie patch it all seemed simple... nettle wine!

So he popped the nettles along with some sultanas, sugar and yeast into a brewing bucket and left it to fester on the kitchen side for 9 days the result at the end of which was this...

...which has since sat on the side for another week or so. It has clarified a lot in that time which makes a huge difference to how drinkable it looks but it has another few months sitting to do before the final verdict!

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On going backwards and other such things

We realised, with great joy at the thought, that this weekend is the first of five weekends at home. That's five consecutive weekends with only a few bits and pieces in the diary. With a burst of enthusiasm we've made ourselves a list of projects we'd like to work on, almost certainly more than we'll get done - but its good to have aims in life!

First things first though, the bathroom. You may have noticed we've gone quiet on that one, and that's because the project has gone quiet - in fact with no help from us it's been going backwards. We've hit two snags...

Where the sink was....

The first is that around a week after rejoicing in the final fitting of the sink, we discovered that it was not to be the final fitting after all. A very slow leak appeared, coming from a manufacturing fault in the sink itself rather than our plumbing. This one has been really frustrating as plumbing leaks we can deal with (usually by applying a hefty dose of silicon sealant), but a flawed sink means it had to come out and be sent back for a replacement, damaging the finish on the worktop in the process.

Getting ready to refinish the scuffs and other damaged caused by removing the sink.

Our other set back is that the paint on the wall in one particular corner has started to react. Slowly but surely its been bubbling and peeling until we could ignore it no more.

Since the corner in question is the one nearest the bath and shower we debated if humidity was the problem. We stripped off the dodgy paint, made sure everything was dry and applied a fresh coat - and within a matter of minutes it started to bubble up again. Oh.

After the first coat of base coat the bubbliness was still coming through a little
- not very easy to photograph though!

Time to pull in the big boys. Over the course of the weekend we've applied several liberal coats of Base Coat by Polycell - the same people that make Polyfilla, which is supposed to seal in whatever is behind and allow you to paint your colour of choice over the top.  So far we seem to be winning - but we'll have to keep an eye on it.

So this weekend has been re-painting, re-varnishing and putting up the mirrored cabinet that arrived this week.

Forward progress at last - fixing the new medicine cabinet to the wall.

In other news, we've taken the old bath to the tip, revealing the lanky grass that's been hiding underneath it, and bonfired away some more of the bits that have been covering our patio. Oh and Lemon is having her first broody spell of the season - we had a couple of warmer days apparently and she was off, hunkering down in the coop at every possibly opportunity - eggs or no eggs. So starts the annual battle of wills....

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A Charity Shop Find

A couple of weeks ago we were at a wedding, and found ourselves wandering the streets of Wells between the service and the party in the evening. Not one to resist a charity shop we popped into an Oxfam book shop and left again 10 mins later with a copy of 365 Reasons to Sit Down and Eat for the princely sum of £2.99. It's a recipe for every day of the year, some interesting, some intriguing
and some downright odd!

We certainly wouldn't religiously follow it every day - it would produce the most random of menus - and the first recipe we've tried was from September. (Yes, we were feeling rebellious that day, why do you ask?) It was a hit though - gnocchi with mushrooms in a white wine sauce. We were after a quick meal at the end of a day of DIY, so bought the gnocchi and just made the sauce to go with it. Not the healthiest of meals, but certainly rather tasty.

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