I haven’t written in a while now, though in fairness not an awful lot of progress has been made on the house, in that time.
We do now finally have an erected shed, Shire sent us the missing parts within the week. We weren’t able to finish it off right away and it had a tarp roof for a fortnight or two, which meant that after a few bouts of real British weather we experienced some shed floods. Paul and my parents finished it off one weekend whilst I was at work. This has freed up a lot of space in the utility room where we had a growing pile of gardening stuff.
This lack of lawnmower and strimmer and various forks and spades indoors has allowed us to take a peek into our downstairs toilet – which is better described as an indoor outhouse. The window is smashed which has allowed Aragog and all of his family to move in and make themselves at home. Needless to say, it will be a long while and a lot of work later before I even set foot into the room. It features a lovely turquoise and white shell toilet and a door that’s been fashioned from two chipboard panels held together by planks of wood. The door handle has been nicely screwed on without a spindle, tubular latch or lock to really give you the impression that it serves a purpose until you try to use it. This is going to be a job for another time though. Bleugh.
At the start of August, Paul and I had a nice weekend away – a Christmas present from my parents – in the Cotswold. I’d never been before and I found it really beautiful. Whilst there, we visited Cotwolds Lavender in Snowshill, Broadway. I’m glad we did because, like the rest of the area, it was very pretty. We brought back three different lavender plants that I planted the next day in the front garden (Fathead -pictured below, Loddon Blue and Folgate). We’re hoping it will attract some bees and we’ve put a bug box not too far away, beside our front door.
On Sunday we got around to putting the first coat of varnish on our two new oak windowsills in the box room and the main bedroom. We used Osmo’s Polyx oil in Raw. We’ve used Osmo oil before in our old flat and we were both impressed and this oil has impressed me more – our windowsills have retained the unvarnished look but with all the protection that varnish provides.
Lastly (at least for this post, anyway), we’ve noticed a huge surge in mushrooms popping out of the ground recently (which we thought was quite early for them) and have been trying to get lots of pictures. Paul and I went on a Fungi Foray at Poltimore House last year and enjoyed it greatly, so we’ve kept our eyes peeled for unusual mushrooms growing locally. Here is one of my favourite pictures of Paul’s:
