Its taken two and half weeks but the block work is finally done, there was one or two little hold up including us changing our mind at the last minuet about the hight of the courtyard wall which is the main access down to the studio/office at the back of the building. Our brickies have been superb, they done an incredibly neat job and we couldn't be more happy with it.

It looks a little bit massive and overbaring right now but Im sure will look better once all the small details are added like a roof and garage doors! Work on the roof begins tomorrow.

While this has been happening Richard I are trying to source stuff to finished the studio off, I managed to bag a bargin on ebay and got us 25 meters of parquet flooring for just £10! Just the small task of sorting it all and giving it a quick clean up. This will hopefully be the new office floor, we dont need anything like the full 25 meters so Im hoping to sell off what we dont use.

This is currently living in our kitchen while I clean it all, so no sitting at the table for a meal for us for a while!

We have being going to car boot sales and rec yards looking for lights since the start of the build, of course now I need them all the cool old lighting seems to have disappeared or shot up in price so not much luck lately. During this weeks sunday morning boot sale hunt I did pick up this coffee sack with the coolest designs on I ever seen, Im now think of making this part of a door curtain for the new studio.

I also scored some new pans, my old ones where fine (Ive had them for 11 years) but just very devode of 70s flower patterns so they are being rehomed at the local charity shop.

Its been an exciting/frustrating/pressured few weeks and I'm looking forward to everything no longer being covered in brick dust.

The last 10 day have been a bit of a blur, suddenly we have walls, lots of walls...

We decided to have both the office and the garage double skin insulated, our Brickies think this is very posh! Its apparently not something you normally do with a garage but as Rich plans to spend quite a bit of time working in there and our brilliant buildlers quoted the same for double skins as other guys quoted for single it seemed like it was worth investing in.

My easter holiday has been spend scouring ebay and the local Rec yards for lights, flooring, patio pavers and a log burning for the office. Why is it as soon as you need this stuff you cant find anything you like! Heres the light collection so far...

So all in all its going well, hopefully they will be starting the roof end of next week! Fingers crossed!

Garage progress has been somewhat slow, we ended up waiting a week for the structural engineer to come back with his calulations for reinforcing the walls to cope with the pressure of the ground on them. But things are moving again this week, the steps down to the back of the building which will be the office are being put in.

Hopefully with the good weather the concrete will dry out quickly. We need to go shopping for flag stones for the little court yard and the steps going into it next, also fencing, capping stones and parquet flooring!

So our entire world is revolving around this 9 meters of garden, I literally have no other topic of conversation at the moment!

Oh god its everywhere, everywhere! We are drowning in mud, I cant keep anything clean as the minuet you go outside to check the chickens for eggs or get wood from the log store your covered again.

It started a few weeks ago with our builders digging a big hole, which steadily got deeper and deeper, currently the hole is around 8 feet deep which was slightly more than we had accounted for, turns out they had to go down deeper to find solid ground and then get it level.

That was day one when it wasnt too deep, then day two they really went nuts...

Then much to our neighbours delight came the concrete lorries.

This was the first layer with the damp proof membrane in, they where then all set to pour the second layer when everyone realised that the retaining wall to keep all that hill (the one with the houses on) back might need to be slightly more of a serious structural affair then original anticipated. This has left us waiting for most of last week for the very nice structural engineer to come out and advise on how me make everything strong enough to stop the hill sliding down and ending up inside the garage!

While the experts where head scratching Rich and I got on with digging the trench for the electrical cable, as yet another cost saving exercise we decided to dig this ourselves as we couldn't afford the cost of a labourer to spend a week doing it. The trench has to be 60cm deep to pass regs which makes is about mid thigh height on me...never, ever again.

Of all the many shitty jobs I've had to do on houses over the years this has to have been one of the most rubbish (Rich disagrees, he thinks rewiring the house was worse...I couldn't possibly comment as I ran away to a beach in Turkey with my Mum that time!). The builders of this 300 year old cottages just dumped all the spoil and stone off cuts in what would become the gardens, so we had endless fun digging through 60 cm of compacted stone and clay, we found tones of broken pottery, animal bones and old sewers, general in the rain and wind.

So my lovely garden no longer exists, I how just have a variety of mud mounds. The added thrill of a 60 cm drop next to our pretty narrow path had Rich slightly worried about the postie and milkman so we had to go buy site safety tape as hes worried someone will fall in, break an ankle and sue us. The cat has repeatably fallen in but so far not taken legal action...I can only assume because of the tape!

Hopefully work will commence again this week with the second layer of concrete and the electrician laying the cables in the trench so we can fill it all back in.

So not much else has happened as I now only have enough space in my brain for this but I did get a lovely parcel of fabric from Rich's auntie Lesley in Australia which should help me get my massive patchwork door curtain finally finished off.

Also I got these plates in our local charity shop a few weeks ago, they are my new favourite, every meal taste better eaten off a psychedelic cow.

I also signed up with Abel and Cole for their British Veg Box, I figured as we have concreted a third of our property I might struggle to find enough space to grow potatoes so now they will instead be delivery every few weeks in a nice box by a very cheerful delivery driver who is apparently 'looking forward to seeing your project develop', yep me too!

