Grim weather

Thursday evening was where I left you and what a beautiful end to the day. It was still a bit cloudy but the golden sunset was just stunning.

Sunset

Friday morning was the usual routine of coffee and collecting the men. They got stuck straight into their respective jobs and made great progress as always.

Cracking on

More plastering

With changing my hours at work, Friday is now the new shopping day and I quickly had another brew, let the puppies out for a toilet break and headed into town. I prefer Thursday morning shopping as it is less busy, but I got through the pain with the help of a fresh croissant.

It always takes me a longer time than I anticipate when i do the shopping and I can never work out why. Maybe I get distracted or maybe I spend far too much time looking at the offer aisle. Anyway, it was almost 11.30 before I arrived back at the school and I had a phone call from our friend when I arrived back to see if he could borrow our ladder in order for him to gain access to his new building. Of course. They arrived soon after to collect it and also a drill and off they went to sort it all out. It is nice to be able to help.

Rambo was showing a big interest in what was going on in the kitchen. I hope he hasn't been lining up his seat at the breakfast bar or he will be sorely disappointed!

Rambo

After the exertions of the shopping trip and coupled with the fact that it was raining and grim outside, I spent the day playing with the puppies in the living room. I think they are feeling a little more neglected since I have been here alone and they are getting a bit bored. We lit the fire and had a right old time. Dinner was a much craved steak and chips. This is probably the only thing I miss. The steaks are not generally very good here; it does not seem to be something they eat a lot of. So when Lidl have these in, I do like to grab a couple. It tasted better than it looked!

Steak and chips

Saturday, again, was very cold and it was raining consistently throughout the day. I pottered around mainly and Himself will be most annoyed because I didn't take any photos whatsoever. What I did do was  to make a start tidying up a little bit in advance of our guests arriving. The more I do now, the less of a rush I will have next weekend. We had to empty a suitcase for him to take to Islay and so I transferred the clothes that had been, quite frankly, dumped out into the guest room, into another suitcase. Again, the fire was lit and the rain continued. It is so very difficult here when the rain comes at the weekend as most of the chores that I want and need to do are outside. However, I did manage to get on with a little surprise task which I cannot show photos of anyway, so all was not lost. In the afternoon I baked a ginger cake and for some reason, this one is the best I have made yet. I am not quite sure, but perhaps the fact that I did not use the electric mixer has helped it. It is a much lighter and fluffier cake this time.

Sunday arrived and I was geared up to have a busy day. I did not want to sit around for a third day. Despite the forecast of rain, it held off very well indeed. Although this was not inspiring me when I first got up!

A grim start

 With all of the rain there is one benefit:  I have been saved from the twice daily watering round, so it is not all bad. The little seedlings on the balcony have started to show a little more growth now also, which is great. They will be later crops, but I am hoping for a long and late summer.

Late pepper plants

Whilst out having my coffee on the balcony I was feeling very cold and went to look at the thermometer. I got a shock. Look! Minus five. I had forgotten it had got broken whilst the work was going on around the balcony. I definitely do not want to go back to those temperatures any time soon.

Broken

The first task of the day was to have a look, trim and hope for a bit of a recovery on the banana plant we had bought. It really has not been looking great over the last few weeks and the end of the main leaf keeps going brown and drying up. I cut the dead ends off and the dead leaf and generally trimmed it all back as far as I thought I could without cutting into fleshy stems. It does look better now than it did and I have increased the amount of water I have been giving it also. Seems to have done some good as there is a new leaf coming up. This will be a learning curve for us. An expensive lesson if it all goes wrong.

Sad banana plant

New growth

The puppies had been having great fun following me around all morning so far and I cannot remember where I went to or what I was doing to have left them alone in the living room. I could hear Thelma playing with one of her toys though and she seemed to be having a fine old time. It wasn't her toy. It was our inflatable mallet we got given on the night of the fireworks last year. Teeth marks mean no more air. Naughty puppy!

Trail of destruction

It was still quite early in the morning and even before breakfast I decided to get outside. I have had a small tidying session around the front, but there is still so much to clear away after so much work went on.  We will get there eventually.  The puppies were straight on with their favourite game at the moment; lizard hunting.

Lizard hunting

As I have said, things are really starting to hit a growth spurt. Sadly for me, the weeds and long grass are excelling at this and the whole garden looks a little bit like a jungle at the moment. Obviously if it remained dry for any length of time I could probably have kept on top of this, but here it is.

