First night in the new Bedroom!!!!!!!

We spent the first night in the new bedroom. It was SO exciting. 

There are still a few things to do:

• Connect the ceiling lights and fan. 
• Get and fit the wardrobe doors (they are ordered)
• Move all our clothes up there (after washing to get rid of the mould)
• Move the bedding chest up there

This is where there will be sliding doors across

Before the bed and furniture obviously

Bed will be under that light on the left

The view

The wardrobe has strip of LED lights in it

The balcony still needs cleaned off!

View through the door back in to the main part of the house. We have cleaned a strip through the junk (valued possessions) as best we can

The fan still has a bit of wrapping on it which will come off when it is wired up

Bed and chest of drawers. There is another one the other side of the window. They are HUGE, but so is the room so they don't really look it. The bed is a super king and there is plenty of room around it. Biggest best bedroom EVER!

Rain has stopped!

We had two days of torrential torrential rain and we are surprised the house hasn't slid down the hill on the mud. We thought it was muddy before!
Finally the rain has stopped though and there are days of sunshine forecast now. It will be a bit cold (-9 overnight) but a relief!

Bedroom - slogging slogging

Doug's design for the stairs kept for posterity (original thrown away in the tidyup once all the wood cutting was finished)

Door painted blue. Doug finds the colour a little bright but I LOVE it. The wardrobe doors will have a moroccan pattern painted on them with this blue and the same white as the woodwork, as will the bedside cabinets.

We are going to paint the putty white too. This door is really crunkety and we will replace it when the rest of the house is done, but for now it fits the door opening without too much upheaval.

Wardrobe innards finished

Here is my detailed design of the wardrobe

Here is work in progress

Pink knot blocking primer.

Painting them is a BIG BIG job as it is taking MANY coats and there is a lot of surface area with quite a few fiddly bits at the back of low down shelves.

New WABBITS

They are Champagne d'argent, a male and a female. We ordered them on the internet and they arrived by lorry - I now it sounds strange when MILLIONS of people round here have rabbits, but it is such an undertaking finding them and they are generally at least 30 mins drive away... It was very smooth and so far (they arrived yesterday) they seem fine. They are a bit under 4 months old, so not yet ready to mate. 

I think this one is the male. He is called Koala.

I think this one is the female (I have looked at her bits and still think that though it is a bit hard to tell on rabbits). She is called Sterling.

They are currently living in the stacking cages as they have never eaten anything but pellets so they need to be carefully transferred over to eating grass, hay and a few pellets.

Assuming he really is a buck we will get rid of one of the Harveys (our two existing white bucks are both called Harvey). This is the one we will keep as he is more randy.

 We will keep this doe (Blondie) who is one of the Harvey's daughter. She is hopefully pregnant.

This is Blondie's daughter (Snowy) who is also hopefully pregnant.

Farm chic

I might have mentioned this before, but the weather has made me think about it again.

Before we moved here I read lots of lifestyle homesteading blogs (mainly in America) where people appeared to spend their whole lives going around in lovely floaty flowery skirts with pretty wellies. Reality turned out to be a bit different with the mud, cold, brambles and flies making this DEEPLY impractical. I tried lots of things, but eventually settled on farming onsies. This is the waterproof winter one, there is also a winter thermal, some spring and autumn not waterproof, not thermal ones and some summer ones (also known as dungarees).

There is no point in pretty wellies as the mud covers the pretty.

There is also a DIY onesie and and evening wear onesie. They are terribly practical...

Let there be light!

They are not connected up yet. The fan in the middle doesn't have a light on it, we decided the two either side should be enough. Though the room is huge!
There are also bedside lights and lights in the wardrobe.

Yet more moaning about mud

Just when we think it can't rain any more, it rains some more. 

This doesn't look like it in the photo, but is a steepish slope down in to the chicken enclosure. It has become an extreme mud sport to get down to get the (muddy) eggs and then to get back up again.

The poor chickens will be getting trench foot.

In the brief breaks in the rain it has been very pleasant and we have rushed out to walk the dog (not skiing at the moment because we are pushing forward on the bedroom, it is busy because of school holidays and the colds hung on rather).

Chocolate pudding

9 inch cake tin (can be with lowish sides like a sandwich tin)
Or 6 ramekins

200g butter
165g plain (cooking) chocolate
150g sugar (90g brown 60g white)
90g plain flour
3 eggs

Melt together the chocolate and butter.
Stir in all the other ingredients
Put in to tin and bake at 190°C for 15-20 mins until a skewer somes out clean.
Or you can cook for less long and leave the center liquid - that works best in the ramekins.
In a ramekin when you are going for a liquid center it looks like this when cooked, with a dent in the middle, if you cook it more this bit will rise, still tasty, but not quite as good!

