We have been making rather a lot of window thingies. Well, technically, I have been folding things like a mad creature, while Hero menaces tissue paper and glue. They are quite addictive, though, these things – I so love looking at the colours with the sun coming through the window, and anything which reminds me to look outside, that the world will not always be covered either in rain or in mud, can only be a good thing. (I shouldn’t say this, really, given that the last three days have brought bright winter sunshine and crackling starry nights.)

Hero has a new coat, and pink and purple boots made for her by the very lovely shoemaker in Exeter. Her choice of colours, which was nice. The buckles are a complete sod, it must be said, but ultimately they are lovely boots, and how many people get to choose not only the colours but the style of their shoes, from a virtually limitless list of suggestions? If you can’t do it when you’re three and a half, then when?

Our newest familiar, Hecate, is settling in well. Wixon is, shall we say, quite taken with her.

The aforementioned winter sunshine. Good, isn’t it?

Both the heart-shaped casserole (full of rice pudding, a rather unlikely favourite of mine of late; sadly I am alone in this as neither Hero nor Quercus can be persuaded of its divinity) and the cow coffee pot visible in the background are things which make my heart sing whenever I spot them.

My ridiculous magpie-like love of shiny colourful things took over when I saw this sling (a Girasol Earthy Rainbow, if you’re interested) for a very good price indeed. We have bought next to nothing new for Mirth; it seemed nice that she should have a sling to herself, given how much use it’s going to get!

Our bedroom, post-transformation. Look! A ceiling! Which stays up and everything! Not particularly neat at the moment and covered in baby-related paraphernalia, but the room is blissful, and I am quite in love with the increasing quantities of wood which are becoming visible in our house. (Not least as their presence means the roof is not about to join us for afternoon tea.)

Mirth, aptly named both here and in real life, sporting a rather fetching bib and velvety suit passed on to us by some very lovely friends.

Mirth investigating this whole sitting malarky. Note also Pink Mousey, who looks like Sniff of Moomin fame, and who was sent to us by the lovely L-Q-S.

Mad hair and mad exploits with a new puzzle house and a plethora of animals. Hero’s ‘farm’ now includes – but is not limited to – a camel, a fox, a wolf and a wild boar. She is quite the connoiseur.

Such a smiley baby, it is just not true. Also, note plumptious legs – this babe is already nearly 20 lb! That explains all those night-feeds, then…

Star lights on shelves of jars with various bits and bobs. Including plastic reindeer. As you do.

It’s February already, somehow. Mirth will be six months old on the tenth of the month, and, in between sanding and waxing a Stokke highchair bought for £20 at an advent fair, I am wondering how on earth she can on the verge of joining us for dinner, yet her careful attentive watching as she sits on one or other of us while we eat assures me that she is, as does her poise when sitting and her reaching hands as she sees glasses and cutlery move. January has been a difficult month – one of those where everything goes wrong – and we are still finding our feet in its wake, but Mirth and Hero provide me with daily joy, genuine glee, at having two such bright souls in my life. (Yes, even at 3 a.m.) So, I am reminding myself of the happy things as I reach for the strength, the persistence, to sort out all the irritations, the challenges, the oh-you-just-bloody-well-would-wouldn’t-yous. (Current tally: frozen pipes = no washing machine or dishwasher and only sporadic sink water; new washing machine as last one gave up; car breaking down intermittently since Christmas Eve because of a veg oil conversion; my car’s brakes decided to stop working properly due to Comedy French Wiring (a well-known term on sad-git car forums); sleep, the lack thereof; money, the lack thereof; hard-drive dependability, the lack thereof.)

