It's bluebell time . . .

Yes, it's bluebell time here. These photos were taken a couple of years back, on the way up to the Smallholders' Show at Builth. Our local woods are mistily purpley blue and smell divine . . .



I'm surprized I'm still awake - I feel literally asleep on my feet, and everything above waist height is aching from painting bits just out of reach, or from coopying down to get rid of the moss on the bit of the wall at ground level. OH is doing the high bits and I am doing the bits I can reach from the ground/on a step ladder. Yesterday we cracked on with the back of the house. The far end, beyond OH, gets all the weather and there was hardly any lime-wash left on it, so we have thought long and hard and decided the wall would be painted with masonry paint this time, to try and protect it, as there is crumbly shale in amongst the stone, which is why the top half of the wall is slated up.



I did as much as I could do today, before running out of limewash and then bits I could reach, so I have been indoors painting down in what was mum's bedroom. I can now almost count the number of indoor walls left to paint on the fingers of both hands . . .

I would love to be able to crack on in the garden, but the nearest I got to that today was mowing the lawn before it came on to rain. Ah well. I managed to prick out some seedlings the other day and have some good Hollyhocks and Giant Stocks growing on well. Need to do the same with some Nicotiana and Double Blue Cornflowers in the next couple of days.

My Aquilegias are about to start flowering. I think I lost some over the winter - the nesh kind which of course were the more unusual colours or petals, but I took plenty of seeds last year so I will sow a couple of trayfulls and see what comes up. I have lots of good seedlings from the seeds I bought from the nursery on the Gower last year, ones with golden or splashed foliage, and unusual colours. I can't wait for them to flower. They will be coming with me to the new garden in some shape or form (plants or seeds or both).

Still ploddign along

The joys of Limewash

As you can see, my husband is having to be very Heath Robinson in his approach to painting the bits wot he can't reach . . . using a little short-headed long-handled broom that his mum used to use for getting cobwebs down in the stair well.


If you have an old house, the idea is to let walls breath. We spent a lot of time and money doing just that when restoring this house. I am now on touching-up the lime-washed walls where they have become weathered. I hate lime-washing. Even more, I hate having to mix the perishing stuff. We had a tub half-full of lime-wash with tallow in, left over from the restoration work. It had lived inside the house and kept well but of course, was a thick cheesy lump of lime with water on the top . . . I spent an hour or more yesterday, stirring it with a trowel to combine the two elements. Then I had to try and get an exact match for what is already on the walls, using the last of the powdered yellow ochre pigment we had. We do have another pack which we brought recently when we went to Ty Mawr Lime in Brecon, but as it's imported from a different site in Africa, we didn't know how good a match we could get with it (it looked rather beigey on the colour chart).

Anyway, I was lucky and got EXACTLY the colour I needed for the front of the house, using the last of the original ochre, having figured out that it is the front of the house you see first when you arrive, so that daren't be a patchwork effect. Of course, before you can paint, you have to prepare the wall, which because we live in We(s)t Wales means removing the accumulated moss from the bottom of the walls with a wire brush. As OH is braving the scaffolding, I of course get to do everything at ground level. All I can say is, all this hard unrelenting work (which we couldn't start until April when things warmed up a little, inside and out) is like banging my head against a brick wall and I am going to be absolutely FLOATING when I finally lay down my paintbrush!

I will give a word of warning here, about pigments and lime-wash. They take ages to mix in. They don't appear to be adding much colour at all, then you add some more and then, whoomph, you have a paint which looks like Turmeric and not at all the yellow you need . . . And so it came to pass with the 2nd mix yesterday - which is for the end wall overlooking the paddock. I tried a little test patch and it was obviously too dark though it dried much lighter than it went on. There was an absolute beard of moss at the bottom of the wall too, which took some shifting.

We did have another bucket of lime, but this had lived outside (though under cover) and had set solid. OH had added water to it a few weeks back and let it stand. I had no alternative but to try and lighten the yellow with some of this spoilt lime. It took me ten minutes of struggling to dig out piffling little amounts of lime from the 4" of water on the top, draining it a little in a frizbee with a broken side, and adding it to my yellow bin, before I realized life would be much easier if I poured the water off . . . I didn't want to add too much more water to my mix, so I went in search of a sieve.

