Category Archives: country house
Christmas lights (Dec 28)
Today’s job…
…assembling the Arts and Crafts chandelier Ed bought me for Christmas. Now where to put it….
Within the walls (Nov 17)
I thought I heard something… it was the ceiling coming down in the back hall.
Luckily no-one was standing underneath.
The plasterer says the easiest/ cheapest thing to do is to stick up a big bit of plasterboard and skim it flat – or we can have it done the old style, where the plaster is forced up between the gaps in the lath strips. This will create a less pristine, more lumps and bumps kind of look – that will fit better with rest of the house. So the more complicated / expensive option it is. Of course.
We’ll wait though until we get going on the kitchen refurb’ in the room next door – and do all the plastering in one go. In the meantime I’m enjoying looking at it – it’s the muscle and bones of the house revealed. Every time I walk through the hall it makes me stop and wonder.. how the horse hair plaster was made, who the men that worked with it were and how this grand house came to be almost 200 years ago.
Right on the doorstep… (Nov 9)
Friends are here for a long weekend and we discover a new walk just over the hill that takes us through a pine forest to reveal great views of the loch…
The last supper…(Nov 1)
Note to my vegetarian friends – you might not want to read this.
A week ago we went up to give ‘the pigs’ their final supper – the last of the fallen apples from the orchard. They never did make it down here as we couldn’t find the time to repair our fencing – but they’ve had a happy life up at the farm.
They came back from the butchers today as follows x 2. A box for Mr C and one for us:
6 x 500 g of mince
12 sausages
2 shanks
2 cheeks (including ears)
2 flat belly pork – 1 kilo each
1 loin – steak
1 loin – rolled joint
2 back legs – rolled for hams to cure
2 fore legs rolled
6 thick cut chops
4 trotters
It wasn’t the most pleasant job working out which bit was which (nothing was labelled) and involved a couple of calls to the butcher and a lot of blood. It certainly put us in touch with the reality of the situation – and a reality check seems in order if we’re going to carry on eating meat. At least this way nothing will be wasted.
After an hour’s work, it’s all in pristine bags and appropriately marked up in the chest freezer. It should last us a year. The first thing I’m planning is my own cured ham. The trotters seem like more of a challenge.
I have to admit that after today’s exercise I do feel a little queasy about eating it (it’s something to do with the butcher’s shop smell – reality check cont’d) but that may not last. Ed feels the same. Having said that, Mr C has 2 sheep set aside for the new year and next time Ed’s talking about doing the butchering himself….
Saving for a rainy day (Oct 27)
Oh dear. I got up in the middle of the night, towel in hand to catch a perennial drip from above our bedroom window and quickly discovered that ‘drip’ was an understatement. It was raining inside the house…
This is now an intermittent problem above 5 different windows, depending on which way the wind is blowing. It’s essentially down to the fact that a lot of the exterior walls need repointing. We’d hoped to get some of this work done during the summer (see The drip drip effect – Feb 16) but I’m afraid lack of funds put paid to that.
Ed and I joke that whenever a quote comes in for a big job on the house, we can safely predict the outcome – we can’t afford it! The cost of repointing just the east wall, including replacing a lintel, sadly didn’t prove us wrong. I guess it’s because everything here is on such a large scale.
We did make a happy discovery recently though; it turns out our roofer can do lime pointing and he also owns his own zip tower which he can get up and down in a day, and attend to anything urgent. This way we can keep the leaks at bay for a reasonable cost, until we can afford to do a more comprehensive job.
I think interior rain falls into the category of ‘urgent’ – so he’s coming tomorrow.
2 different windows…2 different views (Oct 7)
7pm this evening
Dreaming of a shower in the tower… (Sep 19)
After several weeks of plumbing work the hot water in the main wing is at last connected to the new biomass boiler. This has meant getting rid of 2 immersion heaters, re-routing some original pipework and putting in a load of new pipes that run from the boiler house up to a huge new tank in the roof space – and all the way back down again.
The house, as Ed puts it, is getting a bit ‘pipey’. We tried to find the route of least resistance and managed to avoid any of the grand rooms – but some of the corridors are suffering. It’s a perennial problem in old houses like this with lathe and plaster walls and lots of plaster mouldings.
This is the worst bit in part of our downstairs, back corridor…
The black pipes are the hot water pipes covered in insulation. The copper pipes were added a year ago to extend the heating and the white pipes were already here. It would be good to hide them all at some point – we’re not quite sure how yet. Another problem for another day.
The up-side is that we now have really hot water whenever we want it and it’s cheaper to heat. The pressure is better too as it’s running directly off the mains. It’s also another step forward in our master plan for this side of the house: we’ve got 3 small bathrooms to renovate and one of the large bedroom’s on the top floor is earmarked to become a fourth. It took a bit of time to persuade Ed of this plan but if you can’t have a huge bathroom in a house like this then when can you?
One of the lovely features of this room is the inside of the small round tower in the corner. At the moment it’s a semi-circular cupboard but I’m hoping to transform it into a walk-in shower.
Turning this vision into a reality is a long way off but ever since we bought the house I’ve been dreaming of relaxing in the bath in the middle of this room – a glass of something in my hand, a real fire burning in the hearth, taking in the view of the mountains in the distance as snow falls gently on the lawn. When that day comes my work here will be done.
Harvesting honey (Aug 18)
The end of the summer means the end of the honey flow. So last week we took the first honeycomb from the hives. When I say ‘we’ I do mean we, as this time I borrowed Ed’s spare bee-suit jacket and hat. Intrigue took over. I was charged with stacking the frames which meant I could keep some distance but in the event I felt quite protected. I did suffer a psychosomatic attack of itchiness though – just enough to keep me on red alert…
We removed all the honeycomb from the stacks at the top – 10 frames in all – and reduced down the size of each hive. Only a third of the cells on our frames are ‘capped’ or sealed over with bees wax. Each capped cell it’s own miniature, hexagonal pot of perfect honey with it’s own lid. Ed’s a bit disappointed about the capped to non-capped ratio – and as our ‘bee-catcher’ sadly didn’t attract another swarm (see our First Hive – May 11) this is all our honey for this year.
To get the honey out the caps are sliced off and the comb goes into a spinning machine. At this time of year Neil the bee-man has a honey extractor in his (apparently very sticky) kitchen. Today is extraction day – and Ed’s returned with a bucketful of honey that we’ve just transferred into small jars…
There are 33 jars in all which is much more than we expected so we’re delighted. It has a very delicate, floral flavour which could be partly lime flowers, as the huge lime trees on our drive were buzzing this summer…
The bees will now hunker down for the winter and the colony will become much smaller. They stop doing all the normal bee-type things so they live longer and the queen stops laying eggs. We’ve left enough honey inside the hive to feed them through till spring.
Ed thinks that we should be able to produce around three times as much honey next year, as the bees have now made all the honeycomb. God knows what we’ll do with it all? He’s already talking about farmer’s markets but I think we’ve got quite enough on our hands for now…
A Castle in the Sky 