And in less than two weeks, we begin the next phase of work on our house, and Mirth, Hero and I will be heading to West Sussex for a few weeks (anyone local, do say hello!), to stay with Quercus’s mother while Quercus takes ceilings and plaster down. As part of this, we are meeting a central heating engineer later on today; I am quite excited (though I’d be so more fully if I had worked out an infallible bank-robbery strategy first, given that we are probably looking at about six thousand pounds to do the sort of thing we need to do). Our pipes are frozen for the fourth year running today; we had a heating plan and a plumbing plan designed for us by ex-friend David, and basically the latter sucks and the former never materialised. So, we’re finally taking the bull by the proverbial and seeing if we can at least fix the heating problem. At the moment, we have a woodstove in the living room, and that’s it. What we’re hoping for is a larger stove (12kw or so) with a back boiler, and thus a radiator in the kitchen, a towel rail in the bathroom, and radiators in each of the bedrooms. Of course, our house being difficult and minute, it is a tricky job and the heights and levels are all wrong. But it would be so, so good to get this sorted once and for all – I would not miss the lakes which appear on our windowsills each morning, and nor would I miss the mould which forms when things get damp, and nor would I miss the searing heat we achieve in the living room combined with the chilling see-your-breath cold of the bedrooms.

Still to come: the saga of the Steinway piano sale (or not), the rice pudden recipe to end all rice puddens, and the fact that I appear to be sliding towards vegan cooking.

So, that’s where I am at the moment. Where are you, internets?

Dark evenings, darker mornings, and we inch closer to midwinter proper. Devon has yet to feel the real bite of winter cold this year – it’s been incredibly mild, such that while we’ve had the stove lit, we’ve also had the stairs door open, letting the heat drift upwards to the (unheated) bedrooms. The lime upstairs is still going off, we think, taking its time since it was put up on the new lath work in August, and creating strange patterns of damp-looking limewash from time to time as the warm air from downstairs makes its way into the eaves.

Things to make, things to eat (peppermint bark, in this case). Most of the shopping done (we’re going easy financially, so no huge trips, really, anyway), and the house reasonably ordered as we look forward to Quercus’s mother visiting soon. Oh, we are genuinely looking forward to another pair of hands. The small girl, who will forthwith be known as Hero because it’s getting confusing remembering to differentiate between ‘small’ and ‘smaller’, has been quite challenging of late, and while Quercus and I know that it’s a question of adjusting to new family dynamics while at the same time being three, and also being born of two parents who are, shall we say, determined, that knowledge is not making the day-to-day battles any easier, frankly. There is a lot of willpower in this household, and although we are sure that it’s the adults who are in charge, sometimes getting that message across takes quite a wee while, and no small measure of self-control and anger management. Hey ho – we shouldn’t have joined etc. etc. I am trying not to take the constant struggles for power and attempts to stage minor coups personally; I think it is just that Hero has reached that age when she is aware of possibilities, and the limitations to what she perceives is very frustrating, so she exerts control over the things she can control, i.e. the time it takes her to put shoes on, whether or not she is hungry/thirsty/tired, whether or not she can stand up/do her coat up/find something… The list is endless, and super-annoying in the short-term, but ultimately, I keep telling myself that she will not be doing such things when she’s five, and wow, how quickly that time will come around, if the first three and a half years are anything to go by. I am not always quite the parent I want to be (that calm oasis of maternal love), but I am trying my best, and hopefully the result will not be too too awful. I do wish that it wasn’t such an uphill struggle at the moment, that said; I feel myself to be constantly – though I know, rationally, that this is an exaggeration – at war with Hero, and I hate that, but I also feel equally strongly that I am her parent, not her friend, and that this means sometimes I have to be the Person Who Says, albeit kindly and respectfully and patiently, and she has to be the Person Who Does, albeit in a few minutes, in her own way. But oh, for it to happen just once in a while without the back-and-forth negotiating, or the wailing, or the howls of despair. This Too Shall Pass.