We live on a quiet little lane and don't have many cars passing by. Why should it be that just when I am labouring (obviously bra-less!!!) at my front gate, with an old metal kitchen sieve, a large metal salad spoon and a large quantity of soggy old lime, that the world and his wife should start driving past? I didn't have my glasses on so couldn't see who it was, but several cars waved at me so they must, horror, KNOW me!!! My reputation for being the village eccentric has doubtless risen greatly overnight . . .

This old house . . .

Our house, as seen from the paddock . . . a work still in progress.

I seem to have been down memory lane in the brain-singing-a-silly-song department this week - I blame Radio 4 for playing someone singing Noel Coward's "There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner". Since then my brain seems to have gone through its entire repertoire of silly songs from Music Hall days onwards . . .

Mind you, when the above song was stuck in my head at 3 a.m. one morning this week I ended getting up to come on the computer and try and forget to sing it! I listed a pile of stuff to be auctioned on e-bay, and put it on with a delayed start, only to find out it I'd waited until the weekend I could have listed it for free . . .


Above: the bit I have cleaned off and painted up today, which includes the lower half of the inglenook kick-out of the chimney too, just behind the Damson Tree, which as you see, couldn't have been more in the way if it had tried.



I battled on with the outside painting today. It seems never-ending (the painting in general) - but we have made good progress with the Gable walls these past few days. The paddock side is done bar a section half way up on one side which OH said can be done from a ladder, so we need to crack on with the bits we can only do whilst we have scaffolding up, so we have been working on the Inglenook chimney gable end. I did about 6 hours out there in all - preparing the wall (e.g. removing moss on the lower regions!) and then painting, which takes a long time as it is very rubbly and rough in finish from where it had gravel added to the final render coat when it was originally rendered. OH has been doing the top bit, which involves leaning across with an old brush which is on the end of a long long pole - one his mother used to dust the stair well with and which has come into its own again. I'm very glad he is the one with the head for heights . . .



I thought I would include a couple of photos of the Morning Room now it is finished and will probably be renamed now it has the big old mahogany table and chairs in there (most of the latter still waiting seats). This old table came from a Dorset auction (the auction held at Sturminster Newton market) before we moved here, and was cheap as although solid mahogany, some bright spark had thought to glue floor tiles to the top to render it more "useful" in the kitchen . . . Needless to say the top is looking a bit newer these days and doesn't have the depth of patina it should have had according to its age. Ah well, if it was perfect, we couldn't have afforded to buy it!

Below: Gr. Granny C's little dresser is a perfect fit for the blocked in doorway.

The right hand side of my garden, which is just about to burst into Aquilegia to keep the Cowslips company.


I have to confess, whilst I am house-hunting on-line, although not in the market for a bungalow, I am discarding anything more than two modest stories high, or looking "high-maintenance" . . . This house has held us in thrall for far too long. We have spent a king's ransom trying to restore it in the way it should be restored - lime plaster, lime-mortar, limewash, flagstone floors, half-timbering in some areas, a builder who specialized in restoring old houses, etc. I lived in a building site on and off for 16 years. The house, once tarted up again, is wonderful, but it has been a millstone round our necks and I look forward to a retirement where we can potter rather than work like navvies! We have been the custodians of this old house for over 20 years. Time for someone younger to take over and carry the banner.

Because I'm a woman???

An early morning walk down along the river a few days ago . . .



Well, as you know, we are working flat out on redecorating the house at present. So we can really do WITHOUT any more little problems. The plumbing seems to be going wrong all over the house. First the washing machine, which OH had to take to pieces to cure. Then the ground floor toilet won't fill up with water properly and when OH wanted to take THAT to pieces, he found that the chap we'd had here to fit the new Belfast sink in the kitchen a couple of years back had bent the stop cock downstairs so that it couldn't be moved!

We have had a dripping kitchen tap for months, and - being on a roll - OH decided yesterday was the day to sort that out and I was sent in to get 2 washers for it (taking the top half of the kitchen tap with me). I went to the appropriate shop but there was much sucking of teefs and head-shaking so I was guessing, as he searched through the little boxes of "leftovers" on the highest shelf, that I was going to be unlucky with the washers. Then he said the tap is wrecked anyway, as "this bit" is broken and he pointed to what looked like a metal washer (couldn't see it myself, but . . . without the washers, might just as well be). So that meant new taps, and they only did a chrome version of our old-fashioned brass ones bought ten years ago. Price: oh dear, that will be £55 plus VAT. My turn to suck on teefs, and I pointed out I would have to pass this by my OH, as he sent me out for a fiver's worth of washers at most and I can't present him with a bill for over £60 . . . Thinking as I left the shop, OH will bodge this somehow or we will get a much cheaper pair from B&Q . . .