Jungle 

Whilst planting out some seeds a couple of weeks ago I had moved some pots over onto the table tennis table as I thought they were not going to come. This one has, at long last.  One of the blue plants I had planted months ago. Perhaps the weather just has not been suitable until now?

Finally growing

In one of the beds we had planted a few carrots that had managed to sprout a few weeks ago. Now there was one plant that looked like it had carrot leaves which we had left and felt very dubious about. It was significantly bigger than the rest and over the last few weeks has grown at an alarming rate. My reckoning was that if it was a carrot, it would be HUGE by now given the size of the upper growth. Here it is. And it is not a parsnip, just a dirty big weed, as I suspected.

Not a parsnip

With the grass being very long around the raised beds, it was becoming more and more difficult to navigate and to keep on top things inside the beds. I took the garden shears out and chopped it all away to allow some access. I would have used the strimmer, but it was all still very damp and that would not have worked very well at all. Plus, it was good exercise.

Path cleared

 As I was collecting the cut grass into piles for the wheelbarrow I got beckoned by next door to go over. They had guests. The guests were the ladies we see every year and who come to take a tour of the building. I think one of them was the librarian here when it was in operation. They love seeing the progress we are making. Off I trotted to have a coffee and a piece of lovely bread.

Growing puppy

Gosti

One of the ladies is the daughter and granddaughter of the two either side of my neighbour in the photo. She goes to university in Sofia and spends the summers here working. She speaks very good English indeed and was able to translate anything I did not understand, which was a lot!  Perhaps we can practice our language skills on each other in the summer. That would be nice.

When I left and arrived back home I was very tempted to call it a day in the garden.  It was still cold and a bit miserable weather-wise, but I gave myself one last task for the day. The second jungle. It is important for me to be able to get into the vegetable garden when the rain finally stops and so I set to work on clearing the first section of walkways.

Another jungle

Trimmed

So there you have it. I was relatively tired when I finished but obviously lizard hunting is much more exhausting!

All to much

It is now Monday morning as I type this last bit. I was lazy last night and had other things to do and phone calls to wait for and so I decided to postpone my post. I don't think I will do that again as I have struggled to remember everything that happened! Anyway, onwards - another busy day ahead here.

Lek den.
A x

Everything is growing

Thursday already! Where does the week go to?

So where did I leave you? Oh yes, I was pretty tired on Tuesday evening and it was a late dinner, at almost 9pm before I managed to eat and straight to bed. Never mind. I am determined that it will not be that late tonight. Let's begin:

Firstly, on Monday morning, Bekir's first job was to set the sump up and get it ready for operation as the kitchen waste will go through it once connected and in use. I was asked to get a video to show Himself but due to me not being quite as savvy as he, I had to wait to publish because I was not confident with the editing software. So here it is. Isn't it amazing how you don't think you sound how you do until you hear it?

Wednesday:  

I had received a message on Twitter to say I would be having guests on Wednesday evening, so I decided that I wanted to have a quick tidy round before they came, as I had not done the complete process on Sunday and so my living room in particular was a bit of a state!

The men got started and stuck in very quickly and Bekir's tiling progress was fantastic. He of course said it was more to do with the tiles being big and that he had little cutting to do that day, but it still was lovely to see.

Getting stuck in

Sally had also made a start on the corridor area and was able to only complete plastering the ceiling for the bathroom due to final bits of plumbing to be done. He did however make a start in the corridors and also smoothed out the surfaces in the cubicles in preparation for that plastering.

As far as he can go

It really did not take long for Bekir to get right down the back of the island section. By the and of the day he had all but the last row laid and probably only didn't get that done due to the cutting required.

Flying

As I mentioned, I had things to be getting along with. One of them was to try to make sure the mattresses that we gave to the workmen whilst they were here were not getting caked in dust.  Whilst this room is sealed a bit more than it was, there is still a lot of dust around the whole building. I lifted that all on my own, as well.

Protection

After quite a session, the living room was almost presentable! It is a big room and I forget how long it takes just to hoover it. I had to scrub the tiles under the two seater because we may have put a little bit too much water in out pots and it has gone down the wall and stained the tiles at some point. Oopsie! I best get the bleach out before he comes back to clean the walls.