So I've been a bit quiet on here for a few months, mostly because Rich and I have been tied up with planning and organising our next big house project. We had up until last week an old 1950s garage at the bottom of our garden nearest our access lane, it been slowly falling apart since we bought the house over 6 years ago, the plan has always been to knock it down and try to replace it with something. End of last summer we submitted planning and after an agonising wait finally got it! So heres the render we submitted...

Its a simple long building pretty much like our neighbour has, is going to contain a large workshop for Rich and an art studio in the back for us to use, meaning we can move our office out of the house but still be able to work from home.

So last week was spent 3 days taking the old garage down, which meant fun with a kango hammer!

Our builders are due to start tomorrow and hoping to get the base finished by next week. We are really excited to finally get this project started, it feels like it been a really long time coming, Rich in particular has put in a huge number of hours so far, he did all the plans himself which saved us a lot but was quite a big learning curve!

So most of this year will revolve around getting this building up and fitted out, as ever we are on a tight budget so will be look at how we can fit both spaces out for as little as possible but still keeping them looking good. We will also be trying to make as much use as possible of any waste, we saved three quarters of the concrete blocks from the old garage to reuse as a retaining wall which Rich will build. We saved all the old wood that came from the old garage, the door frame, lintel and roof timbers, these have all been cut up for our log burner, we'll also be saving any waste wood including pallets from landfill once the build starts. In the long term we have some ideas about fitting this building out with solar panels but that might have to wait a few years!

As part of hooking the garage up to the house electrics we also have the pleasure of having to dig a deep trench for the cable all the way from the house down to the garage, all 50 meters of it! Part of the prep for this has meant removing part of our box hedge up by the house something I've been considering for a while anyway as it will gives us more room on our little patio.

Once the plants are moved we can open up the trench, although our local badger has already made a start by digging some pretty big holes in this since this pic was taken!

So some more back breaking days ahead but hopefully it will all be worth it in the end! Exciting times!

Wow it's been a weird year... on the one hand at a personal level we have managed to get most of the things done that we wanted do and on the other hand the world at large seems to be doing its best to try to rip itself apart. Frankly the last 6 months simply switching on the news has left us both exhausted and pretty depressed, however we have gone on with things same as everyone else and tried hard to find hope where we can.

So here's my happy list for the last year, mostly just to prove to myself that it hasn't been all crap!

We finally switched to a 100% green energy supplied for our gas and electric and when EDF rang to ask us the reason why we switched and would we consider coming back, telling the nice girl on the phone that I didn't want my hard earned cash funding something as stupid as Hinkly Point C nuclear power plant that they are building down  the road when they should be investing in renewables ( to which she replied 'ok fair point').

Finally after years of waiting getting some chickens, apart from the occasional escape and having to build a better fence to keep them out of the neighbours veg garden they turned out to be pretty easy and a lot of fun to look after. I'm now considering expanding the flock.

Getting long running jobs finally finished, such as a new bath panel and sorting the lighting in the kitchen out, small but annoying jobs that needed finishing up.

We have managed to stick with the vegetarian thing since May, we even had a veggie Christmas! This has saved money and been much healthier for us both.

After months of hard work on Richs part we managed to get planning permission for our new workshop/studio we hope to be building in 2017, this will totally change the way we will be able to work and give us much needed space in our cottage back. Rich worked for months on the plans which were signed off  a few months ago, now we just need to fine a builder who doesn't pull out at the 11th hour!

Also a friend posted a link to this list of 99 reasons that 2016 was a good year, so if you need a little lift this evening take a look, it definitely made me feel a bit better about the world we live in.

I hope you all have a peaceful and happy New Year, lets all work together to make 2017 a nicer place to be!

I've been meaning to blog about this for a few weeks but life keeps getting in the way! So the devils own chickens decided that the 3ft high fence really wasn't offering them enough of a challenge and the minuet my back was turned where happily hopping over it and making a bee line for my next door neighbours bounty filled veg garden! Obviously this wasn't something that could continue as at some point I would actually like to go away for the weekend but couldn't leave the escape artists in anyones care as the would take the first opportunity to bugger off.

£200 of farm fencing supplies later we planned to rebuild the whole run, from this point on the be referred to (as all the neighbours are doing) as the Lion Cage, because what else do you call an enclosure made up for nine 8ft poles!

I feel my lovely curvy blue and white coop is some what lost in all this but hey ho. At least I can now go to work safe in the knowledge that are not pecking another man brassicas to death.

Look at those steely eye little bastards, already plotting their Steve McQueen 'Great Escape' style moment.

On the plus side no foxes are jumping this fence and as we had to make the run slightly larger I am already harbouring plans to get a couple of ducks come the spring, we'll see how it goes.

A few weeks ago Rich and I managed to get tickets via the excellent Bath Film Festival to see this amazing film. I really cant praise it enough, if you get the chance to see it do! The film looks at our rather checkered history with the land and the seeds we use to grow our food, in the 20th century we have lost a staggering 94% of the seed varieties, we now only commercial use a handful. This is worrying in that we don't even really understand what is it we are losing, verities which have existed for thousands of years have been allowed to become extinct taking with them who knows what benifical properties for both us and our eco system.

