If you have stumbled upon this blog expecting Google was taking you to a daring-do story of the mountains and The Eiger, apologies. However, stick with me - you may find some relevance here… we all have our Everests and this project has certainly been ours!
At risk of being a little corny, I'm going to go with the mountain theme for a minute - We may have seemingly already summited when we moved ourselves in to Old Dairy Barns last year, but anyone who knows anything about Everest will know that more people die on the decent than on the quest to reach the summit. Complacency and excitement are all the demons of premature celebrations (hence no housewarming party yet!). So we are plodding on, racing to get the stonework finished, aware that perhaps the apparently more interesting part of our story may appear to be behind us, but I know there is still so much more to do and many more mountains to climb!
For the moment, most of what I can report consists of rather dull stuff like lime mortar (which actually excites us!) and pointing, which brings me back to The North Face… pointing a northerly wall in November appears crazy but our unusually mild weather in early November meant we only needed to dodge the wet rather than the frosty days. We continued to make progress and felt the building warm as we plugged the drafty holes. Now we've hit a cold spell with frosts at night meaning progress has ground to a holt.
On the days where pointing isn’t possible, there’s still an ever growing list of other jobs. My new 'to do' whiteboard drags up dim and distant memories of my corporate life and the endless 'time-wasting-time-management' courses! Under the Urgent/Not Important category comes bulb planting. 21kg (roughly 400 bulbs) to be planted. The plan of filling the orchard and hedgerows sounded great until I realised it's not easy in rocky ground. Anyway, nearly there, if a little late. Fingers crossed they emerge in spring!
One top daily job is the great chore of fitting in the best dog walks ever! Tough huh?! Sharing some recent Autumn jaunts:
Our lifestyle suits us well and we are constantly discovering new gems in the community that fit our desire for living more sustainably. It's so satisfying being able to just nip over to our local organic farm's honesty shop to buy veg grown mainly within ¼ a mile of home.
There's also the most recent discovery which involves taking a Saturday morning trip to pick up sourdough bread from a local farm bakery and mill, and bumping into neighbours for a coffee.
Life is full. Of course I wouldn't want to mislead you into thinking it was all perfect, when is life ever? But it is quietly good. And quiet-good is, I think on the whole pretty damn good.
If you've not seen the 'before & after' images, click here There are some clever images of the same view that you can slide to see the transformation. Clever stuff by the techy-offspring!
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