Hello all, another 2 weeks have past and I have come to consider that I am way too old for all the hard manual work that I have been doing! As mentioned in my last blog Pat and I have been re-pointing the back wall of the house. Pat started this by himself, but I jumped in to help as we saw very quickly that it would take forever with only one person doing it. So to help I have been removing the mortar with a small pick axe and Pat has been mixing the new mortar and doing all the pointing work. I have discovered that this is very, very hard work. Despite being ambidextrous and using both hands to do the removing my right hand is very sore and the rest of my body doesn’t seem to know what is happening! I ache everywhere, however today will be our last day for a while. Unfortunately, not because we have finished but because we need to tidy up the back as we have guests arriving in a few days – and as we are ¾ of the way through we are at a good place to stop.
Repointing
And as I also mentioned last time, I ripped up some of the carpet upstairs. This was from the landing and I was expecting the floor boards underneath to be in very bad condition and thought I would have to sand them and either paint or stain them. Fortunately, the carpet that had been put down was not put down by professionals. It was just laid (no underlay) and held in place by the skirting board and the connecting plates between the rooms and the top of the stairs. So after the joy of taking that carpet up I also cleaned up my work area, did a picture wall (my first one, I’ve got one planned for the living room) and re-organised the book cases.
floor and wall
towards my desk
We have been having lovely weather, but unfortunately the good weather has bought an unexpected guest – and when I found this on my aubergine plant I was curious as to what I had found, looked it up on the internet and then killed the bugger! The picture is of a Colorado potato beetle, a pest (famous as a most-wanted at UK border controls) that likes all plants in the nightshade range so would have destroyed my aubergines and my tomatoes if I hadn’t caught it early. I’ve had one more since over the past week and killed that one, so hopefully no more. We shall see. I’m also sick of eating courgettes, I’ve made all sorts of things and given some away, but they are still going strong – I’ll take any suggestions 🙂
The now dead beetle
Remember Pats blog next week – http://patblog.patbell.co.uk