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No regular internet access...

And no picture today!  Since moving into our building site, we've not yet sorted out space to put a computer in.  Must get that sorted, though I was surprised by my lack of witdrawal symptoms, to be honest!

The house is coming along very slowly, as I've been a bit under the weather.  However, we've finally managed to get our food out of boxes on the floor and into a cupboard, in the last week.  That and the piece of scrap worktop we've balanced on top of said cupboard are making life a little easier.

We also now have lighting in the bathroom:  What a luxury!  It is in the form of 4 "spot" lights, LED ones (nice and energy efficient!), so we still need to put in one central light some time, but it is better than nothing.  Oddly, they glow very very faintly even when switched off, presumably due to inductance between the live cable to the switch and the output cable from it.  Possibly the switch should be connected to earth or neutral when off?...  Hehe, we're not going to kill ourselves with dodgy wiring, honest!

Must sort out both a computer and the necessary bits to take photos off our camera, so I can put some of the "work in progress" pics up.

Moving In Day is creeping up on us...

And we still don't have a bathroom! Fortunately, I'm going to have a minion to mix plaster up for me soon, so hopefully we'll get it done in time.

We bought a dishwasher today, so we now have the entire set of appliances. And only one of them was full price - we're too picky about cookers, unfortunately. Other than kitchen tiles, pretty much all of the buying-stuff phase should be over now! Hope so, anyway...

Oh wait, there's still all the decorating to do! And curtains, and carpets! Hmm, they can wait untill after payday ;-)

Photo is of Roundhay Park, which is only a few minutes walk from our house. V pretty, I should go there more often. This pic was taken before Christmas, although I've been there since.

My birthday on the 18th. It'll be a lovely relaxing day of plumbing and tiling. Meh, leisure time can wait until we've moved, I don't mind. Shame we probably won't be able to cook my birthday cake in the new oven - our gas-plumbing competent friend is stuck miles away with a car that won't pass an MOT!

Maybe we'll have microwaved puddings instead, made with sponge mix with the ginger in syrup I made underneath. With custard. Really thick custard you can stand a candle in!

Productive day

Ok, not much happened at the house today really, but a few things are falling into place that we were worried about:

We have a small issue in that the floor of the extension we had put on the back of the house is about 1cm lower than the old house floor. This is apparently a major headache, as it is too little for concrete, and too much for screed. This happened because the builders matched the level of the old concrete floor, but forgot about the tar based screed on top of it. So, we've been advised to break up the old screed, just in the bit that is opened out to the extension, and just level the resulting mess off with modern self-levelling stuff. It helps that that is a much smaller area too!

The knock on effect of that is that priorities have changed - flooring was the immediate concern before, but only one kitchen unit needs to go into the old bit of the house, so we can now get on with putting the rest of the units, cooker, and dishwasher in place.

Our fabulous lovely cooker is arriving on Monday, although we don't yet have the gas supply ready for it - we weren't expecting it just yet! We weren't so much worried about this as just not knowing, which can be frustrating.

As far as what I actually managed to do today - I washed the ceiling of the old bathroom. Hohum. I don't think I've ever seen anything that makes me worry more about the lungs of smokers! Seriously, it was dark yellow with brown spots, is now pale yellow, and used to be white. Yuck. I'm going to be reskimming it, as we knocked out the wall between toilet and bathroom, but was worried about the bonding actually adhering properly! Also, don't want the tar to seep through and stain.

Also, a bit naughty of me to be spending time on the garden right now, but I collected and planted out some Comfrey, which I am hoping will provide me with "organic" feed for the fruit and veg next year. The very kind guy also gave me a few strawberry plants.

Apparently, grapes need to be incorporated into the garden plan. If it gets my OH making things (i.e. wine), then that is worth a try.

Photo shows the heap in our back garden (mostly wood now, but as we're hoping to get a wood burning stove, what would be the point of getting rid of it all?), looking towards the back of the extension. On the right is the 3/4 destroyed brick shed. One day we'll finish taking it down, honest! ;-)

06/06/06

Not really done anything interesting today, but thought I'd write something due to the interesting date. Lets see if I'm still posting in one year, one month, and a day's time...

This is Charlie, he is in a pretty similar place right now, but without the box he's lying on. He had his chin resting on the duct tape until a minute ago, silly thing! :)

Hello

This is our new house. It's changed a little already, for instance, new windows, and we knocked down the brick shed (mostly... that's one of many jobs still to be completed!). I've been told that blogs are very motivational, so hopefully this will do the trick and help me get a few more things done around the place.

My husband and I (and cat) are moving in in about a fortnight, but first, we'd like to put a bathroom in! Getting the kitchen to a useable state would also be lovely. If something miraculous happens, we could even decorate our bedroom, so we can have one corner of the house to put stuff in, that won't need to be disturbed again in a few week's time.

Other than making the house habitable (it was completely unmodernised, and horribly tar-stained), I have a few other goals, though they get to wait a little:

Start a food-producing garden. This will be mostly fruit to start with, but I do intend to have a very complete herb garden, and then move onto vegetables later. Building a patio is not quite so interesting, but probably needs to be done first, to save the house from the mud!

Become a bit more environmentally friendly. A bit general, but involving things like cutting back on stuff going to landfill. The food producing ties in with this, of course!

Raise money for two charities. The first is Macmillan Cancer Relief, and I'm doing a sponsored trek in Peru for this. I need to raise £2000 for them, ideas are welcome! Then, I want to raise money for Cancer Research, as an ongoing thing. This is in memory of my mother, and father-in-law.

My Peru trek page is http://www.justgiving.com/massivepikachu

Hohum, that was quite a long post. I've not really kept a diary before, but I believe it's fairly common for people to write a nice long first entry, then pretty much forget about it! Hehe.

Thanks to D for finding this site, it's spectacularly easy to start using!