We get creative - and demolish things

We've moved out. Yep, properly gone! The new rental property is gorgeous - and DRY! We knew Atlasta was damp - but it was only when we moved the furniture we realised just how damp...

Even the carpets are wet. Bleugh. Still no matter - by this time next week there won't even be plaster on the walls any more... We are thoroughly enjoying being in a dry house and we've even had fun dismantling and rebuilding wardrobes, creating an extra worktop and getting creative with making it homely without spending even £1. [Actually that's not true, there was £1.43 for two jubilee clips for the washing machine...]

Remember the 'can you tell what it is yet' from a few weeks ago?

Well, we've now done creating!  From the plank and the forked branch we have this:

Can you tell what it is yet? No? Here's a clue then...

And from the shorter bits of wood we have this:

We are well chuffed - a hatstand and jewellery display (which doubles as artwork) for FREE. The board was from the greenhouse base shuttering, the branches were from the wood and the concrete was knocking around in the shed. Commissions (for a vast fee) will cheerfully be undertaken.

There'll be another creative display soon - a bit of kitchen worktop is going to make a dressing table. Although we may go mad and actually BUY the legs! I know - such extravagance!

The driveway is coming along nicely - it's almost passable now. The removal van (Abacus Removals, utterly brilliant) got stuck on the corner coming on his first trip - Guy and Mr Abacus got cracking with shovels and unstuck the van. The next time he drove up he simply wellied it and slid round the corner rather spectacularly, ending up just where he needed to be. The chap on the digger was looking on, open mouthed, so I said 'he used to be a stunt driver' and left it at that...

Yesterday was genuinely momentous. We removed the conservatory. That's 'we' as in the fabulous Mark with help from Rag, Archie and Pip. We genuinely couldn't have done it without them. AND they brought stollen bites...

From this:

To this:

WOW - look, there's a cute little cottage underneath! Again, a HUGE thank you to Mark and Rag - you're top of the list for the housewarming party!

Today we've had a quiet morning, we've shifted the contents of two flowerbeds, delivered dug up bulbs to a neighbour, wiped all the STILL wet paint off the inside of the outside loo and rammed in a post for a postbox (once the porch is bulldozed, the letterbox will be No More). We've hurtled down to Monmouth to find WiFi and the nice people in Caffe Nero aren't even looking at the state of us... Everyone else in here is clean...

Sarah's tip of the week:  Not really building related, but it's a good idea to label random bags of goo you put in the freezer. This avoids having pasta with stewed apple. We thought it was ratatouille...

O.M.G.

Aaaarrrghhhh! Where to start?! Well, the mud might be a good place...

We started the week with this:

Which is very pretty!  Nice trees, lovely grass, very civilised.

And now?

Ooh. The idea is to create somewhere for vehicles, somewhere to store materials and a solid base to enable everyone to get up the hill to the house. It's not finished yet - we're still sliding all over the place in the car, to the extent that today Guy said 'when can we go and look at 4x4s?' 

Maybe we'll get Wednesday's move into the rental over first, eh?

So what else happened? Ah, yes... 

We went from this (yes, I know, old photo...)

To this:

To be fair, that could be a picture of another piece of woodland - but it isn't, it's the SAME BIT! Yep, the old tin barn has gone. So much gone that you'd hardly know it had ever been there...

And we had Meetings. On Wednesday the lovely Tom from Welsh Oak came - he's the frame designer and he was doing the final measuring up before the next stage can start. We had to really think about what we wanted and how we wanted things finished. And whether we wanted doors (yes please). And that a whole wall will have to come out to accommodate the stairs. And that there might not be a chimney for the Aga flue to go up (kind of crucial).

On Saturday BOB came round and we had even more decisions to make. The upshot of this meeting was that when we've moved out on Wednesday, his lads will start on Thursday - pulling plaster off the internal walls, digging up the floors, taking out the odd wall or two... At one stage we discussed removing the roof before Christmas (WHAT???) but we're now starting with the floors and walls instead. 

The cottage will look VERY different by next weekend...

Ooh, er - it's getting a bit real, isn't it?

The first day of the build!

Yes, we've actually started work! That's the royal 'we' obviously - it was a man with a digger...

The lane to our house is very narrow so if we don't do something about it we won't be able to get materials up to the cottage and there won't be much building going on, hence the need for a man with a digger.

Here's the 'before':

And here's the 'after':

We don't think it's actually finished yet - a bit more flattening out to do, perhaps push it back a bit more and some hardcore to be added then it's sorted. Not bad for Day One!

While the man with the digger was, um, digging, we cleared out the old tin barn:

It held a LOT of logs, the tractor, flail mower, logs, trailer, logs, lawnmower, ladders and then more logs. So we pushed out the back walls, threw the logs through the holes and covered them in ridiculous bright blue tarpaulins. Question: Why aren't tarpaulins green? Just asking.

Mopsi found this Very Dull. So she thought she'd liven things up a bit. Quite without warning we suddenly found we had a whimpering, shaking dog, one paw in the air, totally unable to weight bear, utterly pitiful. We persuaded her to walk on three legs to the house where she promptly fell over and barked at now very swollen paw, but we couldn't find a thorn or a cut or anything. We tempted her with a mini Bonio but she wasn't interested, which was when we realised it was serious. So we CARRIED her to the car and I drove 40 minutes to the vets. At which point she jumped out (on all four legs), bounded into reception and greeted everybody very cheerfully. Absolutely nothing wrong with her at all. Turns out she must have trodden on a wasp and the time for dogs to recover is about, ooh, 40 minutes. We had a nice chat with the people in the waiting room, got fussed over by the nurses in reception, gave everybody a good laugh and then came home.

Sarah's Tip Of The Week:  Don't paint the corrugated asbestos ceiling of the outside loo after dark in November. It will not dry and by the next morning it will all have dripped off onto the floor. The outside loo now looks like it was a major player in a paintball tournament...

And because it's Remembrance Sunday, here's an un-limping dog proudly wearing her poppy:

Early in the week we decided to get creative. For the rental house we can't use our bedside chests of drawers because they won't fit, so we bought two uber-cheap old ones to put our cups of tea on...

We thought we'd have a proper competition to paint them - you know, take one each, get properly creative with the paints, then run an online competition with voting and all that to decide who won.

And we have a new paint colour. As Ronseal Willow covers so well and is so easy to use when we needed a white for the outside loo door, we bought some Ronseal Daisy online. However, where Ronseal Willow is well behaved and does what it's told, Ronseal Daisy appears to be the naughty younger sister who does NOT do what she's told. On the loo door we used undercoat and primer then FOUR coats of Daisy and it's still streaky. Hmph.

At which point we realised that painting the bedside tables with Daisy and getting creative would be a lot of work so....

... we painted them Ronseal Willow instead...

They are vastly improved by the addition of a black labrador...

She's finding all this painting a bit boring and sits looking longingly at the stables next door like a poor hard done by orphan dog...

Because we didn't think we were busy enough we also cleared rubbish hawthorn bushes from a wall and discovered the trees underneath actually looked like trees. By the time we finished it was almost dark - which led to a rather lovely picture.

At the end of the week BOB* came round and we've agreed that he and a digger driver can widen the drive, create a hard standing area for materials and help dismantle the old tin shed. And then we talked about taking up the floors inside the house to fill in the hard standing and, if he's got the digger here, why not dig out for the extension footings too... Ooh, that's, like, actual building! He's starting on FRIDAY! We need to move out...

The rental cottage doesn't have a lot of coat hooks, picture hooks or anything that resembles decorative features, so we're going to need to get creative again. So...

... can you tell what it is yet?

* our Best Option Builder