Break Through

I am currently struggling with my camera/PC link (mainly due to having nearly 16 Gig of pics on the camera card, which takes the PC more than 10 minutes to riffle through looking for new ones it has not seen before! It gets fed up looking and times out declaring, like a teenager sent to find their school uniform in a typical bedroom, "Nope.... It's not there"). This post may get published sans pictures and I will edit some in at a later date. If you are reading it now like that, then do come back in a day or two and check them out.

Kitchen looking from 'old' to 'new'

We reached a major landmark in the kitchen extension project on Sunday, finally breaking through the inner wall to reveal the true size of the new room. You may recall that the wall here was the traditional Roscommon blend of boulders and concrete (at least down here on the ground floor - upstairs this changes to modern cavity blocks telling us that this rear extension was built in 2 stages) 11 inches thick inside of which we, when we rebuilt, we added standard studwork framed with '3 by 2' timber, infilled with 3" insulating foam but then covered with half inch plywood and then the plaster-board. The ply being to let the wall take the weight of any shelving we might decide to put in there and load to the gunwales, as we do. Total wall thickness then, 15 inches. No mean wall.

...and from new to old

You may also recall that we had kango'd our hole from the outside inwards but left all the stud-wall intact (with a sheet of MDF across the window) so as not to fill the kitchen with dust and rubble. Eventually though, we were going to have to make the new end (door/windows unit) draught-tight and lock-able and then cut out our aperture through the stud-wall. That was, as I said, Sunday's game. We also made the concrete step which rises you from the old kitchen. 3" or so up to the new.

Our replacement suite

You can now stand in the kitchen and see the full size of the the new space. It was (and still is) 8 feet wide but was, up to now, only 8'3" long. A bit 'bijou' and hence Liz having to do all her bakery prep, bread-kneading etc in the Dining Room as well as us having to store a lot of kitchen gear, bakery stores and crockery in there too. The extension adds 11'9" to that length giving us a new dimension of 20 feet. I don't think we have ever owned a room with a 20' length in any house.

There is icing on this cake and a cherry on top, too! The icing is that we now have a big area of glass looking out at the garden, the raised flower bed and the big pond, plus at sunsets in Summer. OK, it also looks out at the car-port and the various piles of wood, pallets and straw bales there-in but every silver lining has a cloud. We have never had a window looking out that way up till now (except the old kitchen window which was always a bit 'tunnel vision' buried as it was 11 feet down between house and Tígín). It is also nice when I am walking the dogs or working out there to be able to look in, see the kitchen light on and wave to anyone in the kitchen. After a couple of weeks with the west window aperture boarded up with that MDF it is also amazingly light in the new kitchen now that we have the acres of glass.

I treated my chain saw to a new chain for the 'Doris' tree

The 'cherry' is undoubtedly the cat flap. Cat-folk will know that cats can be very demanding of being allowed in and out and you spend a good part of any day hearing the pleading 'miaow' and getting up from what you are doing to open a door for the animal. If it's raining they tend to get you to try all the doors in succession just in case it might not be raining out of the 'next' one. They will also happily use the house as a corridor, miaowing to come in the front door, then striding through the house and straightway asking to be let out the back. Or asking to be let out and then sprinting round to another door to be let back in.

The tree looks much diminished now
it's all cut up.

We have 4 cats at present so all of the above is four-fold. Each cat has its own way of making its demands known. Blue will scrabble and scratch at the aluminium threshold at the bottom of the front door. Soldier seems to fling himself at the door like some kind of DEA policeman on a drugs bust and hangs by his front claws from the window panel with his chin just high enough to look in accusingly like the "What? No Meat?" character in the war-time cartoon. He has destroyed the paintwork and scratched up the wood quite badly. If we can ever break him of the habit it will take quite some filler, sanding and painting to get the front door back to its glossy red of 5 years ago.

Messing with the bottom slice of tree.

Up to now we have not been able to do a cat-flap - both the front and back door are good strong ones with fancy panels which would not take a shop-bought cat flap. The new kitchen 'end' though has flat panels (all be it 3 cms thick) so we installed one and are now getting the cats used to it. All 4 quickly learned how to use it and that it is always open, even when humans are asleep or not indoors or (Heaven forbid!) saying things like "No - I just let you in the other door...you can bloomin' well wait!"

