Category: Renovations

A New Shore

21st February 2012 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in , No Comment

I set a course for a new shore
It felt the same as the one before
And I forgot what I had been sailing for
And why I thought this time could be different

New year, new stuff to start thinking about. And it’s time to stop sitting back and waiting for stuff to happen. Over the next few months we’ve got more than enough stuff to keep us busy:

  • Kitchen refurbishment has finally been started. All the old units have been ripped out and new, shiny ones installed. Annoyingly one of our custom-made worktops is damaged, so we’re going to have to wait for that to be replaced before tiling.
  • Just three months to go before the nursery has to be ready. Depending on when the kitchen ends up going in I suspect I’ll end up doing that sooner rather than later…
  • The garden fence was damaged by the recent storms. I’ll need to sort out getting that fixed sooner rather than later…

On top of that (and to try to get the most of my new kitchen, when it arrives), I’m trying to do more cooking from scratch. While reading Heston Blumenthal at Home I’ve had a bunch of inspiration and have started trying a few things (though nothing too adventurous… yet). Hopefully I can keep that up.

Assume the Perpendicular

7th October 2010 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in , No Comment

We’ll walk the grounds by Capability Brown,
Get lost for days inside the manicured maze.
We’ll bump our heads jumping on a four-post bed.
And we’ll ride for free
On the ladders round the walls of the circular library!


I can’t abide a horizontal life –
It’s time to rise, assume the perpendicular.
Jump up and down, make wild ecstatic sounds,
And talk about nothing in particular.

It’s been a week since we moved in. Seems like no time at all, and while I’ve managed to get a couple of things done, like putting up curtains in our bedroom and fixing a leaky tap in the bathroom, there’s still so much more to do – much of the time after moving in before going back to work was spent cleaning the old flat. Off the top of my head:

  • Curtains / blinds for my office and the lounge
  • Shampoo carpet in the lounge
  • Dismantle the wardrobe in the dining room. No joke, it wouldn’t fit up the stairs!
  • Finish unpacking boxes. Mostly the stuff left is DVDs and odd bits and pieces. There’s half-empty boxes everywhere.

That’s not including any of the bigger stuff to do, like redecorating most of the house, sorting out the garden. We have no interwebs yet, relying on a 3G USB modem (which made for an… interesting day working from home recently) but mostly it’s all good. Just need a few more years and we’ll be unpacked.