:: vanilla muffins

:: peacock trousers made from an old skirt of my mother’s

:: Danish candle ring, acquired in Matlock (as you do) while visiting the aged parent

:: a finished kitchen!

:: and bathroom!

(Now just to find a place for the clock and a few pictures, but that sort of thing is the fun bit, I find. Less so, the cleaning of the floor.)

1. A small girl in her tent, in the garden, doing a spot of colouring.

2. A clean kitchen, for the first time in, ooh, three or more years, courtesy of a week’s hard work finishing decorating all those unfinished bits and sanding all those unsanded bits and generally getting the fuck on with it.

3. A bathroom blind fitted, despite our only onlookers being cows.

4. Multi-coloured eggs, some chocolate, some felt, some dyed, hanging on a collection of hazel twigs.

5. The Danish candle ring getting its first use, currently boasting four orange candles and wooden chick, star, daffodil and unknown flower.

6. Pizza base rising, having been made by a – largely unaided – small girl, who only ate a half-dozen raw fistfuls of it at most.

7. Röyksopp’s take on Steve Reich’s ‘Fast’, from Electric Counterpoint.

8. Finding our old dining table a new home in the garden.

9. Two washing lines filled with nearly-dry-in-a-half-hour linen.

10. A field of emerging buttercups.

And you?

So, here we are on a beautiful Monday morning, with Quercus sanding plasterwork and me pottering about while his mother takes the small girl for a run about the place. This is the week when we’re hoping to finish, finally and completely, the extension we started around the time the small girl was born, so the house looks like a bomb has hit, and there is Stuff everywhere.

Partly, we’re doing this in hopes that we might get the upstairs of the house sorted out before the new baby appears sometime in early August. It’s a bit of a tricky one, that. It’s possible that not all of the plaster upstairs needs re-doing; some of it might just be a case of taking off the awful, vinyl-like wallpaper and stabilising what’s underneath with cunning lime-related stuff, and then skimming with a thin coat of new lime. Some of the walls, certainly those downstairs, are going to need to be taken back to the bare cob, and covered up in layers of new lime to replace the crumbling mess of dust currently passing itself off as plasterwork. (We will draw a tactful veil over the plasticky wallpaper and waterproof paint which previous owners thought would be just the ticket for sorting out the damp problems.)

Anyway, the problems with doing this work are as the perpetual lack of money (with both of us working part-time so that we don’t use childcare, we’re always on the strapped end of the spectrum, and obviously impending maternity leave on my part ain’t going to benefit the coffers); the feeling that no matter how wet the day, it’s not quite rainy enough to wipe out savings; the fact that the upstairs will be uninhabitable for possibly the best part of six weeks, depending on the sort of lime we’re able to use (current favourite: a feebly hydraulic lime, which would go off in a few days, as opposed to the non-hydraulic sort traditionally used in cob buildings, which takes six to eight weeks to achieve a set which would withstand even the gentlest of prods), and our house is tiny, meaning there’s nowhere to run, really, instead, and finally, the continual lack of time from which we suffer. We both have some leave left, jobs-wise, but not enough, I fear, to finish the extension work and get the whole of this next bit done.