Then along comes a company like Monsanto (insert Dearth Vader music here), I started reading about this company 12 years ago when we started to build our first veg garden, the shear lack of humility in the face of nature displayed by the one company astounded me and in the last 12 years they only seem to have gotten worse. The blatant distribution of chemicals in weed killers which are carcinogenic, arbitrarily advocated that people should wholesale exterminate all insect life, the good and bad for larger crop production and worse of all the patenting of seeds meaning that farmers can not collect seeds from one years crops to grow next years, something we as a species have been doing for thousands of years. It makes your bloody boil! I have always been an organic gardener, I have never liked the idea of using chemicals on something I planned to put on my plate and Im bloody glad this is a path I never ventured down.

I would highly recommend everyone see this little film, weather you grown your own or not, we should all be aware of what we put into our environment and our bodies.

I would like to thank the Bath Film Festival for showing such a great film and also to thank local organic tea company Pukka for sponsoring this film (and for the lovely goodie bag we all got on arrival!).

Ok rant ok, I'll go back to posting chicken pics in the next post!

I've managed to have a few weeks off work over the last month which has meant we've got quite a few jobs finished off before we lose the decent weather which seems to make everything harder.

Rich has been in full on DIY mode since summer but as is the case with most freelancers the minuet he starts a house job a paying job will come in meaning he has to drop what he's doing to earn the cash! Very frustrating for him but after 15 years of this we have become very used to living with half finished projects, one job I have been begging him to get finished was the bath panel. We replaced the bathroom 4 years ago and became so used to not having one we pretty much stopped seeing it, however after a little trip to my fav house clearance shop Rolfeys we picked up an old water works sign which we decided would be great as part of the bath panel. £30 worth of wood later Rich finally got round to building it!

Of course it being us we couldn't have something as simple as a plain panel, no no... as we have bugger all storage in our tiny bathroom Rich built in a cupboard as each end, one for storing all my hair products (of which there is a lot!) and one so he can access the stop valves incase of emergencies (we have made that mistake before!). Also the fact that panel then had to hold the weight of a cast sign all meant it is now build like a bomb shelter, in the event of the Russians deciding to nuke us I will be under the bathtub!

I cant believe how neat the bathroom now looks! We both love the sign so much! I am still on the look out for some nice vintage cupboard latches, finding nice old door furniture is always a sod especially as we are always on a budget, most of the stuff we get comes from junk shops and boot sales so we have to be a bit flexible about styles and also stuff very rarely matches. Luckily I don't really care about that!

Rich also managed to fit the door keep so we actually have a bathroom door you can latch and lock!! We've never been able to lock the bathroom door so its a bit of a novelty, although nice for any visitors who understandably don't want the cat knocking the door open and wandering in to see what your doing.

While we are hovering around the subject of bathrooms Id like to mention toothbrushes, fascinating right?! Ok so I learned a pretty horrifying things a few months ago, the plastic that tootbrushes are made from takes 1000 years to full break down...so in theory everything plastic toothbrush every made is still in existence!
This totally blew my mind, I mean I buy new toothbrushes roughly every 3 months, between us both thats an average of 8 brushed a year so over the course of both our lives so far thats 280 odd toothbrushes we've chucked! Given that we are trying really hard to reduce our waste I wasn't going to let that go on so we switched to bamboo brushes.

You know they are good when theres a happy panda on the packaging right!

We've been using these for the last few months and I have to say they are great, no really notable difference to a regular toothbrush, they are pretty competitively priced at roughly £3 each which you can get cheaper if you buy more than one or two at a time, we got ours from this website but most eco food shops seem to stock some variety. I highly recommend you check them out, plus you get the satisfaction of chucking your used toothbrush in the compost bin when your done with it or like us you can ceremonially burn it on the fire in the knowledge that the chickens will be happily shitting on the ash by the next day! You can't put a price on that kind of happiness!!

We also got round to fitting the wicked light Rich bought when we were last up in Shropshire 6 months ago from the town of Ludlow. It was in a very nice shop full of Victorian light fittings, so this one pretty much stood out, it was fitted with an American plug so we got it at a reduced price too.

We wanted it to go over our little kitchen table, I thing it goes really well with all our other retro crap! I love the bright orange flex, in fact Im thinking of spraying the metal legs of our 1960's kitchen table to match. The light from it is lovely, its a LED bulb but the light is really soft and make the kitchen feel warm in the evenings.

As you can see above Rich and I don't really do minimalism or indeed matching patterns on anything!
 
Weirdly after we fitted this I discovered that you can buy smaller version of this wire shade in various colours from Tescos Direct of all places! So I've order a smaller yellow one which Rich plans to hang in the opposite corner of the kitchen, just need to order some coloured flex, I'm thinking in baby blue?


So Im going to be pretty busy for the next 6 or 7 weeks with the run up to Christmas, I have some nice new designs  this year if anyones looking for some unique or unusual christmas presents, take a look at my shop.

Hopefully back with more updates soon. xx