Much tidier

The landing was also being used as a bit of a dumping ground for all sorts of things; mine and his. My main concern was to tidy all of the stuff from the top of the pool table and get it hoovered and cleaned so that I could cover it over. All of the bits and bobs on top and underneath it were things he had ordered or collected to use with his model railway, so I re-homed those all into their new room. He will find absolutely nothing here when he gets back. This happened last time he was away too! :)

Cleared of boy-stuff

As I mentioned, I had guests arriving just after I got back with the men. I showed them around the building and I think they were very impressed with the progress since their last visit (I think around two years ago).  We opened a bottle of wine and a couple of beers and sat for a lovely couple of hours on the balcony chatting through their plans to move here next year, having purchased a house not far away. It was a really lovely evening and a shame that himself missed it. How and ever, I am sure there will be plenty of future opportunities.  I was pretty tired again and considered not eating because I was lazy, but after they left I persuaded myself to at least have half a pizza. There was no pizza left for breakfast this morning.

Thursday:
Today was a work day and I had a very restless night, awakened initially by Sassy banging in her hutch so much that I had to actually go out onto the balcony and tell her to shut up. After that I struggled to get back over to sleep again but finally dropped off at some point.

As I got back I explained to Sally that after he had finished doing what he was doing in the corridor that perhaps he might re-do the finishing around the bedroom window and door that we had to have replaced a little while ago. There was only a small amount of patching up to do and when he saw it he just got stuck straight in. He was back and forth a few times in the day to work on it.

Touch up

I had set my own task today for in between work to separate out the lettuce seedlings. There were loads of them and all bunched together, they were not growing very well. So here we have only one box; there are two. If we manage to eat all of this when it grows we will be beach ready in no time at all!

Separation

New beds

Bekir also came up this morning and was having a look around in the bedroom to see what Sally needed to do. He remembered that Himself had asked him to reattach the outdoor plug socket which had been removed for the insulation to go on. He also noticed that the hatch edging needed to be tidied up and left finished, so Sally moved straight onto that after he had finished the bedroom. There are lots of little tidying up jobs to be done on the inside now which will benefit us more now the outside is complete.

Edging

Today I was a bit surprised with what Bekir had been doing. At first glance I was disappointed that after yesterday's enormous progress, today seemed very slow. It was only on my second look that I noticed how much cutting of tiles he would have had to have done and after he had secured the tiles around the various archways, he laid about a third of the tiles required for the snug area. Great!

Lots of cutting

I was late today because I almost forgot, but luckily before I was reminded, in taking the daily photograph. On my way back I went to have a look at the little flower bed we had dug out and I was cursing at all of the weeds amongst the flowers when I noticed this little beauty. When I planted the seeds out I just mixed a load of seeds into a pot and sprinkled them, not realising at all what the flowers were or anything.  Isn't it pretty?

Very pretty

I also took a bit of water up to the garden. I am absolutely horrified at the growth of the sections between the beds in here, especially as he was down on his hands and knees with a sickle only three or four weeks ago trimming it down for me. Why is it that is is only the weeds grow this fast? So this will be a task for me over the long weekend and I am hoping it stays dry in order to get it done.

Overgrown

We have had tomato plants indoor in bloom and I noticed that a couple of flowers are now showing on the ones outside. It won't be long now!

Flowers

I have just finished eating, earlier today and so I am going to leave you to read this and enjoy the last half an hour of the sun on the balcony with two very bored puppies. Tomorrow will be a busy one as well. No rest for the wicked, eh?

Leka nosht.

A x

A busy start

So I left you on Sunday with a longer blog than I had wanted to type. I fear this one will also be longer than I would want as it is now 7.40pm and I have not even eaten yet, so onwards!

Sunday night sunset with a storm brewing overhead. I am not sure how clearly it has come out on the photo, but the clouds were very odd on a low level (to the right of the photo). There were what I can only describe as little vertical wisps of cloud hanging there. It was very strange indeed.

Storm

 Monday: Despite the rumblings promised over night, I slept very well. This is what was waiting for me when I did awaken. What a glorious start and such a contrast to the night before.

Monday morning sunshine

 I had some paid work to do on Monday morning as I was helping with a bit of a backlog and so as I went out to feed Sassy, enjoy my coffee in the sun and spend some time with the puppies mid morning, I spotted this little beast hanging from the wall outside the living room. What a lovely pose it struck for me. I made him dance a little as he jerked into position each time I moved so that he could keep an eye on me. There were at least five minutes of fun with that!

Mr Sticky

Meanwhile, the men were getting along with the more serious tasks. Sally was making a start in the bathroom and giving Bekir a free rein in the kitchen to finish the tiling off. Here he is giving me that "not another photo" face before he headed up his ladder to plaster the areas he could until the last of the plumbing goes in.