Happy Pancake Day!

We haven't been able to do pancake day for YEARS as I have been at work on a Tuesday and therefore in a different country to Doug. 

So this year we had to go mad and attempt to make up for it by eating ALL the pancakes.

Every single one with loads of lemon and sugar as that is the best topping (filling?) 

Ooohhhh full tummy - must lie down!

Bedroom progress

I haven't mentioned it much in all the skiing, cooking and excitement of the new apartment, but work has been progressing - it just takes a really long time to do everything even from the point it looks pretty much done.

We have done:

• The skirting board (still to be painted)
• Made the stairs
• Fixed up round the windows
• Finished the woodwork around the built in wardrobe

We still have to:

• Install the lights
• Install the ceiling fan (bit fiddly as the beam is a bit narrower than the mount and clearly it needs to be very firmly attached...)
• Do the built in wardrobe innards
• Get, paint and install the sliding doors for the wardrobe (one company has disappeared since we chose them, fortunately not paid anything so now trying to sort it out with another company, but there website is shonky - they have just suggested it would be easiest if I send them a cheque!!)
• Paint the skirting board and window sills and wardrobe surrounds
• Clean up and paint the door - possibly also removing a little bit off the bottom of it

Doing the rooms in the extension has been a very good learning experience for how we will do things differently in the main house.

We won't have the hempcrete sprayed will be the main difference.
Instead we will do it behind shuttering. This will give a flatter, firmer, more even insulation layer on which to plaster. We will also do something differently with the finishing layer, perhaps not lime plaster, I am sure you will here more about this later.
It is a little bit of a shame as the lime plaster without paint does look very nice, but I am sure other finishes will to.

The end pieces for wardrobe sliding doors

We need a solid and vertical end for the wardrobe doors to go up against. As the walls are quite wobbly this was a bit difficult to achieve. But Doug achieved it by using a piece of wood supported by lime concrete to give it strength and then another piece of facing to hide all that.

This is the facing which is cut wobbly like the wall and will be painted white

This is the straight bit that the doors will butt on to, looks nice and neat but was hard to get this way.

Probably not entirely clear from the pictures, but when you see the sliding doors in there it will be...

Rendering round the windows

The plasterer left a bit of a mess round the windows in the bedroom. It was difficult for us to prepare for him properly, as we didn't really know what to expect and therefore what we needed to have done beforehand. Round the windows we had insulated a bit and that didn't work very well with his rendering and plastering.

This is before fixing up

After

This is round the door on to the balcony
In progress (I cleaned up the mess that was there, then made a base with ordinary filler and then put in the lime render on top)

 After

We have had to patch various bits of the plaster where plugs have gone in, where the wall hasn't been straight enough to meet the ceiling etc. It is difficult to get a colour match between batches as it is just sand and lime mixed with water. You can see some little white dots in here where the lime is getting old and going in to lumps.

Building the stairs

The extension with the bedroom (and our current living/kitchen/bath/toilet room) is at a different height to the main house so we needs steps down in to it. It was hard to design and make them at this point as we are not sure to within a few centimeters the height of the floor in the main house. Doug came up with a design which hopefully that won't matter as they don't go up to the very top and there can be a little difference in final floor height and it be fine.

In progress - it was a lot of work to get to here as there are some mortise and tenon joints between the two types of wood which were quite a fiddle for Doug to do.

This is him working on those joints

All ready but not finished or stuck together

You can see it will be much easier and safer getting in and out of the bedroom!

Nearly there... just a bit more paint needed...

Skirting board

The walls are quite wavey due to the way the hempcrete insulation was done, then on top of that the plasterer kind of flared the walls out towards the bottom. These things made fitting skirting board rather tricky. Doug had to use wedges as he screwed it to the wall to hold the top way from the wall so it was in line with the bottom (that was touching the wall at the bottom of the flare. We used reasonably thing MDF so it was flexible enough to follow the shape of the wall.

We then filled in behind the skirting board to hide the gap at the top.
Then mastic was applied to hide the join between this and the wall.

We are leaving the walls as unpainted lime plaster which is an attractive pale sand colour. However that has created quite a lot of extra work as we have had to be very careful not to get glue, filler or anything on the walls as it wouldn't be hidden later with paint.

The final thing to do is to paint it all.