Hurrah!

Such progress! In a bit of a hurry, so I won’t write much, but here are the pictures:

With Sam’s help with breaking and placing tiles, we finished the section of mosaic in front of the sink, and broke enough tiles to do the rest of the area inside the front door.

This is the mosaic without grout, though I finished that too, and it’s suitable for walking on now, which means it’s filthy already.

Steven spent a lot of time working on the rendering (we’re doing a very piecemeal job of it for various reasons, the left-hand corner in the picture above is where the accidental soaking occurred, so we’re still waiting for that to dry out. Barbara’s going to bring a moisture meter at some point to check. And the porch can’t be done until the plasterboard is used up, since there’s nowhere else to put it, so I’m working on the ceiling as a priority now.

Steven also did a lot of the complicated framing in preparation for the ceiling going up, which is fantastic, he has a good sense of how to do it and I’m delighted it’s getting done while I’m flitting about doing mosaics.

I bought enough decking board to cover the porch because it was on sale cheap, but we have to do the rendering before we do that, and the ceiling before the rendering, so it might wait another few weeks. Sam heroically brought it all down the steps and stacked it on some blocks where it’ll just have to get rained on, because there’s nowhere it can go under cover, really. Everywhere’s full.

I’ve been taking several short breaks a day to swing on the rope swing, which is doing wonders for my upper body strength. I’ve ordered some cotton rope to make a trapeze with, which I can’t wait to get on; static trapeze is one of my favourite ways to exercise.

On the food front, I’ve been perfecting my recipe for slow-cooked chicken, which I’ll put in the recipe section of the blog when I get around to making that (soon!)

Sam’s been developing a board game based on the figures we dance in our morris team (Boggart’s Breakfast, look us up) and it’s at the testing stage now, so I drew a board and we played a four-player game last night. It worked really, really well, and would definitely be marketable if it wasn’t reliant on quite specialist knowledge of morris dancing figures. Still, I’m half thinking it’s worth approaching a games company with the concept, because the game play experience was really good, flows well, challenging but not impossible or tedious, I’m really impressed with it. And it’s always good to have another game to play around here!