Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Our new house has a couple of west-facing windows, including the one in Humuhumu*'s room, and it turns out that Worcestershire in summertime features spectacular sunsets. I didn't managed to snap them all, but there were four in particular during the past two weeks that merited diving for the dSLR.

( +3 )


Stratified on the 19th.

( House, Telstar, garden wildlife )

I'll make a more organised house post when I've settled into my routine better. At the moment I'm quite anxious about getting things right. Particularly my work-from-home setup and the commute to London, which starts very early on Wednesday and ends late on Thursday and involves multiple trains, buses and coordinating places to sleep. I'm sure it will all come together just in time for me to go on maternity leave and undergo another massive life change.

* Passenger has become Humuhumu, after the reef triggerfish, humuhumunukunukuapua'a, which is the bloke's favourite Hawai'ian word. I would have preferred "Manapua", which is a roast pork bun. Anyway, this began because of our ongoing debate about whether or not Humuhumu is going to have an Anglo first name or a Hawai'ian first name. To Be Continued...

That's what the sign outside our house now says. The legal fidgy-widginess has begun. We spent part of last night filling out the 4761910 pages of forms the solicitors sent to us. The activity required us to use a dictionary - neither of us knew what "pelmets" were. (We don't have any so they're not included in the sale of the house.)

We also learnt why our buyers were so keen to have the place. Apparently it's not just our renovation work that appealed. The person buying it is good friends with the person who bought the place two doors down from us eight months ago. Both houses are in the same five-house block. We noticed this summer that the new person liked to have lots of garden parties. They were genteel parties - music kept low, and they always went inside promptly at 11 PM. There weren't a lot of female guests, and the occupants of the house seem to be exclusively male. I don't like to assume too much, but I think our central neighbour, who will now be bookended by this crowd, put it best.

"I'm going to be the faun among the flora," she remarked, grinning.

Here is something I never imagined I'd need to learn: How to convert your front garden from a patch of triffids (no really, they were eight-foot-high giant thistles) and weeds into a car parking space.

Naively, I thought that all you had to do was dig up the plants and chuck a load of pebbles onto the bare soil. How wrong I was. For this endeavour, you will need:

• 1 digger
  
• 1 skip
  
• a large quantity of broken-up concrete slabs
  
• planks of wood and stakes
  
• several tonnes of hardcore (2x as much as you think you need)
  
• several tonnes of pebbles
  
• 1 whacking plate
  
• 1 large sheet of weed membrane
  
• several nice big tiles to make a footpath to your front door
  
• 3 chaps, at least one of whom has previously operated a digger
  
• 1 neighbour in the construction business (for cheaper sourcing of materials)
  
• 2 weekends (3 if you fail to order twice as much hardcore as you think you need)

First, collect your chaps and fill them with tea and biscuits. Get them to use the digger to remove the plants and the top six inches of soil. Lob these in the skip. Take your pile of broken concrete slabs and mix them into the remaining soil. Use the whacking plate to flatten this out, then place the membrane over the top. Place the wooden stakes around the border of the area to be pebbled and attach the boards to make the edging.

The above is one full weekend's worth of work. If you have a full-time job, you will now need to cross your fingers and hope it doesn't rain until you can work on it again the following weekend. If you live in England, you will know how futile this hope is.

Before you start work the next weekend, you should have the hardcore delivered. Take the volume of hardcore you've calculated you need (length x width x depth) and multiply it by two. If you think you need four tonnes, get eight. I can't stress how critical this is. There is one lesson that I want everyone to take away from this story and it's this: It is better to have too much hardcore than not enough. You run the risk of stretching the job out over another weekend at least if you don't.

When Saturday arrives at last, collect your chaps, apply tea and biscuits, and get them to spread out the hardcore and whack it flat in layers until you've replaced most of the soil you took away. Assuming you have obtained enough hardcore (clever you!) you will now be able to lay your tile path and spread the pebbles out around it and over your new drive. If you haven't gotten enough hardcore, you must now wait an extra weekend until you get a second load delivered. (Have you spotted the mistake we made? I thought so.)

When the drive is finished, apply beer and curry to your chaps until they no longer ache.

Before we started, I had no idea it was this much work to convert a garden into a car parking space. Not a clue. Now I can do it again if I need to. Well, probably not on my own, since I can't use a digger and am not strong enough to operate a whacking plate for six hours straight. But I tell you what I can do. I can paint.

Oh boy can I paint. My painting stamina is high, and it's not just the fumes that make me say that. I can paint fiddly bits of woodwork with gloss paint for hours. This may not sound like a lot but let me assure you that if anyone ever offers you the opportunity to paint their woodwork, turn them down. It's tedious. Every weekend and spare evening since the new year, I have spent painting woodwork. To apply a single coat of gloss to all the woodwork in the kitchen alone took me 30 hours. Our kitchen has four large doors and nine cabinet doors as well as the surrounds for these. There are also the picture rails and the skirting boards.

I started the kitchen job feeling fairly jolly, having recently accomplished the landing (five doors) and the stairwell (bannisters oh lordamercy). I put Absolute 80s on the radio and bopped along. Then the angst set in as I realised I had spent every spare moment for seven days on the job and it still wasn't anywhere near finished. So I switched to Planet Rock. About four days ago, the rage set in and Planet Rock only served to agitate me further, which is not what you want when you're doing work that requires fine motor control. I had to resort to the soothing tones of Classic FM.

Last night I was about to start the last cabinet (with glass doors, making it extra-specially annoying) when Classic FM decided to play a Complete Work. It couldn't have been more appropriate. I placed the final brush strokes to the strains of the Lux Aeterna at the end of Mozart's "Requiem".

Sadly, this is not the end of the renovation saga, as the non-woodwork areas of the kitchen still need painting, the floor needs sanding and re-varnishing and we haven't even touched the bathroom yet. If I refuse any invitations in the next three weeks, rest assured I am spending my evening at home, not having nearly as much fun as you are.