No more need, soon then, for our in house 'scoring' system which we use to decide whose turn it is NOW to let the cat in/out. We started with a simple "Please, Liz, I have a dog on my lap" - if you had a dog on your lap you were exempted from cat doorman duties, making coffee/tea or what ever. This then got a bit more complicated if we both had a dog, and a whole Poker-score system evolved. A dog on your lap AND a kitten on your shoulder trumped a mere dog. A single cat trumps a single dog. A cat and knitting trumps any combination not containing knitting. I'm on the phone/email/Twitter/Facebook carries some weight but not much. Ultimately, if all else is equal then a simple "I did the last one" settles it.

Our dogs never do "lying in a heap". None can stand being
in contact with another to sleep - so 3 dogs, 3 beds!

Possibly, just possibly, all that will go away and all the cats will exclusively use the cat flap. There will be no more need of humans attending doors, upstairs windows (yep, they quickly worked out that you can shout in through the main bedroom window from the new kitchen roof; you just leap onto the cattle-race wall and from there up the Tígín north gable, then walk along the ridge of that building and descend to the roof at the south end. Wait on the kitchen roof though - a half asleep human might knock you off the window sill when they open the window for you). What could POSSibly go wrong?

It's a Wood Lemon.

Wedge cut from a tree being felled. "It's
a wood lemon!" says H (5)

We don't have a huge number of friends round here with any children of baby-sitting age, so we don't get to do a lot of it. In the week, through circumstances and a clashing appointment or two for Carolyn (she of the Mini-Horses) led to me minding young H(5) for a couple of hours during the day. He's a great lad and dead easy to keep entertained and happy, particularly with the option of "exploring" the local fields, hedges and abandoned buildings. He made me smile, though, when he discovered a wedge of tree trunk of the type you cut out to make the tree fall in the right direction and said "It's a wood lemon!" You knew immediately what he meant.

Our ever more magnificent Marans rooster, Gandalf

He is a carpenter's son, though, and a curious, enthusiastic helper of Dad in the workshop when ever he gets a chance, so I tried to steer him down the correct route (wedge, tree, felling etc). He just took all my 'man-splaining' in, nodded sagely and said "Yes, but it's still a wood lemon and that's what I will call it". No arguing with that, then, H.

Both these pieces now evicted, the leather
 sofa and the single-chair.

But now I must change to sombre funereal tones for a couple of paragraphs (cue dirge-y violin music) while I relate the sad passing of a much loved item in this house and family, the prized leather, 3-seat sofa. This huge item was a lovely thing. It was tan colour leather and had a seat long enough for me to lie down in full stretch (and to use as a guest bed) at over 6 feet. Indeed, I have enjoyed many an afternoon nap on it.

In with the 'new'. Our replacement
furniture starts to arrive. Liz is still
playing book-shelf games..

I have long forgotten but Liz tells me it came from John Lewis 10-15 years ago and cost over £1000 even then in a sale. I do remember that we had to get the double glazed bay-window unit taken out of the Faversham house to get it into the room and again when we were moving here. We also had some fun getting it in here with Liz giving 'Sparks' and I a hard time, convinced that it wouldn't fit if Sparks assembled the stairs banister BEFORE we tried to wrangle it in.

New peas in the poly tunnel.

We have had the thing for all those years and,obviously, it is no longer pristine - normal human wear and tear, dogs and so on but that was all OK until last Summer. At that stage, we obtained the new kittens and they were given that room as a safe haven from dogs while they grew up a bit. That was our mistake. We'd given the kittens a litter tray, of course, and they were doing possibly as much as 95% of their pee and poo in it but we knew we were getting the odd accident, where we had to  clear up cat-mess. Obviously the room smelled a bit 'niffy' sometimes but we thought we were on top of it and were sure that once the kittens had grown up and evicted from the room, we could clean and air it all away.

The peach tree survived and is now putting out new leaves.

No such luck. Despite all our cleaning, the sofa continued to reek and we started to dismantle it, stripping covers off cushions and even putting leather covers through the washing machine but to no avail. On one occasion Liz found my 'washed' covers drying and thought from the continuing smell that I'd forgotten to wash them, so they went through again. Liz even started to research professional cleaning companies and preparations but cat pee is some kind of special chemical brew - its scent chemicals 'glue' to fabrics in an enzyme reaction, so you need chemicals to undo that. Probably not cheap, or even possible out here in the sticks.

