The Donated House

Awoke relatively early (for me) and got to work moving stuff out of the way of destruction. Constructive destruction, that is. Lifted the flagstone path and carted away the large wall stones we’d removed.

Meanwhile Antony and his big machines did what they do best and made further progress on my driveway.

It’s scary watching bits of wall broken down, knowing nothing about stonework and not knowing how they’re going to be made right again, but Antony assures me it can be done!

It certainly is gratifying watching a giant machine do in a minute what it would take me a day to do, if I could do it at all.

In thanks, I made him a pie, though I forgot to put the sugar in it, so I had to do some last minute pie surgery before I put it in the oven. All worked out for the best.

And the last little bit of the story is: seeing as he’s about to knock his house down to rebuild it, he’s looking for someplace to house his cat for a year. So we’re having a trial run. He’s a lovely cat. More on that later, if he stays here for more than a couple of hours.

The chicken house is taking shape.

Today we got the post in the ground and framed the floor, triangulated the whole gubbins and nailed down some floorboards.

Tomorrow I’ll get as far as I can on the walls and see if I can get them up. Haven’t really got a plan for the roof yet… slapdash as usual. But we’ve got a plan for where to put the run and all we need to do then is source some chickens.

Spring is occasionally making steps toward appearing, though it’s still cold (frost forecast tonight) and raining a lot. Still, the flowers are out. I’m told we’re better off here than in Vermont where there are still two feet of snow.

Well, life goes on and luckily spring is here, or at least it was for a couple of days before it left again.

While it was around, I took the opportunity to take the tarps off all the bits of wood that had been languishing, sodden, all winter. Reclaimed beams and bits of fallen tree, deconstructed picket fences… some of it dried out a bit and I put it in a more permanent home. Some of it I put in a very permanent home indeed, via the fire pit.

Anna brought out her clarinet and we took a few minutes to practice some tunes together.

Anna vastly prefers sunny t-shirt weather to our normal cold drizzle. I agree.

Inevitably, the cloud and chill returned, but no rain as of yet. Lizzy came over for the weekend and we ate good food (including finger cookies, thanks Ma, for teaching me to make pastry, everyone loved them.)

Lizzy, being the head gardener, whupped the garden into shape for planting this season. It seriously, really wouldn’t have got done without her valiant intervention, I don’t think. We planted onions and garlic and prepared space for a bunch of other stuff that we’ll plant later.

Meanwhile (I don’t garden) I got on with making a chicken house out of bits and pieces of reclaimed wood, including some great bits of shed floor(?) Anthony had brought round after dismantling some building or other.

I only walked away from today with the front wall, but I did manage to finish designing the thing, which is really half the battle. Oh and Anna cut the bits for the floor frame, so if I ever see another sunny day on the horizon, I’ll clear my calendar and get this baby done.

We came back from a weekend in Scotland to find that Balthazar was missing. The cat-sitting neighbour hadn’t seen him when coming in to feed them. I put up posters on Monday and all day kind people in the neighbourhood phoned with possible sightings and good wishes, but sadly several of the residents of the road along the bottom of the hill reported that a cat matching his description had been killed on the road. We can only really believe that it was him. The kind neighbour who buried him showed us today where he had done so, so at least we got to say goodbye in a way.

Lily has become quite active and vocal, and it’s hard to know whether she misses him or is glad she’s not having her tail pounced on all the time.

Anyway, I know I miss him.

Our latest volunteer, Achim, turned out to be very adept at building woodsheds. Now we can move the small stuff to a permanent home rather than its haphazard pile-under-black-plastic system.

We finally got rid of the red Honda to Lisa, whose car died the day after she spent £400 getting it through its MOT. Hopefully it’s got a few years left in it. But it needed a jump to get going because we’d left a light on quite a while ago. Also pictured is the new blue Bongo, I can’t remember whether I’d introduced that one yet. Mainly I’m talking to my dad here. Hi Pa.

And the bees came out during a sunny spell last week, which was nice because I’d been worried that they might not have made it through this wet winter.