Last night due to the forecast of heavy rains and the invasion of slugs in the garden, I’ve harvested the garlic. I’ve got about 15-20 bulbs, three or four of the strongest I’ll save for seed for the autumn planting. The rest are tied up and drying out. I’ll buy a different variety for the autumn planting too, so that I can have a trail.
technorati tags:home, garden, garlic
Spent a few hours last night weeding the veg patch. Turns out I’ve been growing the onions and garlic all wrong. You need to clear the earth away from the bulbs to encourage them to grow outwards. I’ve done that now for the onions so hopefully they will start looking like onions rather than scallions.
I don’t think I’ll get much of a harvest this year. Still, you live and learn. I hope the spuds fare better they are starting to flower so should have a crop in around six weeks time.
technorati tags:home, garden, onions, garlic, potatoes
Added del.icio.us and flickr links to the side bar. Swell!
And got tabs for Paddy Casey’s Saints and Sinners. I’ll be learning that this weekened.
Off work tomorrow so a nice long weekend, with my folks coming to visit.
Now I’ve started back on this perhaps I’ll get me brother’s website sorted out for him!
technorati tags:guitar, Hols, Paddy, Casey, blogging
The saga that is decorating the nursery continues although I hope this is final chapter. Rather than plain white the walls will be a more calming yellow/straw colour, and I’ll get come coving to tidy up the ceiling. Once that is doen there is fireplace and skirting to strip and repaint. Couple of weekends should see it.
After the fiasco with Richard’s steamer I got another loan of a steamer from Gill. This one worked perfectly, my folks where over this weekend so I had help too. With a paper tiger used to rough up the gloss paint over the wallpaper the steamer made short work of lifting of the paper. In twelve hours I’d managed to remove about 20 sq ft of paper, but with the steamer we cleared about 200 sq ft in an afternoon. About half way round there was a little doodle of a cottage and hills on the old plaster and on the opposite wall the date the paper was put up, 1st Feb 1960.
We also went and spent about 200 pounds at the garden centre too, on hoses, spades, plants, bulbs and weedkiller. There’s now two pots of chrysanthemums ready to brighten up the front of the house.
Inside I’ve put new white ceramic door handles on the doors facing into the hall, and put up a few hooks.
With any luck we’ll have the nursery painted by the weekend.
Got a loan of a steamer to strip the ancient wallpaper from the soon-to-be nursey, excitedly I filled it up with water. Excited because I had taken me 12 hours to strip about 20 square feet, although the wallpaper remover liquid does help a lot, it was still very slow progress.
It was just after sunset dark when IĀ plugged in the steamer, flicked the switch and bang! Everything was in darkness. The ancient circuit breaker tripped. This had me in a bit of a state because if the electrics are like anything else in this house we are in trouble. Luckily after fifteen minute fumbling around for candles the eletric is back on, and strangely the central heating seems to work now. We shall see if it continues. I’m pretty sure it was the steamer that is scooped and not our electrics and so the sun set on another exciting day of DIY, well the sun was already set before but you catch my drift.
We have bought a house, it is not new just new to us. In fact most of the “modernisations” we will make will be restoring the house to it’s original condition. It is not that it is in any way a special house, other than to us, but it is post-Edwardian and means clean and simple.
There is a fair bit of work to do, some plumbing, a lot of repair work in the garage, a bit of building on the rear boundary wall, redecorating, and lots of small maintainence jobs.
I’ve already made a start and painted the livingroom. I’ll move what furniture we have into it now and make it nice and homely. I’ll keep this up to date as to our progress as a way of keeping blogging as I have been proper slack, and as a record of the renovations.
I think there is something on the web houseblogs or something. I’ll take a quick look at that too.
technorati tags:house, decor, family
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