Midlands Ho!

Paul and I rocked down to the Midlands to celebrate Jason being a year older than us again for the next 7 or 8 months. The usual carnage took place. On the Saturday we had a lunch reservation for quite early, about 11.30 I think. So we were all up and about. We had a light breakfast. I settled into the best chair in the world with a superb view of the rolling countryside and started reading a bit of my book. Paul…in his inimitable fashion piped up “Is it too early for a glass of wine then?”

This was the result

The first ever proper Magic Monday

My daughter tends to finish college quite early on Mondays so we decided to start a new tradition. Inspired by the Salt and Pepper chicken balls that we both love so much from Nana Pat’s Chinese takeaway we now intend travel to our local Chinese on the lunchtime of the first Monday of every month. The first Monday arrived the other day. The first ever Magic Monday. Every month we intend to treat ourselves to Salt and Pepper Chicken Strips [ not as good as the balls from Nana’s chippy but still pretty good ] and a main course with noodles. The hope is to try a different dish every month but I’m pretty sure we’ll quickly revert to Crispy Chilli Chicken.

The first ever Magic Monday dish was Peking Chicken – and it was fantastic

Roof…we have a roof!

Given that it was starting to get cold and that the slates were working out incredibly expensive aaaaand I had six rolls of felt in my garage I decided to buy some OSB and felt my roof to get me through the winter.

Here it is with all the OSB up and the beginnings of a pretty bad bit of felting being done. Getting the OSB and felt up was very hard work and I couldn’t have accomplished it without the help of Oli.

After finishing the felting I took the waterproof membrane and started stapling it over the stud walls.

The next step was putting the windows in. The windows were bought off eBay for £70. I just chose the windows that were the cheapest and in roughly the size that I wanted then I built the stud walls to fit the windows.

This was about the time storm Ciaron made an appearance so I started running around the workshop and tacking fence panels up to protect the membrane. I also added some batons to the membrane up high in the triangle bits to keep everything intact. As I write this it’s all still in place and the cladding should arrive in 2-3 weeks to “finish” the outside.