A trip to the archives

Inspired by the need for new windows we decided to try and find out what our little house looked like prior to pebble-dashing. So we booked a visit to the Waltham Forest Archives to see what they had. Unfortunately they didn't have any photos of our road but they did have lots of lovely Ordnance Survey maps. So we found out that our house was around in 1895 and that it did used to have a bay.

O/S 3.60 1895

Trying to avoiding the inevitable

One of the reasons I post so much about the garden, and increasingly little about the house, it that we're starting to come up against the big projects. The things we're a bit too lazy to do, or can't do, or can't afford to do. Unfortunately these projects just seem to multiply.

The big one of the moment is our windows. Whilst I'm not that bothered about living in a faux-cottage for the time being (we're here for the long-haul and anyway we can't afford to do everything at once) the downstairs window needs replacing. This brings up lots of ugly questions about what to do with it. The only thing I'm certain about is that I don't want little panes of glass anymore.

1. Shall we get all the windows done at once or should we spend all our savings on making the bottom window better?
2. Should we go all out and get a bay reinstated? Did our house even have a bay? Could we even afford this, ever?
3. Would the house look funny with a flat window on the ground floor?
4. How will installing new windows affect the pebble-dash?
5. Why do we care about the pebble-dash?
6. Is patchy pebble-dash even worse than normal pebble-dash?
7. Which quote should we go for? 
8. Can't we just spend the money on something fun like a holiday and some new shoes instead?

Just to add to my worry, I found a funny growth on one of the windows the other day. It didn't have anything growing in it, just brown powdery stuff. Arrrrrgggghhhhhh!!!

Patterntastic!

One of the good things about working on a short term contract is that just a year after you get one leaving present, you get another. This time, along with a natty bag, mug, badge and sweets, I got a lovely moquette cushion - a bit of a tradition when leaving the Learning Team at London Transport Museum.

We (oh ok it was Jenny Lloyd, aka Mum Lloyd) decided it looked best on the Welsh chair along with some tartan blankets, just to really bring out the pattern.

If you too want to go nuts with pattern you can order moquette cushions from the LTM shop. Then you can imagine you're sitting on a tube train (or a bus!) in the comfort of your own home.

The good stuff

Mum Guthrie came down to keep me company during my 2 weeks of unemployment and do some gardening today. This seems like a good excuse to show you some pictures of my Alys-wanna-be garden.

Look! Isn't it beautiful? And I can eat almost all of it!

Can you spot Mum doing some weeding next to the sunflowers?

Courgettes and beans and calendular and sunflowers!

Strawberries and chives and thyme!

Red chard and purple cabbages bring some tasty colour to the garden. I can't believe how far it's come in so few months. Can't believe what it looked like in December!

While Mum was here I also made her help me turn the compost into my new bin. This is because it would be dirty and a bit smelly and require heavy lifting and these are some of the things my Mum likes most about gardening, along with serious pruning.

Putting the tasty brown stuff in the new bin.

Giving it a good stir.

Red worms! Scrumptious!

Composting

While I was spending a few days swanning around Pisa with my cousin, Jon got his parents over to the House of Love to put in some work. I came back to a tidied front garden (how does it get so messy and weed-strewn?), some lovely new daisy-like flowers in the back garden, and my longed-for second compost bin.

This means I'll be able to move my compost from one bin to the other getting lots of lovely air in there to help the bacteria break everything down that little bit quicker. It also means I can have one compost bin for collecting and one for using, no more having to decant the compost bin into bags!

They sensibly built the new bin over the MASSIVE tree stump in the garden thereby using up some otherwise dead space.

Look, it's got a special door to help me get at all that lovely compost.

What a stylish compost bin, made from reused pallets don't you know.

So now I have a black bin to put all the yuk in while it breaks down and a nice wooden bin for all the lovely tasty nearly ready compost to do it's last rotting.

1st Anniversary.

There will be no photos in this post. The aim of this post is to point out that we moved into our house 1 year ago yesterday. If you want to see the house, look at previous posts. You could start here and look at ALL of them!

If you do, you will see how much stuff we have done and how much we still have left to do. We've done a lot, I reckon, but we couldn't have done it without the help of all our wonderful friends and family who have appeared on the blog over the last year, especially my dad and Hannah's mum. They come around and do lifting and digging and painting and things that we're a bit too lazy to do. They also lend moral support when the prospect of another coat of paint or another trip to the dump is just too much to bare.

We never did have a proper housewarming party - and I'm not sure we can be bothered now - but if you're reading this and still haven't seen our house - or haven't seen it for a while - please invite yourself over. It's about the best thing we've done, I reckon.

Stairwell to Heaven

I think every wall, apart from the stairwell walls, had had at least one coat of paint. Painting is annoying. I hate it. Lots.

So I get my dad to come and do it. He doesn't seem to mind so much. The stairwell involved high up ladder painting! He likes to do the more dangerous things because he says he's old and doesn't have as much to live for! DAD!

We covered up the banister because we're pros like that.

He still wants to strip the paint on the stairs but I like it. It looks like we meant it to look shabby chic, but we didn't, so that's, like, actually cool, rather than, like, fake, right?

Oh, and I changed the lampshade (check back to first photo) to one of those spherical paper ones. They're about the only lampshades we can agree on. And they cost £1 at Wilko's.

VIEW THE EPIC JOURNEY OF THE STAIRCASE HERE!