So, round the houses we go. At the moment, we’re hoping that the way forward is to spend the next week or so finishing off painting and general repairs in the extension, and then the Easter weekend heeling in some plants we’ve been given by various folks trying to help us out in our bid to start a proper garden this summer. (Of course, ‘heeling in’ in this instance means going and getting three trailer-loads of manure, digging over the beds [three thereof, about 6' x 8', 6' x 12', and 12' x 16'] and getting them to a less clay-like state before planting… Nothing is ever simple, is it?), and then moving on to the woodwork involved in preparing the upstairs, with a view to drafting in help sometime in mid- to late May. The help comes in the form of a friend’s recommendation, but at a cost of £180 a day, possibly, for two people. Given that we’ve not paid anyone to do anything on our house bar electrical work and having mains water connected, it goes against the whatsit, rather, to look at giving anyone this sum of money, but with sixteen weeks to go until our second baby makes an appearance, perhaps this is that rainy day… I think it probably is. It would be so nice to feel that we were going to start out with this little person with at least some of the house fixed, so that Quercus hasn’t got all four rooms to go; I’m very keen to avoid having to depart the parish for the eight-week disappearing act I had to pull with a newborn last time, and I’d also quite like to be able to see Quercus other than through a mask and a huge cloud of lime dust sometime this year… Some days I think I’m just horribly impatient; sometimes I feel that these are completely reasonable wants, and we should just fork out to accelerate our progress. I think I’m probably just tired of all our spare time – weekends, holidays, whatever – going on renovation work. Particularly as we are still pretty much habitually knackered because of the vagaries of small person night-time sleeping. I dunno, in short. But I do know that I don’t want to do what we did with our last house, which was to finish doing it up about two weeks before we exchanged contracts on it and moved. I’d like some time to just be in this house, and the longer it takes to do, the shorter the time we’ll get at the end of it, before we need more space and have to move to find it. (Our smaller bedroom is about 6′ 5″ x 10′, and will house two small people and attendant chaos at some point in the near future.)

Anyway, for now, at least, the explosion which has taken place in the house while the kitchen and bathroom contents are displaced makes any other housework pretty much impossible. How terrible.

So, I shall just have to keep going outside to gloat about the grass, and the fact that we now have something which closely resembles An Actual Garden.

I’ve been away for a week’s general lazing about the place in Sussex, with Quercus’s mother. She has been getting the small girl up most days, and letting me sleep in until, well, whenever I felt like it, before providing me with cooked breakfasts, fresh juice and general freedom, the result of which is that I look about ten years younger than I did when I left, but am also slightly struggling to get going on the normal rythm now that I’m back in Devon. Partly, I’m attributing this to the reason for my departure in the first place: we’re going all out on finishing off outstanding work in the kitchen and bathroom. All those little things that had been overlooked, or never finished, or abandoned because other pressing things came to the fore, like, you know, leaking windows and render falling off the house – those are on The List at the moment. The next week should see both rooms repainted, the floor cleaned and sealed, the woodwork sanded and repainted (the gloss we used sucks big-time – under two years old and it’s noticeably yellowed; I’m contemplating eggshell this time…?), doors rehung and painted where needed, plasterwork finished and sanded, a bath replumbed and a whole host of other merriments which escape me at present.

So, the rest of the house looks like a patchwork quilt exploded on/in it – the contents of the kitchen are currently taking over most of the book/toy/general pottering room which used to be our dining room before we built the extension, and the sitting room is sort of languishing in general I’ve-just-got-back-please-unpack-me style.

But just think! A week, and then cupboard sorting! Tidying! Putting things back in place, clean, dust-free, orderly!

I know it is a bit on the tragic side, but this is one of my favourite things.

And then… the calm before the storm. For we, being reasonably intelligent and thoughtful souls, have decided to re-plaster the upstairs of our house, including taking down possibly two-hundred-year-old ceilings, by August! Woo! Clearly, in this house, nothing says ‘ill-timed renovation of a major and very dusty nature’ like ‘I’m pregnant!’. Bring on the toxic concoctions of lime-related woe! Twenty-four weeks down, sixteen to go…

In the making:

• a pair of rather appealing Moomin trousers. That is trousers of a Moomin-print-fabric nature, I hasten to add; I have as yet no actual Moomin to clothe.

• a pair of Liberty peacock print trousers, made from an old skirt of my mother’s that I found in amongst the stash of treasures Quercus’s mother is storing for that fabled and golden time ‘when the house is finished’. (I am not sure this time will ever come to pass; it has an almost Arthurian ring about it, doesn’t it? The Once and Future Furniture.

And you?

One day, there you are, making felted eggs, and the next thing you know, you’re on to a whole family of hen plus chicks.

And you?