Little Bits of Progress

It's really cold outside right now, so you won't be surprised at my lack of activity out there, even before it snowed.  All I can manage is an occasional quick foray to feed the birds or to bring in some more wood for the lounge fire - it seems to us that this fire is producing more heat into the room than last winter, but perhaps that's just us being older? We're still burning the trees from the front garden and the (untreated) old battens off the roof - I think that will see us into next winter fairly comfortably.  There is a nice feeling of burning fuel that actually cost us nothing as the battens would have gone to landfill if I had left them for the roofers to get rid of; the only cost of the trees was that the tree-fellers had to do a few more strokes with their chainsaw to give me the fire-friendly lengths to split.

So, I've been doing little things inside - the sort of job that normally I don't find time for as there is usually something far more important to do.  Last winter there were lots of tasks left on the rebuilt extension, but now there's no excuse.  The first thing to do was to sort the wardrobe: I built this in 2011 as a stud wall, a foot in front of the fireplace in our bedroom, the whole way across the room.  This was done so that when we moved in we had somewhere to put our clothes which was a little less dusty!  Sadly, the recycled doors sat forlornly (getting in the way) awaiting repair, repainting and fitting from then until I managed to do the repairs and repainting last autumn (only a whole year...).  However, the fitting had to wait and was eventually done in a hurry on the Saturday before Christmas 2012 (that was 17 months...) as I had some time and realized that it would make Jane smile.  They are all done now and look really good - they even make the room seem bigger as there is nothing falling out of the wardrobe!

Also before Christmas I made a new coat rack for the hall, recycling some old coat hooks which I had kept from two years previously.  The previous coat rack is still in place but hardly used as (a) it is above the radiator and seems to absorb the heat and (b) it is so high that Jane cannot hang coats onto it!  Having moved the coats, the hall now seems larger as well.

Now I've moved on to finishing the tiling in the bathroom - there was an annoying bit which was where the tiles met the window frame; this needed some decent cutting and of course I had bought a good tile cutter ages ago but still never got round to this little job...  It's done now and is awaiting grouting - that reminds me, there's also a bit left for grouting in the extension utility.

Perhaps next I will see if it is possible to fit the bath panel properly - this has also been left since we moved in, resting almost in place, due to the impossibility (it seems) of getting it to go under the lip of the bath.  Then there's the repainting of the doors on the landing; these were also done just before we moved in, and it is amazing to see how much shrinkage there has been since then - on the door panels there is a whole centimetre of dark wood showing where I had painted white.  The dampness in the house must have been much worse than I had realized.

One other external and long awaited job that was done before it snowed was that the roofers came back to fix a slipped slate which had been outstanding since about last April.  This had not been done because it was directly under the chimney and thus a roofers ladder couldn't be used, but it was too far up the roof to allow it to be done with a ladder resting at gutter level.  Hence a cherry picker was required and, to save money, this had to wait until one was hired for another job.  Hence after such a long wait I was quite surprised when they turned up in early January.  As you might expect, it took longer to position the cherry picker than to actually do the job, which was a single lead tingle to hold the slate in place.  Since the cherry picker was resting on the lawn, they needed some spreaders to stop the feet digging in, so I found some rafter ends (7" x 2") from the construction of the extension and left them to it.  When I came back, they had finished and gone, taking my bits of rafter with them!  Oh well, I suppose they weren't valuable, but they have been useful for a good number of tasks in the last year.

Fat Birds and Drunk Slugs

We've been getting some surprising pleasure form watching the antics of the birds in our back garden.  I knew there were lots of bird resident locally, and was quite worried about depriving many of them of their nesting places when we cleared the garden.  Hence I made sure that the hedgerow around the walls of the garden was left as it was, with thick ivy and various other shrubs growing up/on/through it.  Last autumn we put up a bird feeder in which Jane puts those fat balls that you can buy; this hangs from the apple tree just outside the new kitchen window and so we have a good view of the goings-on. 

Firstly, there is a healthy flock of house sparrows here (some of who actually used to live in the wall of our house!), and they are quite adept at imitating blue tits and hanging on the feeder cage to peck the fat.  The apple tree has a high canopy and a single low horizontal branch which is bare for the first ten feet, and there are often three or four sparrows perched there waiting whilst others are feeding.  Then there are some Blue Tits and the odd Great Tit - they prefer not to mix with the sparrows who are quite noisy and possessive.  A surprise earlier in the year was the sight of three juvenile Long-Tailed Tits, and we were very happy recently to have further sightings of several of these relatively unusual birds.  There are a couple of Dunnock who only peck at the bits on the ground which have fallen from the feeder, joined occasionally by a Chaffinch.  Finally, there's a Robin who is more than possessive.  He is a little thug who terrorizes the other small birds to claim ownership of the worn patch immediately below the feeder, and occasionally (largely unsuccessfully) tries his own impersonation of  Blue Tit on the feeder.

The heavy mob obviously are ground feeders as well.  There's a number of Wood Pigeons (and the Robin knows his place with them), but there's also a pair of Collared Doves who dislike the Wood Pigeons!  It's a real soap opera out there sometimes.  Blackbirds are rarely seen - there was a melodious one who used to sing beautifully, up and down the street every morning and evening, but he fell silent in August and so I expect a cat got him. The last of the ground feeders is a mouse who I have seen just twice, when the area was quiet. We also have a Wren who lives in the hedge on the wall, but he is rarely seen and is cetainly not tempted by the fat balls.

The front garden wall is unfortunately just the right height for passers-by to sit on. I don't usually mind this, apart from those who sit there talking loudly, especially when we are trying to sleep, but since I did the secondary glazing this has not been such a problem.   I also object to those who sit there eating and drinking (again, usually at night) and then leave their rubbish in our garden. One of these the other day had clearly had too much to drink, as I went to pick up a can in the morning and found that it was still sealed. Shame I don't drink lager...  At the same time I picked up another open can which clearly had some liquid still inside, and found when I tipped it out that it contained about 20 dead slugs!  Obviously the advice to gardeners to use beer in a can to eradiate slugs does work!