In amidst the challenges we are managing some organised chaos festive buggering-about. We have made stained glass windows à la Claire, and confections à la Orangette. We have baked saltdough stars for a wreath (our front door is getting to look positively civilised these days, as Quercus limewashed the house again this year, and repainted the sticky molasses-like stuff on the bottom of the house, and we have even now got a door which shuts properly and which you can only see daylight through in tiny cracks…), and used red paint and wooden stamps on brown paper for festive wrappings. I have replaced my obsession with needle-felted pumpkins with felt lantern-making; I made thirty-two of the little blighters for autumn, and have taken down those only to put up a miniature cream version for winter. (And no. No. We have not got a season table. No. For some reason, they make my toes curl. Instead, we have the rather ancient twiglet shelves. They are so-called because genuinely, the uprights look like giant twiglets. And on the twiglets lurk toys and something to indicate the passing of the seasons. That is as twee as it gets, frankly, without my need for a sick bucket becoming overwhelming. I know: a part of me is missing, and I am a horrible, awful person. Meh.)

I also realise that I haven’t put up any pictures of the upstairs of the house since Mirth, the name by which the smallest of our number will now be appearing here, arrived in August. I must remedy this, for lo! we hath walls, and ceilings, and even limewash! Quercus has been working quite hard lately to get the stairs finished off before Chrimbly; as a result, there are now bastard little cat paw-prints in white gloss on the carpet here and there (animals are such a joy), and hopefully we will have a completely-done-bar-the-stairs-carpet-because-flat-surfaces-are-hard-enough-let-alone-things-which-go-up-and-down first floor, at which point there will definitely be a picturethon (and yes, of course that is a word). Gratuitous baby pictures follows:

(How? How? How is she FOUR MONTHS OLD? It is not possible, I tell you: the laws of Physics – they be brokeded.)

For the meantime, I go, to make a fourth stocking, to mix up a Dark Solstice Cake, to sort out two more rolls of wrapping paper, to make yet more peppermint bark as presents, and to contemplate the genuinely horrific prospect of a grocery shop at some point this week. And you, dear reader? Full of festive spirit, or bah-humbugging in the corner?

Right now…

:: twelve gallons of wine – twelve! – made, of course, when I’m not drinking…

:: washing drying on the line in a short early-October summer

:: limewashing in the early mists of the autumn coolness

:: cobwebs, chard and pumpkins in our garden at the moment

:: sleeping babies on ancient battered sofas

:: a Malabrigo hat cast on for the littlest one as the days grow cooler

:: a berry-coloured cardigan in progress for her sister, and seeming to take aaaaages because I’ve done a lot of chunky knitting lately, so that 4mm needles seem tiny

:: preparations for Quercus’s birthday (Sunday) afoot, slyly, whenever he is out

:: smugness that we’ve stacked the woodshed full to bursting, and that we’ve yet to light the stove this year, and it’s nearly the end of October.

And you?

Right now, I am:

• listening to Thievery Corporation’s latest offering and loving it

• wondering how the small girl will manage at her grandma’s for a few days; Quercus is driving her over as I write this, for her first solo stay. She’s excited – helped to pack her things and was literally bouncing with enthusiasm come departure time – and I so hope that carries her through any mama-orientated wobbles

• immensely grateful that we have this as an option; Quercus and I haven’t spent any time together on our own for the better part of three years, and while the odd evening out has been managed here and there, the notion of several days is simply unreal, even if those days will be filled with limewashing…

• inhaling the scent of a particularly lovely sort of Nag Champa incense picked up by the small girl in Firkins, a long-term favourite shop in Exeter

• watching the corn turn golden in the field behind the house; it really is summer, then, despite rumours to the contrary…

• thinking of the crafty things I can do in the next few days if the small girl is happy with her grandma – so far, the list includes a bag for her to take to playschool (she’s been going for a morning a week, and seems, with the odd wobble, to be enjoying it, which has been very good for maternal energy levels when she gets back…!), a small quilt for the impending baby, some more trousers for the small girl, whose legs are growingly ridiculously fast, it seems, and possibly the shortening of my Storchenwiege sling.

• marvelling at the notion – quite ridiculous! – that this baby is less than two weeks away, universe permitting.

And you?

