The Donated House

I finished making curtain walls for the back porch just in time for the next round of storms and rain. They pretty much kept stuff inside dry, though some sheets blew their stretchy-string corner connections off.

Up the hill neighbour Antony brought  us some goodies, including three enormous mirrors that used to be somebody’s wardrobe doors. They’re about 1m x 2.5 or something ludicrous like that. I don’t even know what I’m going to do with them, but I love them.

The most recent storm brought a power cut, so we got to do an evening’s work by candle light. Not the worst thing if you’re using a computer, as was Anna, but a bit of a pain to do technical drawing by.

The wind also took out the outdoor shower, but no damage was really done. We just took the walls off it and tipped it back up.

Meanwhile, bulbs are poking their heads up all over, tantalisingly promising spring, but only if you can see past all the buckets and buckets of rain all the time. Sigh.

However, as usual, our spirits are kept quite high by the cuteness of Balthazar.

This weekend has been my birthday weekend, and it’s been one of the best ever birthday weekends. I’ve been really bad about taking pictures of anything else besides the main event, but here is ONE we managed to get of Anna making my birthday lasagna, which was delicious.

The main event was the unveiling of a Boggart Hall version of a zombie board game (Last Night On Earth) we’ve been playing for a year or two. Anna and I have made it by scanning and re-arranging the original boards to create buildings and landscape features from Boggart Hall, and created character cards for us, Alec, Lizzy, Bob, Lisa and Sam, all stalwart volunteers and fellow zombie players.

We packed it all away in the normal game box and casually asked them to unpack it and set it up for a game. It took them a gratifyingly long time to realise what it was and that we’d made it. I have to say I was proud of how well it turned out; it doesn’t look home-made at all.

We use the zombies from the original game, plus a lot of the little tokens, although we also made our own tokens for our own game scenario (Plant The Vegetables During The Zombie Invasion) and we bought little metal figurines to represent all of us.

Earlier today we had a figurine painting party and everybody painted themselves.

Anna, the handyman, in wellies and barbour coat:

Bob, the metal drummer, complete with customary tacky shirt:

Alec, Bad-Ass:

Elmo, the efficiency monitor, in sleek black.

Sam, the tactician, with briefcase that can hold tools and weapons:

Grace, site manager, with chainsaw and battle wounds:

Lisa, cotswold dancer and ceilidh caller… always helpful in a zombie invasion:

And Lizzy, headteacher, with morris stick.

And finally, the other highlight of the weekend, my birthday pink wheelbarrow, with matching bouquet of flowers, which Anna gave me. Squeeee!

Yeah, I’ve been asleep. Or something. Apologies for the long absence. Quite a lot has not got done over the last few months, but lately we’ve been a bit more active.

There’s been some serious rain this winter. I guess we are lucky we haven’t had the floods of the last few years in Todmorden, but we are getting sick of listening to the burbling of the ground and squelching around in the absolute mudpit of a lawn.

The other day was a proper beautiful spring day though. Mild and still, with sun and birdsong. Really welcome change from the chucking-it-down rain rain rain rain rain of the last few weeks.

Didn’t last long enough to dry out the ground though.

In other news, we’ve broken down and put a proper roof on the outdoor kitchen, since the fabric one ripped itself to shreds in the extreme wind of a few weeks ago. The majority of the fabric was fine, actually, but there was one strip of a different fabric that just perished to tissue in the wet and sun. I might yet use the other bits for something else, because although they were faded, they were still quite strong.

Roofing was something of a challenge, involving climbing around on the frame of the rafters.

Balthazar was very helpful at all times.

I mean, seriously, at all times.

And we got it done in the end.

And inside the cabin, to alleviate the growing games-storage problem, Anna built a bench-shelf from bits of offcut we had lying around.

Two sections, two slatted shelves each, means we can store all the board games, decks of cards, etc there rather than on the bookshelves, freeing up much needed space for, well, lots of other crap.

I upholstered it with webbing seats and some foam I had from one of the caravans, along with a bit of that huge haul of free upholstery fabric I got given a couple of months back.

It’s got a lovely hammocky dip to the seats now, and the cat loves it.

And finally, we have cracked on with the back porch storage area, meant to give us someplace less visible to pile all the detritus of daily life that has built up on the front porch to an absolutely embarrassing degree. I am not including pictures because of how embarrassing it is. It’s a right mess.

Balthazar, as ever, has been very helpful.

It involved a lot of hammering at awkward angles, and also a lot of drilling at awkward angles because while we were up there we took note of a rather worse-than-I-thought condensation problem in the roof. I have to admit that Barbara warned me about this, and I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have, and now I regret it. But we hope, having drilled lots of holes along the eaves and left ventilation at the gables, that the gap above the insulation will be enough to encourage the condensation to dry out.

I’m also ventilating the house a bit more, by slightly cracking one of the skylights during the day, since it takes absurdly little wood to make the place baking hot (I’m sat here in a strappy top and quite comfortable) so I’d rather use a little more wood and have the place a little drier.

Anyway, we finished the roofing last night just as it was getting too dark to see what we were doing, and also just as it started sleeting. Ok, I did the last half of the corrugated roof nailing in the sleet. Which was miserable. But it’s done now.

Balthazar declares the whole business a success.

Except I swept the roof.

And we ate some good chinese pork in sticky sauce.

And Balthazar fell asleep in an ungainly position.

We finished the floor of the back porch. Anna did most of the framing and I did most of the floorboards, and today I bought the rest of the timber to build the frame and roof, though I need a trip to the builder’s merchant to buy some leaf guards for the gutter before we extend the roof and make it hard to clean. Boy do these very mature trees drop a lot of leaves.

Balthazar has started going outside and thinks there’s nothing better in the world than getting in people’s way while they’re building stuff.

Anna, Chief Roof-Sweeper, made another assault on the roof, though it was covered in leaves again within seconds. That’s how it is around here in November.

And (hey, non-cat-lovers, I’m so sorry, but the rest of the entry is about the cat) Balthazar the Laid Back is ever amusing and delightful. The above pose looks a bit like just a well timed shot, but actually he stayed that way for ages.

Today his adventures included discovering the joy of fences…

…of outdoor structures…

…and of trees. As for the following, I’ll leave you to add your own narrative.