More Spring Sunshine

Man, we're exhausted.  We hit the garden hard today and did some serious pruning.  We filled my little car to the brim and took the contents to the tip twice - wish we had space for a bonfire!

There are another 2-3 car loads left to be done at some later point...

A few photos...

Ian inspects the shredder we found in the shed - I found it terrifying and disappointingly it didn't do a very good job.

Tea break around 5pm!

Ian: "What is this?"
Me: "I have no idea"

Ian: "It's too twiggy, let's prune it"

Me: "OK!"

Bliss!  

Partridges with a Pear Tree

Some of our wonderful friends from choir clubbed together and bought us a generous sum of garden centre vouchers.  The card read "To fund a pear tree for the Partridges!" and so today we followed instructions and headed to the garden centre :)

It's a dwarf variety so can stay in a pot on the patio and is self-pollinating and will fruit.

Obviously it's a bit twiggy now but I have high hopes for it and the picture on the label looks great!

The vouchers also covered the cost of a pot for it to live in so I went for one of these RHS ones which I've been coveting for quite some time!  They do it in various colours but the blue one matches the rest of my garden pots :) 

Whilst we were at the garden centre, we also bought a little box plant for the front porch - it looks very smart next to our lovely red door, we think:

Potting up done, I decided to stay in the garden until dusk fell.  Things are slowly coming to life!

My Mum and Dad came over for lunch today and Mum encouraged me to be brutal and get on with pruning the various roses in the garden - there are lots of new shoots and leaves so if I didn't do it soon it would be even harder to bring myself to do it!  Being tough with plants doesn't come easily to me - I'm far more like my Dad who is a proper softy and would rather leave roses to grow wild and free!  Anyway my Mum said "they can get in line or get out" and with this in my mind along with a friend's wisdom that if you kill a plant you can always buy another, I got out my brand new pruning shears and got stuck in...

Rose #1 beforehand:

Rose #1 after pruning:

Admittedly I could have been more brutal, but I think I did a pretty good job for a first attempt - fingers crossed it doesn't shrivel up and die, now!  There is still plenty of promising new growth left:

I also took my shears to the MAHOOSIVE buddleia (actually there are about three mahoosive buddleias, this is just one of them).  I didn't take a "before" photo so here is one of it from a few weeks ago:

It now looks like this:

Impressively brutal, huh!  I actually need to take out that whole thick stem, but it was too thick for my shears and needs a saw - Ian says he'll help me with it tomorrow.

All this pruning made a bit of a mess, it won't all fit in the garden waste bin so I'll take it to the tip tomorrow.  Cue garden selfie:

Pruning done I moved on to more general clearance work, the eastern side of the garden is covered with this ground-covering plant, I have no idea what it is but it is a pain in the backside:

And in amongst that are strawberry plants.  Of course.

Anyway it's a right old mess and will be an ongoing task, I reckon.

Other assorted photos I took include the flower of the annoyingly twiggy jasmine plant, which is not at all what I expected.  Is everyone still sure this is a jasmine?!

My snapdragon (antirrhinum) plant which I brought with me from the flat (actually it's second generation as it seeded from the original one).  Snapdragons remind me of my Grandad so this one is sort of in memory of him.

And this plant, which is a sedum I think, which had beautifully captured some water droplets:

Around 6pm Ian came out and suggested that as it was getting dark (hooray for it staying lighter longer!) perhaps I wanted to come inside and have some dinner?  I was pretty knackered so agreed...

Tall hallway

Our stairs have a full turn in them about halfway up ie. they turn back on themselves, resulting in a small landing and a window on that wall.  This means that wall is reeeeeally tall and the window on it looks a bit small and silly, so we've been pondering what to do with it.

Our friend Colin reckons we should build a mezzanine reading nook/snug area, but we reckon this sounds like a lot of hard work ;)

Stupid photo of me showing how tall it is:

How it currently looks (I took this photo before the window was replaced):

My proposed mock-up:

Whaddya reckon?!

Windows and doors and keys, oh my!