I’ve sort of made my peace with the whole plastering situation – it helped that my midwife has lived through a cob renovation herself, and was thus able to see a downstairs bed as a boon in a homebirth situation! I’ve been maintaining my sanity in a variety of ways, many of which are utterly ludicrous, frankly. The first of them is probably watercolour lanterns, with which I have been obsessed ever since I first encountered them probably six months ago on the ol’ interweb. Some stonking examples can be seen here; some are star-shaped, some more traditionally rectangular, and some like little flat stars in which a candle sits, rather than being hidden from view. I haven’t tried the flatter ones yet; clearly they are next on the list.

I feel I ought to have more to say for myself, really, but last night the small girl woke up at 10.00 and 2.00; I went in both times, only to find the second time that twenty minutes later she was awake again, and I had just got comfortable (which, at 37.5 weeks pregnant, is no mean feat), and asking to come in with me, which I went with for the sake of sleeeeeeeeep and happy oblivion. But then an hour later, after fidgetting and changing sides and poking and prodding, she asked to go back to her bed. Only to do an encore of the twenty-minutes-later-just-getting-back-to-sleep ‘MAMAAAAAAAAAA!’ call-back. I am on my knees, I find, today, so words in a sensible order of arrangement are just not high on the list.

Rationally, I know that this sleep-deprived state will end (one way or another, she said darkly), but at the moment, I am finding it very hard to imagine why on earth I put myself in this situation, and how we’re going to get through the coming months without one or all of us in tears.

Oh, and the plasterer cried off again today. Apparently he’s coming on Wednesday. I have kind of gone back to just not thinking about it, really. If he comes, he comes. If he doesn’t, well, he doesn’t. I think it looks like this: another two coats of limewash on the small girl’s room, done over two days because of drying times, hotly followed by gloss painting the painted woodwork and waxing the rest. After that, possibly we’ll lay a carpet a friend has passed on to us, in her room at least. That takes us, hopefully, to just the other side of the weekend. As for our room, well, say another three days’ plastering to get the stairs, landing and our bedroom top-coated in lime, with another few days’ drying time after that, and then however many coats of limewash are needed to get it looking right. I have started lobbying to use breathable paint rather than limewash because paint would = two coats, while limewash, particularly where the ceiling on the stairs hasn’t been fully plastered but only patched, would probably mean at least seven, at a coat per day. At this stage, I don’t think I care if we have to buy paint which costs more than limewash would. I just want to finish this. See? There I was saying I’d reached peace with it (the first few paras were written yesterday evening), and all it takes is a crappy night’s sleep to have me back to the verge of black despair. Lightweight, me.

On the plus-side, we’ve got a car seat for the new baby, and we’ve ordered blinds for the kitchen where we’ll hopefully be meeting him or her.

I go, to a Portland Bill-flavoured rest, during which an insanely awake-seeming small girl will no doubt offer a helpful commentary on the whys and wherefores of life in a lighthouse, and I will pretend to sleep.

Today is not a good day, really. Well, in lots of ways it’s a lovely day – the sun is shining, there is washing drying on the line, and this morning the small girl and I made three different colours (orange, red and yellow, coloured with beets and turmeric) of play-dough courtesy of this recipe, and there is chocolate in the house, which is of course never a bad thing.

But ye gods, I am sick of living in a renovation project.

We’ve now been sleeping downstairs for about two months, I think. There’s less than a foot of space down the side of our bed, because the room is not large, and chunks of the ceiling of the room in which the small girl is sleeping are falling down, trailing the dust of centuries across the whole room and decorating everything with a lovely reminder that an earthen house is just that: made of earth. The whole house is dusty, and there is furniture in stupid places, not to mention the storage garage down the road that a neighbour has very kindly lent us for storing most of the things which would normally live in the book/sitting room (and of course, because the whole damn thing is taking longer than I thought, I’ve now run out of distracty-knitting wool because it’s all stored in said garage, under half a ton of other crap).

