Awakening

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.