Slow progress

Well, my decking should be down and the folding doors in by now, but unfortunately nothing has happened. We have spoken to the builder and it is looking like early September - at least the kids will be back at school and we will be feeling refreshed after our holiday. In the meantime, I have hacked down the bushes - will need to dig out the roots when we get back.







Here is a photo of the decking tiles - we have decided to tile all the way down the path to the back garden so when they arrived, we couldn't resist laying just a few, which took all of 30 seconds to do. I am very pleased with them. It won't be long before this side of the house is looking neat and tidy.

Unfortunately, this is one half of the back garden (the veg patch) below. Some of the weeds are taller than me and I'm 5'9". Still haven't got round to clearing this but it seems to be dying down as the summer draws to a close.

I thought I would show you a couple of recent charity shop finds - both from the charity shop which is a minute's walk from our house. I was meaning to buy an origami style lampshade for my daughter's bedroom - I love the Habitat ones but they were slightly out of my price range. Imagine my surprise when I found one for the teeny tiny price of £1.50. I snapped it up and it was hung the same day - my daughter was really pleased with it. I won't show you a photo of the rest of her bedroom as it is a mess!

I also got this sun hat on another trip to the same shop. I am hoping I will need this when we get to France - not long to go now as we leave on Saturday for 11 days of relaxing. I am sure I will have plenty of photos to post on here when we get back. xx

All at once

This is a photo of our side garden. Our bungalow sits in the middle of the plot and our garden wraps all the way around it - the kids love it as there are loads of places to hide and they can just run round and around the house. So this part of the garden is just outside our lounge and that window is soon to be knocked out and replaced by some super duper bi-folding patio doors, meaning we will finally have access to our garden, other than through the front door. When we first viewed the house, we walked through the door and it instantly felt like home - I have never had that feeling before, but the major sticking point was the lack of access to the garden, which is ok if you are retired, not so ok with two young children who are in and out every five minutes.



I haven't quite worked out these photo's - if you have a laptop, twist it round now! Whilst the builders are in fitting the new doors, we have asked them to lay a concrete base for our new patio - we have ordered some decking tiles which click together like a big jigsaw. We have bought a few extra to cover the ugly concrete path which runs alongside the house all the way to the back garden (which I will not be showing any photos of yet as it is not a pretty sight). Gardening is not a strong point and we have let the large vegetable plot grow wild. I will hack down the weeds some time next week and hopefully the majority of it will be turfed over by next spring. The builders will also be skimming the lounge ceiling as there are quite a few cracks. This means we need to move all our furniture from the lounge/diner into the bedroom and garage before work can commence. I am not looking forward to all of this. We will most likely end up sleeping on the floor for a week and there will be dust everywhere, before we frantically move all the furniture back in, just in time to go on holiday. My Mum is coming to housesit so we can't leave it looking like a building site. I get the feeling the next couple of weeks are going to be very interesting.. And it all had to happen whilst the kids are on their school holidays. Typical.



Anyway, this is the view from the window this afternoon, in the middle of a thunderstorm.

The view from our front door:

I hope the weather is better where you are! Wish me luck for the next 3 weeks, I'm going to need it.