Today I got home to discover I couldn't get into the house - for a really exciting reason; the new front door had been fitted!  Luckily Ian was home to let me in ;)

View when I left the house yesterday morning (yes that's a man leaning out of empty frames, about to take a hammer and chisel and saw to them!)

The window guys had also fitted the kitchen window and back door today - the rest were done yesterday.  The only thing remaining is the patio doors, which haven't arrived yet - can't really get too cross with the window company since they brought our installation forward so weren't expecting to need it until this time next week!  They'll come back to fit that, hopefully not too long until it turns up.

 Living room windows, fitted yesterday - the horizontal split really balances the windows' dimensions out - previously they looked really tall and skinny but we think they look much more normal now.

Here's a photo that shows the old windows - hopefully you can see what I mean - the vertical division seems to draw the eye up and down so they look really tall and narrow.

Exciting red door arrives!  With sidelight frame to the left.

Red front door fitted - we love it!

Front door inside (err guess who didn't notice the off-centre doormat!)

Knocker/peep hole

The front door is super-secure which is a nice reassurance - we live in a safe area but a bit of extra security never hurts.  It's a composite door so has a steel frame and about a billion locking points plus deadlocks.  It closes super snugly so keeps draughts out as well which is rather nice!  

We do have a matching number 5 but we haven't put it up yet.

Back door:

The back door is great cos we went for a double glass panel which lets in SO much light!  

This was the old back door, viewed from outside - I'm not sure how obvious it is but the window in the old one had misted up/decayed between the two layers of glass (previously the only double glazing in the entire house, haha!) so you couldn't see through it at all and as a result not much light came through:

Finally here's a pic of the back of the house showing this side of new windows and doors (apart from the patio door).  Stupidly I didn't take a photo of the front of the house whilst it was light so you'll have to wait for that!

Update: View of the front of the house:

Ugh.  Look at the state of the garage door.  And the moss on the roof.  Nothing like making some improvements to make you notice what still needs to be done, eh!

Windows - Day One

One of the things we budgeted for when offering/purchasing this house was the cost of replacing all the windows and external doors in the house.  They were all the original windows with wooden frames and single glazing, and most of screws holding the handles on were half falling off, and the mechanisms were ancient, so opening and closing the windows was HARD work.  Luckily, given the weather, we haven't had much cause to open them, but also being single glazing means they let a LOT of cold draughts in.

So, this is a huge investment and we feel pretty lucky that we're able to have them all done in one go.

Today was day one of the window replacement and they did 5 of them today:
Bedroom 1
Bedroom 2 x 2
Bedroom 4
Bathroom

Tomorrow they'll start with the Living Room (x 2), then Bedroom 3, then the window on the staircase... and see how they get on.

Ian stayed home today so someone was here and he was sweet enough to take some photos for me :)

The funny thing is, even though uPVC frames are thicker than wood, the windows themselves feel bigger.  They aren't, obviously, but I think there's something about the bright white of the frames and the shiny clear glass that makes it feel as if there's so much more light coming in!

 Bedroom 4:

Work in progress in Bedroom 2:

Bedroom 1:

The back of the house (upstairs windows all done):

Bedroom 1 before and after:

Master Bedroom - update 1

The results of my efforts last night...

More garden clearance

Last week's photo on the left, today's on the right

Sunshine again!  Managed to grab an hour in the garden earlier and cleared a bit of the bed to the right of these pictures which is a little silly as you can't see my hard work!  I'm hoping to make this my veg bed but it needs two huge shrubs digging out which is beyond me so I need to get someone in to do it.

I also cleared a bit more of the grass/moss at the back of the lawn.  Turns out it's not actually quite an oval which is weird.  Wouldn't you just make it an oval so it was neat and tidy rather than have a random wiggle in the back line?  Grr.  Ah well.

The clearance is really hard going, basically there is weed proof membrane underneath all the gravel areas, with gravel on top, and then grass and moss has grown on top.  As a result, the roots are attached to the weed proof membrane and it all creates a heavy mat of grass-gravel-reallystrongmembrane.  Tired now!