{"id":3665,"date":"2020-06-07T20:40:18","date_gmt":"2020-06-07T20:40:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/?p=3665"},"modified":"2020-06-07T20:40:18","modified_gmt":"2020-06-07T20:40:18","slug":"what-a-great-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/?p=3665","title":{"rendered":"What A Great Summer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ok, here’s your next progress report already!<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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This one’s going to cover the entire fucking wall. Because I never learn.<\/p>\n

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Here’s a closeup of some of the detail. Complete with shadows. Punishment glottony.<\/p>\n

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Still, it’s going to be properly, actually epic.<\/p>\n

So yeah, the kitchen has come in in leaps and bounds.<\/p>\n

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Stove installed, electrics hooked up, gas hooked up. Inaugural pie baked.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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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!<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

I do kind of like how it looks like the electric cable grew up through the floor and shattered it.<\/p>\n

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So yeah, this is the kitchen end of the house as it is now. Downright useable.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

Also, we moved the living area to the former kitchen area. Julian did most of it and made it very inviting indeed.<\/p>\n

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WE LOVE BEN for making this all possible, in case we haven’t mentioned that today, so…<\/p>\n

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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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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I’ve also been making gin, as the elderflowers are out.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3665"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3682,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3665\/revisions\/3682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donatedhouse.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}