More than that, Quercus and I are still having to operate on a divide-and-conquer footing, which means he’s either at work, working on the house or asleep, and I am either looking after the small girl, going to a chiropractor appointment or trying to sleep. And STILL we’re nowhere near done. The plasterer took ages to do the first coat on our newly-lathed ceiling, after Quercus and some very kind friends bust a gut to get the preparation done in time for him. THEN the lime took MUCH longer to dry than we’d hoped, partly because June was so rubbish in weather terms. And now he can’t come back for TWO WEEKS, even though the plaster is ready to be overcoated, because he has friends coming to visit. TWO WEEKS. I am due to have this baby in FIVE WEEKS. We have two coats of lime to go on both our bedroom and the landing/stairs. We have three coats of limewash which needs doing after that, and then the normal moving furniture/cleaning/carpet reinstating shenanigans. FIVE WEEKS.

I just wanted a bit of July to be just us, the three of us. To have some time to ourselves, in our newly-sorted bedrooms. To maybe, I don’t know, go out to the sea or something, and have some tea somewhere. To get some rest. To organise things ready for our new baby.

Instead, Quercus is taking unpaid leave from work, making our already-tight budget even tighter, so that he can work pretty much non-stop on the house, and it still looks pretty unlikely that we’re going to finish in time.

I’m a bit fed up.

:: the wildflowers we sowed this spring flowering

:: the size of those poppies

:: the fact that I’m not the only one who appreciates waist-high flowering bedlam

:: skies like this

:: small girl exhaustion after a happy morning at the village playschool (why is it more often called pre-school these days I wonder?)

:: having a garden to sow things in (today: leaf beet, amaranths, Italian parsley and basil)

:: having a lathed ceiling, complete with the first coat of lime plaster on it (though if it could see its way clear to bloody well drying now that would be good – it’s taken twice as long as we’d hoped courtesy of wet dank weather…)

:: having a bedroom which no longer looks like a construction project (it’s definitely back to being a room, even if it’s a room involving wet plaster and bare floorboards; let’s just hope the rest of the plaster coats dry more rapidly… We’re really down to the line here on timing – five weeks to go until this baby is due to arrive…)

:: beech woods and being able to actually walk a half-mile with the small girl, courtesy of a McTimoney chiropractor who (against my expectations, I confess) appears to have reversed to a large degree the SPD I’ve been feeling since week fifteen of this pregnancy

And finally,

:: the news that, contrary to the scare-mongering conference I had with an obstetric registrar who implied (as ever, it seems to me) that I am reckless and badly-informed in my plans to have this baby at home (and who told me that my midwife was very worried about my lack of growth and under-sized fundal height measurement), the baby who is actually in there, doing its thing, is now reckoned to be about 4lb 15oz, if ultrasound is anything to go by

:: the feeling that, unlike last time, where things like this would really have scared me, this is just box-ticking (a sentiment echoed by my supposedly very worried midwife).

And you?

(Format pinched shamelessly from Claire.)

Right now, I am:

• feeling profoundly grateful for the sanity which an afternoon with friends can bring.

• watching the dark grey storm clouds circle around as a north wind blows yet more rain our way; after stupidly long without any rain, really, at all, though, this feels nice, and I’ve always been a sweater person…

• summoning up the enthusiasm and concentration needed to finish a hat, which requires grafting instead of casting off, after hoarding the wool used for about, oh, five years.

• pleased with the planting we’ve managed in this, the first year of our garden’s existence. So far, perpetual spinach, rainbow chard, beans, courgettes, pumpkins large (lantern-style) and small (a particularly lovely variety called Hooligan, which produces small but supremely tasty fruit which work very well when roasted), tomatoes, basil, blackcurrants, strawberries, rhubarb, chicory, red cabbage and leeks. Most of these were something of a surprise; our beds are filled with manure, for the most part, and heavy clay, so we weren’t expecting too much this year, but the spinachy things seem to be doing pretty well, and for the rest, well, we’ll see.