A start on the bathroom

Bekir had obviously decided that he could no longer work in a mess. I had seen this mess at the weekend and all of my good intentions to tidy it for them were lost by Sunday afternoon, sadly.  They are such tidy workers. He has even swept and piled up all of the bags of cement and plaster we bought.

Such tidy workers

As I was taking the daily photo, I attracted some local interest. A little hoarse quack came from the bottom of the side lane and Mr Duck was most curious. I don't blame him either. Mad Irish woman photographs her home every day in the afternoon. I would also be curious.

A visitor

Every time I went to leave my desk and go to get on with what I had actually intended to do on Monday afternoon once I had finished my work, I got sidetracked with other things. Firstly, Bekir needed materials. So off we shot to the local builder's merchant. It wasn't a long trip, but it distracted me nonetheless. When I got back, I made a brew, chatted to Himself a bit online and caught up with all that was going there. It was after 3pm before I got up to head for the balcony and transplant the seedlings into bigger pots for the window ledges. Just as I got into the living room, the phone rang and I had to leg it back into Room 13. It was our friends from further north with the other school renovation just calling to check in on me, get an update, give me one about their swimming pool and other such chit chat. What a lovely thing. I am so lucky and never feel isolated when he is away because of many people.  Talking of kind people, the Little Lady next door also called me over for coffee. I was doing the watering in the garden quickly and she spotted me. off I went and she said she had missed Himself leaving but asked that I was ok and took me to show me her brand new milking machine. I must get a photo. What a contraption it is, but I am guessing it is much less effort and saves her valuable time.

Anyway, I FINALLY got back to the balcony to sort out those seedlings. Below are the sunflower seeds that I had placed on wet kitchen roll and stored in a sealed box. This was a new technique to germinate seeds much faster that I had read about recently and boy did it work? Quite a few were growing fast and I needed to get them planted before their roots got too established. I am chuffed. This could be a great way to start off early seedlings next year!

Sunflowers

When I was filling up my old dog tins with compost I noticed that after throwing away what I thought to be dead seeds from the old planting pots, that I had just thrown away some slow seeds. More tomatoes were growing in the compost box. In the tins they went, along with a few others I had earmarked for moving!

Surprise growth

 Here are the tomatoes, the first of our peppers and the sunflower seeds, all relocated and ready for inside growing on my shelves that I made. Result, at last.

Tomatoes

Peppers

Sunflowers

As the evening came to a close, another storm drew in. This is becoming the norm at the moment and to be honest, it really works well as I don't have to do a big watering round and leave nature to do its job.

Another storm

 The storm, in the end, was a corker. However, I did not get a video, sorry.

Tuesday:  I woke early this morning after a disturbed sleep. I have been very naughty while He has been away and the puppies have been in bed with me. Last night, Louise decided that she wanted to say hello a few times and was licking my ear, my forehead and my cheek at regular intervals. Never mind.

As I left to go and collect the men, the carpenter who has been making some of the doors for us pulled up at the gates as I was coming down the drive. I quickly unlocked doors and let him in, had a very quick discussion about leaving room for the flooring to be done and off I went.  He wasted no time in getting the van emptied and got stuck in.

Tuesday opens a door

Bathroom door

I was working all day, so I am afraid there are limited photos of the progress, but we are lucky to have in Bekir and Sally, conscientious workers who do not need to have someone look over their shoulder all day.  At afternoon coffee break time, I had only just put the kettle on and gone down to collect their cups when there was a lot of puppy commotion outside. Little Lady had arrived with a tray full of her gorgeous Turkish coffee. Perfect timing. She was very pleased with the kitchen indeed.

Coffee time

I took this next photo to sent to Himself, but I had to put it on the blog as I love it so much! Neighbourly selfies!

Selfie time

So as I get ready to eat my own arm off and prepare leftover chilli, I will leave you with some of what the men had been getting on with. Firstly, the heatproof plaster has been applied to the fireplace/chimney and it is giving me an excuse to paint.  It is a different colour to the normal plaster.

Fireplace

 And Bekir is tiling away and going well, despite the distractions of an additional man on site today. I will be very interested to see how his going to tile around the metal feet from the staircase. He laughed when I asked and said "later". I don't think he is particularly looking forward to it. :)

There we have it. I am pretty pooped, the puppies are not liking being ignored either, so off I go to join them in the living room for the evening.

Enjoy!
A x