The Donated House

Still recovering from a busy couple of weeks, including a work party just finished, but here are some more pictures from my parents’ stay.

My dad took this lovely picture of my house, with a very good eye for composition.

Another lovely composition, which has nothing to do with my project, really, but I liked the picture. We went on a steam train from Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog while we were doing a bit of a tour of North Wales. It was a lovely trip, highly recommended.

Anna’s hat, brought by my mum. I think she makes an excellent redneck. N’est-ce pas?

This is all somewhat delayed because I’ve been busy hanging out with my parents, but they left this morning, so I’ll try to catch up a bit, and then add photos as they arrive off my parents’ phones.

My dad raked and planted new grass on the bits I failed to rake last autumn, so hopefully the lawn will start looking a bit better in a couple of weeks. They cordoned it off with pegs and bailing twine so that I wouldn’t just continually walk over it and prevent the grass from growing.

My mom and Elmo made further progress taking out the finder bits of weed from the bit Michelle dug over, while Sarah-May and David de-glassed the last bit. I’ll plant vegetables in the next couple of weeks. It’ll be really nice to be properly growing stuff this year.

David’s daughter Annie came along and had a go with the bow saw cutting up firewood. She was very good at it for a first try.

My parents, both old hands with a bow saw, made quick work of some of the pile, but it’s an ongoing process.

More pictures will follow when I get them from my parents, who are mid-atlantic about now.

From left: Pa’s blurry thumb, Alec’s hand, Elmo, Grace, Anna and Karen (mum).

My mom, who was kind enough to make (yes, MAKE) me some maple syrup and bring it, had a bit of spillage in her luggage and took a picture of me washing her dress.

Hopefully I will make pancakes this weekend and post a picture of the maple syrup being put to better use than making dresses sticky.

I do like a picture of me and my power tools.

I finally laid the lino flooring that I found in a skip. It looks better than the picture seems to imply. It’s a dark faux-wood flooring style, it’s quite classy, though it was sticky and a bit smelly til I washed it several times. The down side of pulling things out of skips.

I’d cut all the pieces to size so it went up pretty quickly, and luckily it felt pretty sturdy with the bits of triangulation I put in the plan.

Not being bothered to bring the wood-holding jaws of death up to the top of the plot, I had to use the top of the wall (with the 3 metre drop on my left) as a sawhorse.

I had just enough leftover shiplap from the gables of the cabin to do about 2/3 of the windward side of the porch, and I’m going to cut a piece of glass for the top bit. Since I have a lot of excess glass.

As a finishing touch, Anna raked the rest of the ground, spread grass seed and mulched it. I hope we’ll see green shoots by the end of my parents’ stay.