When Christopher and I first bought this cottage, it needed a lot of work doing to it. Most urgently, it needed completely re-wiring, as the original rubber-insulated electric cabling was beginning to perish. We found a semi-retired electrician, Jack, who spent many weeks crawling around in the attic and chiselling channels in the walls to […]
It’s been several months since there has been any sign at all of mice in the loft, and I was getting complacent. That was a mistake! They came back on Friday night, just as I was trying to get to sleep, and were scurrying backwards and forwards directly above my bed, all night long. I […]
I knew I had electrical issues in the extension when my washing machine and tumble dryer tripped off in the middle of a cycle, and wouldn’t come back on again, even when I reset the trip-switch in the consumer unit. But it turned out to be more widespread than just one pair of sockets being […]
I’ve had over a month free of tradesmen working on the house. The last time was in early January, when I had Dynorod around to unblock the drains. I’ve rather enjoyed a month free of writing large cheques in return for getting the house put back to how it ought to be! But I might […]
My house is on a main road, and even though I have double glazing throughout I can usually still hear the regular stream of traffic going past. I’m so used to the sound of the traffic that it took me quite a while today to work out what was different. There has been hardly any […]
My neighbours are renovating their cottage which is grade II listed. They are understandably keen to collect images and information about how it used to look, so have been looking through piles of old postcards and photos of the locality. They came across this lovely example from 1937 which is of my cottage. The first […]
There was more snow forecast yesterday, though Scotland and the north east were expected to get hit far more heavily than the midlands. Nevertheless, when I saw the snow starting to fall mid afternoon yesterday, I hurriedly packed up my laptop and left work to get home promptly. I absolutely hate driving through snow; it […]
On Christmas Day, the kitchen sink decided it was a good time to get completely blocked. Obviously, there was no way that I was going to be able to get an emergency plumber away from his Christmas Dinner for anything as relatively trivial as a blocked sink, so self help was clearly required. I tried […]
Between Saturday evening and Monday morning, we had a total of 11″/28cm of snow up here on the hills. It took several more hours of shovelling on Monday morning to uncover the car, and to re-clear the bits of the drive that had already been shovelled clear once on the Sunday. Fortunately, it didn’t matter […]
It started snowing overnight, and hasn’t stopped all day. This was the view at lunchtime today. Since then, there’s been at least another inch, making 10″/25cm in all so far, with more forecast for overnight. I think it’s safe to say that I’m snowed in! The main road is passable with care – there have […]
