Hurrah! I have finally finished re-decorating my cottage and by early next week it should be back on the market! Phew! What a mission that turned out to be. At times I wished I wasn’t such a perfectionist and could just turn a blind eye to something that wasn’t quite up to standard but, hey-ho, I am my father’s daughter and ‘if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well’! So I have washed walls and woodwork with sugar soap, filled and sanded blemishes and nail holes, papered, painted walls and ceilings (usually two coats), painted all the woodwork in all the rooms, re-laid carpet tiles in part of the bathroom, renewed the loo seat, laid vinyl flooring in the utility room and shampoo-ed the sitting room carpet, as well as weeding the outside area (twice), re-varnishing the front door and repairing some guttering. I have been up and down stepladders more times than I care to remember and even climbed the extended ladder to paint the giddy heights of the stairwell. I even ventured through the loft trap to retrieve a box of Christmas decorations that I had suspected was still up there, but which hadn’t seen the light of day for 17 years! The house definitely looks lighter and brighter, and very neutral, so I hope that it will sell this time and I can finally start to look for another place to call Home.
When I haven’t been at the cottage, I have been continuing with my gardening jobs and helped clear an overgrown bed at the market garden, which meant that I got up close and personal with several wee beasties that were lurking in the mini jungle. This week, when I was there, we were weeding between the rows of runner beans (on the hottest day of the year, so far) when Liam discovered a common newt amongst the grasses. There was a large wildlife pond in the centre of the vegetable area, created by a previous tenant, but the liner has long since deteriorated and it hardly holds any water at all, so I hope the newt was able to find some dampness to protect it from the ferocious sun.
At one of my gardening clients I have agreed to take on the challenge of an extra project – rebuilding the collapsed bank on one side of their stream. We have decided to use gabions for extra stability – these are those weldmesh cages that you sometimes see on motorways and other roads holding back banks of earth. They are normally one metre cubed but my client and I think we can get away with much smaller ones, so that I don’t have to dig out so much soil from the bank. My daughter, Jeni, caught in a weak moment, has volunteered to help me at weekends! We have worked together as WWOOFers and make a surprisingly good team, as we seem to think in the same way, so disagreements are few and far between. I wondered what I was going to do now that the cottage was finished! 😀
Yesterday, as it wasn’t forecast to be so hot, Jeni and I decided to meet up and go for a walk, starting at her house. The quiet countryside ramble that we had anticipated turned into a bit of an intrepid adventure: our first challenge came when we turned off the lane onto a footpath, walked across the field in the direction indicated and found that the stile we were expected to use was quite a barrier. Originally, there had obviously been a stone wall as the field boundary, with a traditional stone stile set in it, but the farmer had then stock fenced either side of it, installing rather inadequate wooden stiles each side and about two feet away from the original boundary, thus creating a gulf of approximately 5 feet wide filled with brambles and nettles that had grown across the gap – no-one had obviously crossed it for some time, but we did!
Once across the next field we slithered and slid our way down a steep wooded valley towards the main Wells-Shepton Mallet road at the bottom of the coombe and came across our next challenge – a huge fallen tree, right across the footpath. Jeni scrambled down the slope to see if there was a way round it at the bottom, but then we decided that there was a very small gap that we could crawl through on the footpath itself, so we did. The footpath then led to a small wooden footbridge that crossed the main inlet pipeline to the water treatment works. It looked decidedly rotten, with several steps missing, but it was the only way to get out onto the roadway, so we gingerly negotiated that, fought our way through a wilderness of brambles and nettles and emerged onto the main road, only to see a notice pinned to the footpath sign saying, ‘Footpath closed, due to dangerous bridge’! Obviously, they hadn’t seen fit to repeat this sign at the other end of the footpath.
After that the walk became far less challenging, as we just had to follow the footpath through some fields before coming back into Shepton at the top of the hill, having climbed back up the other side of the valley. It was a lovely walk, and we saw some beautiful butterflies, a small mouse in a hedge and some amazing shell fossils in a piece of rock at the side of a maize field, as well as hearing some young buzzards calling from the treetops in the wood.
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