By implication, it may seem like chickens require a lot of care, as I haven’t written since October. They don’t. I’ve basically just had my hands full of children, baked goods and wrapping paper. The chickens get thrown some veg and then we steal their eggs.
Category: Country house
Here come the girls
In my very last post, I did say that chickens were expected to land next year. Turns out 2017 has come early here, because we just went and got them.
I’ll say it – they do freak me out a bit. Their feet belong to dinosaurs, The Birds put me in fear of being pecked to death and when they want to run, they can sprint like mad. Not to mention the flapping. But there’s something about these ones – our ones – that I’m not quite as afraid of. They’re actually very tame, and observing them, you can clearly see personalities coming through – this is just a couple of days in.
What happened to the rest of the turf
We had a dither about what to do with the excess turf after we’d covered the area we’d ordered it for. After listing it locally for a quick sale and getting no interest, Barry had a brainwave about a practical use for it in our own garden.
Behind the greenhouse was a fairly clear area, not a lot going on apart from the odd shrub and some mint. We got a sunny day (not ideal for laying two-day old turf), but it meant we all got outside for a bit and Scarlett helped too.
Get it off my chest
One of the jobs on my to do list was to spray a chest of drawers white for Scarlett’s room, as all of the built-in furniture in there is white already. My first thought was to just buy a chest of drawers, but as we had an old one just sat there, albeit the wrong colour, it seemed a bit foolish. Plus, there’s the added aspect that this particular piece of furniture happens to have been my dad’s, so I did really want to keep it.
The first thing I bought was the handles – I got them at the same time as the wardrobe, drawers and bedside cabinet handles for our bedroom a couple of months ago.
Turf’s up
The turf arrived in huge rolls on a pallet that the strapping delivery guy couldn’t even pull down the drive. Turf is heavy! We got lucky that it was a bit damp on the day, as apparently that will help the turf take a bit better than if it was sunny and dry.
I already talked about prepping the garden for the arrival, and on top of clearing the area, Barry spread some fertiliser over the ground right before rolling the new grass out. He then spread grass seed over it too. You’ll see from the photos, but he sadly bought the wrong kind of weedkiller to get rid of the dandelions and sprayed the garden with a solution that’s killed huge patches of the grass that’s already there – just in case you were wondering!
Ready for turf
The ground that previously housed a flowerbed, a fir tree and a pond is now ready for turf. This has been a work in progress of a few months – we drained the pond almost as soon as we moved in.
We’ve decided to take the lawn a little further than that, curving it almost up to the garden swing.
Fire, fire!
The spaces beside the log burner appeared perfect for storing logs. I’ve never actually seen them stored this way, and it turns out, there’s a reason that people put them in neat little piles in front of their log burners and not next to them.
As it turns out, the log burner gets so hot that even with the door closed, the side of the metal box reaches a temperature that can spark a fire in a log not even inside it.
The harvest of ’16
We’re pretty lucky. Not only did we get a house we love, but it turns out that it has an added benefit that we’d never even considered before we moved in… the fruit, veg and herbs from the garden.
A trio of stools
A couple of months ago, I bought quite a few chairs and stools from a local guy I’d found on eBay. The three stools weren’t top of my list of furniture we needed, but he was selling them anyway and we had a space for stools in the kitchen, so I made him an offer for the three lots together. They’re supposed to be placeholder stools, but I still wanted to put some effort into making them fit the environment.
Light up
With the bones of the living room almost how we want it, we’re now looking at the lighting in there. Mostly because two of the three bulbs over the dining table have blown and we don’t want to buy new ones for ceiling lights we don’t like!