bunn

 I keep thinking I should post something here, and then I can't decide what, and so I don't, and this is a problem that really is only going to get worse, so perhaps I shall just do random bullet points. 

• House building work is still not complete, because the builders working on the bathroom have gone off to outdoor jobs while the weather is good. We kind of owe them one for having dropped everything to fix our house when the roof came off, so I haven't yet chivvied them about this.

 

• However, the downstairs rooms that were almost converted from a garage and then flooded and had to be entirely re-done are now pretty much finished. We haven't moved any shop stuff (from our roleplaying game shop, Shop on the Borderlands, for anyone still reading this who had forgotten) into them yet, but Pp is AT THIS VERY MOMENT driving home from Birmingham with a van jammed full of 20+ large boxes full of vintage roleplaying games, so that is about to change at any moment. 

 

• One thing that isn't quite finished down there is the under-stairs cupboard which we wanted to have a light come on when the door opened.  It still has wires just sticking out where that should happen.  I hope not live. But the rest of the cupboard is done, so I have started sticking garden tools and stuff in there. If the builders leave it long enough, I may even experiment with wiring up a light in there.

 

• I may also have to hang up the kayaks on their designated hooks, which apparently have wooden supports embedded in the wall, but never quite got put into place. 

 

• I haven't really been able to do anything about the garden since The Event, because all the tools and stuff were in a giant emergency dusty Heap in the porch, but we are finally getting to the point where tools are actually in known accessible places at last. I have plans to cut the lawns at last and clear up everything that died in the heatwave ready to start over. I may have a go at a bit of that this evening if Pp doesn't arrive shortly. 

 

• We frantically finished off everything that could be finished downstairs because Pp's god-daughter, who is seven, and her mum were coming for a flying visit and that's the only room that can reasonably have two beds in it.  We did a lot of things, including improvised D&D, painting minis, a boat trip, visiting a playground and Pembroke Castle, and of course walking the dogs.  Theo, being himself young and bouncy,  was very excited by the visit.  Rosie got a bit tired after a while. 

 

• We have bought a boat!  It's a RIB. A bit bigger than we had originally thought of, but it was available locally (third-hand) and a bit cheaper than we expected.  Slightly alarming, even having done the powerboat training course, that the manual was rather woolly about how and when to sloosh the engine out with clean water, but fortunately the people at the dry stack where we are storing it are really helpful and there's a chandlery.  It's really good to be able to explore further afield than the kayaks can reasonably take us, because Pembrokeshire really is on the edge of the Deep.  I love it. 

 

• My little lemon and blood orange trees in the sun room somehow survived The Event and are back in there.  The lemon is almost pathetically happy to be upright in the warm sun and regularly fed and watered again.  She is absolutely covered in lemon-blossom, and I think she may be going to fruit.  The blood orange has put out some new leaves, but appears to be sulking a bit by comparison. 

 

• I didn't want to claim on the house contents insurance. Claiming on the buildings insurance was bad enough, and anyway, nothing much that was destroyed really had any great monetary value, it was all a bit old and slightly knackered.  So I bought vinyl for the floor on ebay and we laid it ourselves, and I have been around the charity shops and bought a really excellent cheap charity shop sofa ( it's in two bits, which are supposed to form a corner but I've split them up) and a wooden dresser to keep art supplies in, which is a great improvement over the old shelves.  Drat.  I was going to post a photo but my Flickr login is on my laptop downstairs.  Never mind. 

I have been doing a bit of arting, and I shoved (I think) most of the recent bits onto my https://victoriaclare.com/ site today.  Most of the more recent ones are Tolkien, but I did some Stranger Things portraits in watercolour, some of which have come out quite well. 

Definitely not moving before Christmas now.  But!  we do at long last have a planned completion date: 8th Jan.  So we can stop thinking about that until after New Year now

Had yet another house viewing today and since we had to flee from that so as not to breathe on each other, we went and walked in the rain on Kit Hill, then bought a Christmas tree. This year it is a Fraser Fir, which is a tree I don't think we've had before.  It has a really wonderful scent, and a faint pale bloom on the dark green needles.  It remains to be seen how well the wood will carve. Tomorrow we'll have to get the decorations out of the loft, probably for the last time (for this loft, anyway!)

