The Donated House

So here’s what we’ve been up to:

The front garden is looking more and more like a garden.

The sweet peas are smelling sweet, as they were intended to do.

The plants in the caravan planters are hesitant to put on weight, but then they’re quite new still. There are flowers on the tomato plants.

The Albertine rose is in its first full on flowering. I hope it lasts a long time.

The sleeping pod, which is Alec’s bed for tonight, since his caravan is full of volunteers from abroad, has a path and some steps.

And a front door made from the front of a knackered tent Antony gave us.

The blueberry crop is looking very promising.

Lea’s giving the garden a good watering as I write. Some things are thriving and some things are looking a little sorry for themselves. That’s gardening, I guess.

And, excitingly, progress is being made on the curved wall of the drive. Gerhard, the German volunteer, is doing a great job with it.

I am giving up trying to think of entry titles every time I write. They tent to be meaningless anyway.

Chimelle and Thomas from France are helping to de-nail all the wood from Antony’s house. It’s a huge job.

All week they’ve been removing the plants and soil from a place to store the wood as it gets de-nailed and before it becomes buildings.

I bought some (noticeably) clean and lovely new wood (with Neighbour Sylvia’s money) to build a bed/seat for her new camping van. I designed it myself, and therefore had to redesign it 10 times as I went along and realised part A patently got in the way of part B during use.

But it worked really well in the end. When extended it’s 6 feet long.

When compressed, it’s about half that, only takes up half of the van and is good for sitting on. Obviously there are cushions involved!

Sylvia was really happy with it. She’s not had the best of times lately, so I’m glad I could do something nice for her and Jane.

And me and my seriously amateur gardening skills are trying to do green wood cuttings of weigela (which apparently hasn’t got a common name. What a shame.)

Yeah, check me out, doing proper work. I threw together the sleeping pod in time for the weekend of Elmo’s birthday (which is always an inundation of guests.)

The frame is made of roof trusses and rafters. The floor and siding are floorboards.

The roof was hastily thrown on in time for Ryan to sleep in it without it even having  back yet. He was very keen. There were also old nail holes in the roof, but luckily it didn’t rain.

Antony came down with his (probably imminently dying) digger and flattened a new place for the caravans to go.

And a big team of people stopped them rolling down the hill too fast…

and then pushed them into place against the back wall.

Lucy gave them a bit of a wash. Long overdue. Embarrassingly overdue.

And Rob and Christopher built some planting boxes so we can grow some pretty climbing plants over them.

Meanwhile Jack took up residence in the beehives.

Elmo unearthed the path along the back wall in order to route the electricity to the caravans.

Kate and Mary added the rest of the sticks to the walls of the summer kitchen for the climbers to climb up.

Hazel and steven installed some water lamps in the workshop. It involved cutting a hole, filing off all the sharp bits, sticking a bottle filled with water and bleach through it and sealing it with silicone. The board is just there to hold it in place while it cures. It doesn’t make a huge difference at the moment, but when I enclose the back of the workshop, I think it will lift the gloom a bit.

Hazel went on to sweep the roof and seal up all the nail holes with the rest of the silicone. She also did the sleeping pod, so hopefully the bed won’t get too wet tonight in the rain.

We had slightly too many people to seat them all comfortably in the summer kitchen, but it was fun trying to cram them all in.

Lucy kept us amused with a routine involving the big cable spool.

Anna built a jumping-off platform for the rope swing, which is pretty exciting now.

The extra couple of feet makes all the difference.

We finally made hanging lanterns out of the beer bottles Anna brought back from America.

And I made a pie.

Now that we have a roofed working area, it doesn’t matter if it chucks it down all day.

We can still build a beautiful floor for the new sleeping pod, which will have walls that were recently roof trusses in Antony’s house.

The floor looked lovely when we finished it, so we went in for a cup of tea, at which point the heavens seriously opened and we found out that there are several holes in the roof that definitely do drip if it rains hard enough.

So we stuck a bit of blue-tack in them and got on with cutting up the roof trusses.

By day’s end we had one of them just about done… hopefully the next one will go a bit faster. We’ve got enough roof sections to roof it (and hopefully not need to plug a lot of holes with blue-tack) and if we are lucky, we may test it out on Tuesday night.

Anna has made the latest addition to our household by buying a stuffed bear at a charity shop. He’s called Arthur.

He turns up everywhere.

Jack took to him instantly and they are good friends. Jack is so much like Balthazar, we think they must have been brothers.

Like Balthazar, he quickly realised he wasn’t allowed on the kitchen countertops while anyone was looking. Most times we go out we find mysterious muddy cat prints on the counter upon returning.

Lily maintains a dignified silence.

The railway works down the road seem to be going through cable reels at quite a pace, so I asked the workers if I could have one and they said “yeah, take as many as you want.” So I took three. Luckily, after pushing this one up the hill (which took three of us) I decided I could use some smaller ones.

We finished the roof frame in the most searing heat (must have been 17 or 18 degrees C!) and put the metal roof bits Antony had given us on just in time for the rain.

But I don’t put pictures of rain on this blog, so here are some more pictures of sunny, hot, dry Todmorden.

The view from the workshop is rather pleasant.

The view from the roof is lovely as well.