• marvelling yet again at how fast second pregnancies go – this week marks thirty-three weeks of forty… More marvelling is also brought to you by the fact that I am still wearing ordinary jeans and, at least in large sweaters, could be just a greedy pie-eater when seen side-on.

• listening to the marvellous Gotan Project, and imagining future time spent buggering about in the south of France, of which I have very happy memories, from a time (shortly after my mother died) when I least looked for them. (For a few years after she died, the aged parent and I used to spend the better part of a month in the summer trolling around various parts of France. They were, against the odds, very happy days.)

• looking forward to the days to come, when we’re not all higgledy-piggledy in the midst of downstairs living, and can rediscover the joys of going upstairs to bed.

• thankful that the small girl’s room is now plastered, and we’re just waiting for the lime to go off before we can get on with the easy bit – three coats of limewash, with linseed oil added to help it not to dust, in a rather nice natural umber colour, courtesy of earth pigmentation.

• providing tea, cake, gratitude and a continuous line in terrible jokes and spectator-sport yawns for the people who have been kind enough to come and help us in our bid to get our bedroom ceiling re-lathed by Monday, no small feat. Should we succeed, the plasterer is booked for Monday morning, with Quercus labouring for him, and the idea is that the first coat of plaster will be done in that day. That’s ceiling only; lime plastering is not the rapid task which you may know from gypsum encounters, but hopefully we are treating the house with the sympathy it should have had previously, and this should mean improvements in the damp which has plagued it for years, and in the dust, which has become increasingly noticeable as the plasterwork has deteriorated. We’re looking at three coats of plaster where the building is back to the bare cob, and probably two for the rest, so it’s going to be a close run, but hopefully mid-July may see us limewashing our own room. This is an amazing thought.

And you?

Right now, I am:

• dealing with the news, from our new vet, that Wixon, our four-year-old rescue cat, is probably going to lose an eye and most of his teeth due to a combination of the feline herpes and gingivitis, despite our previous vet assuring us that he wasn’t in pain and that his teeth, while not great, were not a major cause for concern just last month.

• contemplating the number of major organs which will need to be sold to foot the vet’s bill.

• worrying that our plasterer is going to need to pick up his now-three-weeks-to-plaster-the-small-girl’s-room pace, given that he has the landing and our bedroom, which currently has no ceiling, still to go (Quercus is reinstating the ceiling, I hasten to add, rather than the aforementioned plasterer).

• wondering if the small girl will sleep better tonight; two nights of very broken sleep followed by mornings starting with a six and a five have not helped the familial mood…

• triumphing over the grubby microwave with lemon juice and steam.

• realising that the oven, rather more significant in size and grub, is still to come…

• delighting in the wildflower meadow area we’ve created at the bottom of the garden; cornflowers, poppies, daisies, all jumbled together in a chaos of willowy grasses.

• marvelling that today marks thirty-two weeks of this pregnancy. Where did that time go? (And did it take my needle case with it? When you need a bodkin, nothing else will do, really, will it?)

• finishing the first knitted thing I’ve made this new child, a hat similar in style to the small girl’s Noro berry-coloured creation, which she’s worn for two winters so far. (Or, rather, I would be finishing it if I could find the sodding bodkin! This is what happens when the furniture from your downstairs fucks off to live in storage.)

• remembering, just about, to breathe.

Today is the small girl’s third birthday, and, as such, has consisted mostly of gingerish cake (by request; recipe to follow as it’s rather splendid and it’s been fucking ages since I actually bothered to post something foodish) and sand. She has a new Quercus-made sandpit which is rather splendid too, together with a felt play mat which I’ve been working on for about three weeks (my fingers have been needle-felted most effectively in that time, and I’ve also discovered that felting needles are quite good for tidying up dreadlocks) (because obviously neatness is your first consideration with dreads), a zillion wooden animals and a beautiful wolf puppet from her grandma, who has accompanied her to bed tonight. Not for her the Riding Hood end of the spectrum; oh no – she would rather have the wolf, and ‘a bad wolf! with teefs!’ at that.

