Early this morning it was announced that we were no longer to remain a part  of the EU. I am both shocked and disappointed in this result as we don’t know how it’s going to affect us in the long run, both with the house and it’s mortgage and with everything else really. I know a lot of other people are in the same scenario as us, but we’re just going to have to carry on for now and try and prepare for whatever may come.

Anyway, back to the usual stuff I blog about:

There are no major changes around the house since my last update. We did pull down half of the fence at the back of our garden, which took longer than expected seeing as there are three layers of it. There’s some fence, then some more bits of fence then a big layer of chipboard. And that doesn’t include the sheer bulk of ivy and other plants growing up, around and through it, which make it even more difficult to pull apart. The wall behind is thankfully solid, but it will need some rendering. But that can only happen when we’ve pulled the rest down, remove the concrete posts and fill in the ditch!

My new plants have been looking good. I bought two foxgloves and two lupins earlier this year when B&Q were having a sale. To be honest I didn’t expect them to look that good. I’m actually pretty rubbish at keeping plants alive so the fact they’ve even flowered has surprised me.

Only one lupin flowered because the other one was ravaged by slugs, but it’s hanging onto life by a few little leaves. This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago and this particular flower is now made up of seed pods, but he pink and white one beside it is still in its prime.

This was how it looked a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to get a lot more pictures but I had poorly eyes and wasn’t able to do it myself.

B&Q lied to me about my foxgloves. I chose a white one and a purple-y coloured one, because I was aiming for lots of purples and whites in the front garden but I probably won’t do that now as both turned out pink. I don’t really like pink that much, I don’t hate the flowers, I’m just a bit disappointed. Maybe I’ll just try and make everything really colourful instead. I have lots of wildflower seeds I have yet to plant.

One of my foxgloves fell over a couple of days ago. I don’t know why. Maybe it was a bit windy.

When I walk/ cycle to work, I have to go past this beautiful white foxglove. It makes me jealous because it always looks so perfect. Though it’s all closed up again now and my flowers are still going.

We’ve had a quote come through from a building company for some works to the house. It was a bit of a shock though. So we want to source some of our own materials, because I can get discounts, so we have discussed that with them and they’ve said it was fine. So fingers crossed for getting more work done.

The main two jobs were the fireplaces. We’re planning on having a log burner downstairs in the living room and a small decorative fireplace in the bedroom upstairs. We went down to Plymouth last weekend for Fathers day (which we had to celebrate on Saturday) and Paul and I  visited a nice little reclamation shop that had a real treasure trove of old items in there, including loads of cast iron fireplaces. We bought a second hand, replica Victorian fireplace for £175 which was a lot cheaper than the ones we’d been looking at on eBay and online.  So this one is for the bedroom.

For the living room fireplace, what we are going to try and do is get it all sorted apart from the actual log burner (which is the expensive part). We want to leave that until later so we can spread the cost a bit.

As for the other building company (the one who offered us a refund)? They haven’t refunded us yet and it doesn’t look as though they intend to. After many warnings, we are now taking them to small claims court. I’m fairly confident in taking this route, especially as the company have even previously admitted in earlier emails that they owe us money but have never paid it to us.  My mum and the solicitors she works for have been a great help during this process. So fingers crossed that it all gets sorted nice and quickly and we can move on from the whole sordid thing.