What A Great Summer

Ok, here’s your next progress report already!

I’ve started on the next mosaic, the kitchen wall, which will be epic, because I think it’s important to have more than one epic unfinished mosaic on the go at once.

This one’s going to cover the entire fucking wall. Because I never learn.

Here’s a closeup of some of the detail. Complete with shadows. Punishment glottony.

Still, it’s going to be properly, actually epic.

So yeah, the kitchen has come in in leaps and bounds.

Stove installed, electrics hooked up, gas hooked up. Inaugural pie baked.

Ben built this adorable little shed to house the gas canisters, which apparently can’t live in the house. So I had to knock a hole through my front wall.

We are greatly enjoying the novelty of washing dishes in a sink, with water coming in from a tap and leaving again from a drain. Such innovation!

And of course, it’s started to get cluttered. We are doing our best to make it tidy at least once a week, but it’s a strain.

We walled in the pantry at the foot of the kitchen space (thanks Ben, for stating the obvious, that everyone needs a pantry!) and that is now one of the places we can store the many mountains of crap we can never find places for.

Also I have tiled a bit more floor, as you can see. Cheaty cheaty big tiles for this bit. I am slowly reducing my idea of how much of the floor should be intricately mosaiced. It’s still an outrageously high proportion, don’t worry.

This small area of mosaic was necessary to accommodate some serious undulations in the concrete around the spot where the electric cable enters. It reminded me how much harder crazy-paving style is than coursed mosaic. Live and learn.

I do kind of like how it looks like the electric cable grew up through the floor and shattered it.

So yeah, this is the kitchen end of the house as it is now. Downright useable.

So having moved the kitchen, we have now cleared a space for dusty work to take place at the other end of the house, where my 5 years’ accumulation of ebay and skip-rescued tiles resides. Next task is to grade them for thickness and start YET ANOTHER insanely overambitious mosaic, I reckon.

Also, we moved the living area to the former kitchen area. Julian did most of it and made it very inviting indeed.

WE LOVE BEN for making this all possible, in case we haven’t mentioned that today, so…

We love him so much that when he wistfully said how much he missed banoffee pie, having given up dairy products, I decided to scour the internet for a dairy free recipe. There were some absolutely dire sounding abominations that seemed to think a lack of dairy ought to be extended to a lack of sugar or anything that presented a danger of tasting nice, but after some research I found this recipe from Biona which I can heartily recommend, though I would urge you to use their coconut sweetened condensed milk instead ordinary coconut milk for the caramel layer, as it’s a lot quicker. They said 25 minutes boiling. I say more like an hour to thicken properly. Anyway, the results were divine, if different all three times we’ve made it so far.

I’ve also been making gin, as the elderflowers are out.

And we laid a couple of actual patio paving stones. For real. And then we stopped and moved on to something else, as is our habit. That’s the news. As you were.