Of course, he bodged it - in that he found he had a spare brass tap (£1 at car boot sale) in his boxes in the stable, and he used the top half of that (with washers) and married it to the bottom half of the original tap. Problem solved. In excess of £60 saved. BUT - and here is the rub - he said it was only the washer which needed replacing on the tap. It wasn't "broken" as they claimed in the shop. Now . . . if he had gone in, I am certain they wouldn't have tried it on with him, because he's a bloke. But because I'm a woman, and apparently ignorant about the inner workings of taps, I am fair game. They don't have the washer, but that's a feeble excuse for new taps, so they say it's broken . . . Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! (And this was a subject we had been discussing only the day before, with regard to women taking cars to garages . . .) Cynical? Moi?

Day Out at the Antiques Fair

You will have to bear with me at the moment, as I am going absolutely FLAT OUT here, painting and gardening etc. However, we felt we deserved a day out on Saturday and we drove up to the Antiques Fair at Builth Wells. Here are a few pics:


All the tools you could ever need, neatly laid out on display.

A lovely stand with lots of interesting pieces.

OH would have loved to have brought both these chairs home with him - especially the primitive chair above. The Windsor chair boelow is made in yew, bar the seat which is elm, I believe.

A bevy of beautiful dolls await new homes.

The Kitchenalia shop is always one of my favourites and there were lots of people shopping there.

Looking down from the gallery.

Plenty of jewellery stalls. My girls would have had a lovely time looking round!

My little treat - 6 more old bobbins with lovely spangles. The one far left just HAD to come home with me because it "spoke" so eloquently - you used what you had in those days . . .

This was OHs indulgence - apparently an "Irish kettle" - more like teapot, though I have a wicked suspicion it may have been a "po" to collect urine for dyeing purposes - hence the spout!!
It is now where the bananas are kept . . .

Back to Acton Scott

I have been a little distracted recently and forgot to post the bestest bit of Action Scott, for me, which was the Bailiff's cottage.

Here you can see the Farm Bailiff and his wife (well, for the day anyway!) enjoying their lunch. Home made (Leek and Potato?) soup - and boy did it smell good - and doorstep sandwiches. I was really taken with the range in the background, and it fairly chucked out some heat.


Next door was the laundry room. Here you can see all the washing day paraphenalia of a bygone age - the tongs (m-in-law had a pair which had been her mother's and probably her grandmother's before that) for getting hot laundry out of the "copper". The Washing dolly, the glass washboard. As you can see, the "copper" here was set in a brick base. I read somewhere recently about country folk sometimes having their bath in the copper of a Saturday night, so as to be clean for church next day. I think it would have been a tight fit in this one!

My favourite room, the larder, which was lovely and cool and roomy and full of all sorts of containers which were familiar to me (mainly as I have a fair few like that at home).

Looking back from the laundry into the kitchen. Note the mangle on the left and the washing tub with a long-handled dolly in it.

In the little hallway was a bread oven which is apparently fired up and used on occasion. I have one downstairs in the big inglenook, but we can no longer use it now that the chimney is capped.

The parlour. A pretty little spinning wheel, centre, and a rag rug, and we have a chair just like the Windsor in the foreground.

One of the bedrooms, complete with utalitarian home-made quilt. I used to sleep in a bed just like that one when I was little, when one of the neighbours got a new bed and we had their old one. Wish we still had it!

Another beautifully-crafted smock on display in a case.

Another bedroom complete with home-fashioned quilt. I fear the wash jug and basin would have offered only cold water in the good old days.

I could quite happily have moved in here and not noticed THAT much inconvenience. An elderly Dorset aunt of my first husband's lived in a cottage with no running hot water (only cold, which was pumped up from the well into the kitchen sink). There was no bathroom and no inside loo - just a honeybucket in a tin shed up the garden, which rubbed cheek by jowl against a rat trap, various garden implements, old buckets etc. and no end of cobwebs! This cottage was a lot more sophisticated!