I am feeling super-lucky, and really rather happy.

Oh, and tomorrow, more plasterwork will be happening in the small girl’s room. At this rate, there is a distinct risk that we may move back upstairs before the middle of July, at which point the house will seem ENORMOUS.

Right now I am:

• listening to the hum of the oven as dinner approaches

• watching Quercus move rhubarb into its new home IN THE GARDEN! Did I mention that we have a garden now?

• marvelling at the dust created by renovation work

• wondering if there is such a thing as a decent vacuum cleaner, or if the common denominator, rather than their shittery, is us

• weighing up the pros and cons of stopping work at twenty-eight weeks pregnant (which is a whole nother post in itself, I suppose, but the long and short = SPD – the git which keeps giving)

• throwing my hat up at a night without the small girl waking, after about a month of trotting between rooms several times each night

• loving the emergence of the upstairs of our house from years of neglect, cobwebs, loose thatch and all

• looking forward to freezing meals in our new chest freezer, which liveth in the workshop, for when the new baby arrives

• thanking the universe that I have Quercus, whose capability and enthusiasm never cease to amaze me.

And you?

This morning Quercus took down the ceiling in our bedroom. It’s been gradually descending ever since we moved here in 2005, and we have always known that a good portion of the original house would need replastering at some point; given our impending arrival in August, now seems like a good time to stop large chunks of plasterwork falling down on one’s head… So…

You can probably just make out the rather haphazard nature of the beams – most of them are roundwood poles of a not-very-large diameter, and several of the ones designed to keep the thatch up have either disintegrated at some point, or simply come away from their proper place, meaning that the thatch has fallen in in places. Not so that you can tell from the outside, but obviously rather more than one would like. This means that quite a lot of new timber will be needed for the ceiling; some to reinforce the existing bits, and some to replace those which have just…. disappeared. Bracing is the way forward, methinks. It’s amazing, looking at pieces of wood which may quite probably have been up in that ceiling for really rather a long time; back when we fitted the stove, I felt definite shivers when we found fingerprints in the cob, fingerprints probably made by the people who built this house originally, back some time in the seventeenth century – well, the ceiling has probably had work done on it since then, but the original timbers are almost certainly just that: original.

We’re revisiting the concept of the family bed, too. Largely because the room we’ve shoe-horned our bed into while our bedroom is out of use is, well, about the size of said bed. There is a gap of six inches to one side, and enough room to walk past the end, and that’s about it (along with the mankiest door in the house; it fell of its hinges about two years ago, and we’ve just kept it propped open ever since, flat against the wall; I’d show you what the wall looked like behind said door if I didn’t like you so much). So, so far, our bed has been a sleeping space (for us, for the small girl, for – if they get their way – both our cats), a play area (for beads, buttons, wooden badgers, foxes, and reindeer), a picnic ground and a cinema (for me, while Quercus’s mum takes the small girl for a much-needed run around the field).

I think we’re looking at at least six weeks of sleeping downstairs. We’ve yet to move the small girl out of her room, largely because she and I are going to stay with Quercus’s mum for a few days shortly, and it seems daft to move her for a few nights. Hopefully now that the ceiling is down in our room, the rest of the preparation will be less scary; it’s mainly wall-paper stripping and then a cunning substance applied over the top to prepare the walls for a skimming of lime plaster wherever we can salvage the exisitng plasterowrk, and repairing the bits that we can’t. (Of course, I use ‘we’ here in the loosest possible sense; I shall mostly be gestating and hashing out the best way to make the small girl a felted play-scene farm mat creation for her forthcoming third birthday.)

It’s funny, but after so long spent agonising about when to do this work, and how to do it, and whether or not to do it before the baby arrives in August, it feels really good – even down to the sleeping downstairs chaos – to just get the buggery on with it.

:: 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.)

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?