A familiar sight from buildering days - a
stack of plaster and foam "slabs" taking
up most of the floor space where they will
eventually end up on walls and ceiling

There we were, then, making the tough decision like you would for an elderly pet, and deciding to put the belovéd sofa out of it's misery. It is now out by the sheep field waiting to become the base of this year's bonfire and we have been handing cash to the proprietor of a furniture shop in Balla-D. This morning the replacement suite turned up. Because it was a suite - sofa and 2 chairs, we also needed to evict Liz's lovely single-seat chair which came to us originally from Diane, but that is not for the bonfire. We donated that to the suite delivery guys who said they would be able to sell it 2nd hand.

New kitchen access for cats. 

Friends of the Blog who know the Lady of this House will not be surprised to know that all this furniture moving was all too much temptation to not blitz and clean the entire room. That has been Liz today including unloading book shelves (we have many)  to move those so that floors could be cleaned under, moving every other piece of furniture, pictures on walls, standard and desk lamps and even hoovering top corners for cobwebs, polishing windows and on and on.

Curried hake, leek and butter bean stew. 

As of now that is still happening, so pictures of the finished room will be saved for the next post. Meanwhile the room is now NO LONGER AVAILABLE to unsupervised cats and dogs so it is being kept for 'best' like an old Irish 'Parlour' or 'Best Room'. We have a series of guests through April. They will be relieved to not have to recline in puddles of cat pee or go home with their clothes "smelling a bit funny".

Things To Do

When Liz and I were working, both of us had the kind of jobs where your working day was made up of a hotch-potch of different bits from a broad range of types of task. In my case, being IT based I'd have hardware assembly and moves going on, users to 'create' and manage, projects to manage, management information to compile for periodical and one-off reports and at some stages also a warehouse assembly team to plan, deploy, rotate, control holidays and absence for and so on. They were the sort of jobs where you needed a "To-Do" list or you'd lose track. Sometimes this would just be on a pad or note book but if we were feeling tired, under-manned and over-worked (quite often!) this would go onto the dry-wipe board on the office wall and if somebody came in to give you more work who you didn't feel like co-operating with in any kind of a shiny, enthusiastic way, you could stride theatrically over to the board and write his job somewhere way down the list to make sure he understood that it might not happen any time soon. To-do lists also give you the satisfaction of crossing out or highlightering jobs when they are complete.

Well, I am back into 'To-Do' lists now in my not-so-as-you'd-recognise-it 'leisured' retirement. Mentally it is in three parts - REAL jobs which will actually get done, Jobs that will happen (Projects which will start) if we get any small financial windfall (e.g. an endowment ripening) and then jobs that we'd love to do if we win the lottery. The latter list is unlikely given that we very rarely do the lottery, but it includes major works like "Build conservatory on end of kitchen and incorporate Tígín building into house". The latter two bits are just mental lists and we can ignore them for the purposes of this blog. The REAL list 'lives' in my bound note book and just out of interest I thought I'd share the current list with you to give you some idea what I am meant to be up to over the next few days and weeks. I have added explanatory notes where you might need some fleshing out of the raw statement.

Things to do as at 22nd Feb 2013

• Dog-proof fences and gates round yard
• Clear up 'sneddings' on Vendor Anna's land (Sneddings are the thin branch ends left when you cut out all the decent sized logs from a tree. This rubbish is still lying in the field where Bob and I felled the ash tree and need tidying into the hedge)
• Dig Pond
• Hanging-garment rod in Utility Room ceiling
• Hedge trimming in East field (see picture - we are currently most of the way round and can nearly tick off this job)
• Cat flap on Utility Room door
• New canopy on raised bed mini-poly-tunnel cloche
• New doors on chicken house and calf house.
• Work top in kitchen where 6 foot fridge-freezer used to be
• Fireplace (hearth) in Living Room (This is the only incomplete bit of the original house-build project)
• Stainless steel anti-cat panel on kitchen wall. (Cats are messing up the wall scrabbling up to the window-sill)
• Car-port over caravan
• 'Greenhouse' in 3rd bay of former hay barn, to be built out of corrugated transparent plastic
• Gut 'shower room' and galley out of caravan
• Build 4th berth in caravan
• Stand caravan on blocks with wheels off ground
• Close-able doors on rabbit run 'bedrooms'
• Pallet sized water tank plumbed to sheep drinker in orchard
• Pallet sized water tank plumbed to sheep drinker in east field
• Drinker in east field
• Burn hedge trimmings in east field
• Fencing east field (sheep proof)
• Clean outside of caravan (algae etc)
• Brambles on road edge of front lawn
• Mow round outsides of allotment and orchard, under larches and along both sides of lawn hedge.

That's it for the moment, unless we can think of any more. Should keep me out of mischief. You never get bored, anyway!