It’s a Bank Holiday weekend, which of course means we’re doing stuff on the house again.

To be exact, this time it’s the garage that needs sorting out.

It’s not actually a garage – whoever built the thing fucked it up, so it’s round a dog-leg corner behind the house, and thus well-night impossible to park a car in. (Of course, that just shows I’m getting old – who the hell parks their car in their garage these days?) As a result, it’s been a storage tip spot for stuff since we moved in.

It still will be a storage place, but we’ve sorted out a lot of the stuff inside it this weekend, taking out the bits we don’t need and/or putting things in far more order.

So far, it also means that I (with some help from Herself) have :

• Put up an offcut of the kitchen worktop, for use as work-surface (and storage surface) in the garage
• Put up two lots of ladder-hooks, and hung ladders from them (which haven’t yet fallen off again)
• Put up another set of hooks for a couple of other heavy odds and sods to hang off
• Done two runs to local tips, one with everyday rubbish to our normal recycling place at Snetterton, and one with tins of paint etc. to the rather more serious one at Knettishall

There’s still plenty more to do, but at least we’re getting somewhere. Even more importantly, it’s beginning to look like the garage will become properly usable space after all…

Regular readers already know that when it comes to DIY I’m pretty much a total bell-end. It’s a thing I’ve inherited from my father, who is a world-renowned DIY bell-end, and tales of his idiocies have been used for me and my brother to dine out on many times.

Anyway, about two years ago, I put in a thing for the rotary drier/airer in the garden. At the time it was fairly straight, but over time it’s got more and more wonky.

So this time we got another fitting (this time with a built-in spirit level – genius!) and a bag of Postmix cement. You can see already where this might go horribly wrong, can’t you?

Only it didn’t – the holder is now cemented in properly (and absolutely straight!) and the airer’s post fits in it fine.

At the same time (i.e. while waiting for the postmix to set) we’ve also put up a hosereel thingy on the wall of the house, which’ll hold a 25m hose-reel – enough to get almost halfway down the garden – which should make for a tidier garden without sodding hosepipe coiled up in random places.

Sometimes, a day can be quite successful. Of course, I’m now waiting to find something to screw up in order to balance things out again…

On Friday, I managed to break our bed. (No, nothing dirty – get your minds out the gutter!)

The main support in the middle of the bed (going end to end) is/was a piece of box-frame steel, and that piece of steel buckled, which then resulted in four of the wooden slats going across the bed to break.

We bought the bed less than two years ago, so I went back to the place we bought it, to see whether we could get a replacement bar and slats, or whatever was necessary – seeing as the bed was completely unusable ’til repair/replacement.

Anyway, it turns out we’re not the first people that this has happened to, and it’s a known issue. In fairness, our was only the third or fourth one it had happened to, but it meant that the store is aware of the issue, and it’s not a problem to replace the bar.

So I was able to pick up the replacement bar and slats from their warehouse (still in Norwich) and less than an hour after going to the store, I’d got the replacement bits in the car and driving home – along with some extra advice from one of their warehouse guys, who had also had it happen to him.

As a result, we now have the bed back together, with a couple of extra supports under the metal bar, just to help spread the load a bit more – and the supports were even made by me. Sure, they’re nothing special – just a couple of bits of wood under the bar, but they needed measuring, and cutting straight ( normally my primary problem when it comes to DIY) but they got done traight off, without even the need for a re-measure or a re-cut.

All told, I’m sadly chuffed at having sorted the bed out so quickly, including the extra bits necessary. And who knows, it may also provide just a little bit more motivation on that “needing to lose weight” thing. We’ll see.

Yesterday was emphatically not a day of rest – primarily because we spent most of it in the garden. Again.

The first surprise came when I went up to let the chickens out in the morning – and found three peacocks (OK, technically one peacock and two peahens) in the chicken run. They quickly fluttered up on to the fence, and then next door, but returned a couple of times more before finally being scared off by Hound.  There’s a colony of peacocks over by the church (probably half a mile from us) so it wasn’t a complete “Where the hell did they come from” moment, but it’s still the first time we’ve had them in our garden since we moved here.

From there we got a bundle of work done, including finishing filling the remaining three raised beds on the veg plot (using the best part of another ton of earth) and finally planting stuff in the bloody things. So we now have raised beds containing :

• Broad Beans
• Peas
• Strawberries
• Pumpkins
• Courgettes

In addition, scattered round the rest of the veg patch we’ve got :

• Raspberries (18 canes’ worth)
• Gooseberries (4 bushes)
• Blackberry (1 plant)
• Rhubarb (4 plants)
• Garlic (2 rows)
• Onions (3 rows – although they’re not doing much)
• Beetroot (1 row of white, 1 of red)
• Potatoes (3 buckets, two of which have so far been successful)
• Various herbs and odds-n-sods

Bear in mind, this is actually a reduced list from last year, due to us not actually managing much garden-wise last year. *ahem*

Anyway, with that little lot sorted, Herself also planted a bundle of stuff round the new pond (Hound was being a pain in the arse by this time, and got dragged indoors by Yours Truly) including foxgloves, lambs ears (it’s a plant, we’re not that cruel!), salvias, and other stuff I now can’t remember the name of.

Along the way there was also other bits and bobs, but it was a pretty busy day all told.

And that’s why I didn’t update yesterday…

Yesterday was spent with absolutely no internet connection at home.  For once this was a choice thing, rather than some esoteric Bank Holiday Fuckup by BT, Tiscali or anyone else.

Basically, the main phone point is in the hallway, and over the weekend the hallway got cleared out so we could sand/seal/varnish the teak parquet floor.

Yes, Herself was back trusting me with power tools. Go figure.

So yesterday was the day the actual sanding took place. And all went amazingly well.

The floor was (it turned out) amazingly dirty – the parquet looked more like mahogany than teak. Then the industrial floor sanders came out, and now it’s all teaky and beautiful again.  I’m not perfect with the sanders, but the job has come up looking fantastic.

It’s all been sealed/varnished again as well, using Ronseal’s “Diamond Hard” clear floor varnish – a product which certainly lives up to it’s description, but also makes the floor look even better.

There’s a couple more marks/dents/lines in the floor than there used to be, but they’re not horrendous – I’m sure we’ll stop noticing them soon. I bloody hope so anyway, because it’s now going to be a complete bastard to go back down through the new varnish if we did decide to sand them out completely.

But it’s all done now. There’s a lot more work to be done in the hallway – woodwork and walls to be (re)painted etc., and so on, but the final big job in the house is now complete.

Today and tomorrow are going to be primarily spent in the car, I feel.

Today I’ve had an interview for a contract role down in Welwyn Garden City – checking out the lie of the land, and whether I can do the drive as a daily commute for a couple of weeks before knocking that back by working from home for a while (I can – the “2 hours+” listed by AA and TomTom rapidly descended to around the 90 minute mark, with just the A505 being a slow-moving piece of shit road)

Tomorrow is the longer (much, much longer) day – because of the planned work for next week, I’m taking Hound down to her old kennels/staying place in Wokingham. From there, I’ll be driving to the O2 arena (ex Millennium Dome) where we’ll be seeing Pink in concert – Herself plus Herself’s Sister and Husband will be driving down separately, and we’ll meet up at t’O2 – and then I’ll be driving home with Herself once the gig’s finished.

Saturday is going to involve a trip to Norwich to pick up the floor sanders, and over the next week we’ll finally be sanding down and re-sealing/varnishing the parquet floor in the hallway, which is the last of the big house jobs. Yay!

So don’t expect much in the way of updates tomorrow – although I might write a couple today if I can be arsed and/or think up stuff to write…