 I need to write this down to get it out of my head.

( cut for death )

Just to make life more complicated still, Pp's dad used a solicitor who was recently struck off for corruption, so his paperwork is probably (we hope) somewhere in the depths of the vast national law firm that took over the corrupt solicitor's archive recently.

And today, though hardly a comparable event, our house buyer decided to drop out. House is 'not for them' apparently: something they could probably have decided before making an offer and having us take the place off the market.

 We have put many things in boxes in the spare space of kindly relatives! We have decluttered as if our lives depended on it, and also scrubbed for days, and painted things if the scrubbing wore the paint off. The house may possibly have been this clean in the past, but not for a very long time.

The result may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better than it was. Our house is now for sale on the various property sales portals that operate in the UK, and now we wait and hope! I made a website for it too, since I can easily do that, and you get more photos on a website than you can on a portal. It's here, if you'd like a look: https://moorlandbutts.clareassoc.com/

We did wonder if we would love the house and not want to leave once all the tidying, scrubbing etc was done, but no. We have been here 20 years, it's enough.

WELL. It has been a rather frantic few weeks. The Shop on the Borderlands has been growing like a particularly enthusiastic weed, and, already pushed for space, we decided that we were really going to have to look at Doing Something. We now have stock in all the bedrooms, tucked under beds and packed onto shelves, and getting stuff up and down the stairs was starting to be a major chore.

We'd started to look vaguely at other houses, and then it occurred to me that I knew a few people who had moved to South Wales recently, so we started to look via the internet at that area too, particularly Pembrokeshire, which is rather like Cornwall in many ways, and before long we had a shortlist, and were starting to work on decluttering and painting the house to make it saleable...

Anyway, we'd got to that point when lockdown restrictions were eased, and since Pp was off to Bristol to pick up some more second hand games, we thought, why not pop over and take a look at a few areas, and actually, why not take a look at a house while he's there....

And then of course, I had to go and have a look too...

And now we have had an offer accepted on this house and suddenly everything is moving very very fast! The photography really doesn't do that house justice. In fact, this was a bit of a theme of many places we looked at, the photography was often AWFUL and left a lot of questions open, which is just what you don't want in the land of Covid19. I'm thinking I probably would like to do the photography myself rather than rely on an estate agent to do it, since frankly most of them seem to be less good with a camera than I am.

We've had assorted shysters and pessimists of the Estate Agent variety to look at our Cornwall house, and we've been working flat out on rendering it relatively clean and neat inside and out. Am kicking myself for not having it painted back in June, when the painter I got to quote had lots of availability: I booked him for August, and now he's saying he can't do it till the second week in Sept, and since the outside of the house has big black seams where we had the render fixed, all the estate agents agree that painting the place is absolutely essential, sigh. And I *really* don't want to DIY that.

On the plus side, apparently people are fleeing the cities in the time of plague in the traditional manner, so our hopes are high that someone will want to flee to the Tamar Valley, where they can work from home.

What else has happened? Oh yes, further to my hip problems, I decided to do a course of https://www.secondnature.io/ which is a sort of diet-and-lifestyle-change program, to try to relieve the weight on the hips. One of the key things is cutting right back on sugar and eating only smaller amounts of whole-grain carbohydrates and a lot more veg. I must say, I am somewhat amazed by how much of a change this has made to my energy levels, and my hips also have improved vastly. I've lost about 6 pounds in six weeks, which is not exactly a mountain of blubber, but it feels like a lot more. I no longer feel like I need to nap every afternoon, my hips are much happier, and I can both walk and garden energetically without feeling too zonked by it! So yes. Sugar. Delightful but better eaten rarely. Which I suppose is somewhat obvious, but still.