Latest projects!

Hello, for my second entry I thought I'd let you know what I've been up to this past week.

Our plot
Our garden is a bit on the boring side – by day it looks like a cross between a bowling green and a bowling alley, and by night it looks like a run way (probably not helped by our solar lights!). In fact I'm surprised a 747 hasn't tried to land!

I suppose it's hard to do much with a garden that's 110 ft long and only 12 ft wide, but for now we've fenced off the end for our vegetable plot to keep the chickens out and the rest of the garden is left as lawn and borders. I've been desperate to get the garden looking nice for a while now and one of the niggling things that I've been dying to do is paint the shed a nice shade of green so that it blends in more, it was also on a kilter so every time you opened the door it came swinging back and hit you in the rear. If there's one thing I hate it's when people do a bad job of something, and the wonky shed used to drive me potty! So we've now pushed the shed over to one side so that it's almost level and we're going to get a tool store next to it so that the shed can store all of our seeds and silly things like my hard top cover for my car! I also painted our makeshift fence so that it blends in and I have to say you can hardly see it now! I've heard the weather is likely to turn cold again so we thought it would be an ideal opportunity to get the garlic in – apparently garlic likes frost and we thought we'd missed the boat so fingers crossed it works!

The house
My latest hair brained scheme is to make my own soap. With my new old bathroom in mind, I was thinking lovely old fashioned lavender, English rose and jasmine soaps would be fantastic, and, rather than spend a fortune in shops like Cath Kidston, I thought I'd make my own to decorate the bathroom. I bought a set from a lovely lady on ebay, her shop's called Bath Night Boy Crafts and she's really friendly and helpful. Another crazy idea I had (I have many, you'll soon come to realize this as the blog goes on!) is to buy old decanters, you know the ship decanters etc, from charity shops and fill them with bubble bath. I keep seeing all these jars, decanters and bottles in Country Living and I think these would be a great alternative. Hey, if you're really on a budget you could probably pick up a decanter in your local charity shop for £2 and fill it with economy bubble bath from Sainsbury's! I really hope work can start on our bathroom soon; I'm still undecided about exactly what colours etc to have. I'm thinking of going for tongue and groove on the walls, probably about half way up. This is much cheaper than tiles and also looks quite country cottage. I think I'll paint this cream or an aged white. I would quite like to get a roller blind made by Cath Kidston; I like the mono rose pattern. I want an old fashioned toilet with the pull chain – two reasons for this: (1) I love them; and (2) we are so short on space that we only have enough room to squeeze in a toilet with a narrow system, which only leaves the modern toilets.

Important news
Margo layed her first egg yesterday, it was absolutely huge! Usually hens lay quite small eggs initially, but this was a monster! It's a beautiful pale brown speckled egg though and I can't wait to eat it!

Plans for next week
I will take a few pictures tomorrow and post them, and if the weather's nice I think I'll probably spend the day out in the garden with the chickens. I have a trellis that I want to paint and there's always something that needs doing, maybe I'll do some weeding. Until the next time…..