Fatherhood² | Henry's Blog

Archive for the ‘Garden’ Category

In a break from the current routine, I interupt my regular daddy-based blogging to post an update on our house DIY!

As a bit of background for the uninitiated, I started my first proper blog 8 years ago – titled “Our First Flat” it chronicled the DIY efforts of doing up our house. You can read all the old posts by clicking the “Our First Flat” link on the side navigation, but needless to say I’ve not updated it (consistently) for several years not.
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Since the baby is due any day now (well, in the next 4-6 weeks anyway) we thought it would be a good idea to make a little more space in the garage – you never know when another kind relative will drop off a spare cot or moses basket! So Henry set to work cleaning up the garage, and a heavily-pregnant Sara decided that the garden needed weeding. We followed a day of hard work with the first barbecue of the season – WAY later than last year’s first BBQ (April I believe) but hopefully the first of many to come…

Since it’s been so wet this summer, the garden plants have done very well. The vegetables are another matter mind you – a couple of courgettes is all we managed to get grown this year – but the bamboo in particular is doing extremely well. Also below is a shot of the garden next door – what a jungle!

So we’re a third of the way through 2007 and we’ve done very little in terms of DIY this year. But now having the spring air around has begun to inspire us a little more to complete those jobs we keep meaning to do. That and the fact we have new upstairs neighbours who have already fitted a new bathroom and we’ve been here 2 and a half years and we haven’t gotten around to it yet!

As a result of a bank holiday weekend and remortgaging our flat finally coming through, we’ve spent time and a bit of money doing some small jobs and buying some of the bathroom bits as well.

Sara’s gran gave us a lovely weather vane for Sara’s birthday, which we have finally gotten around to putting up – now we can tell which way the wind is blowing, and since it frequently is at the moment, that’s quite fun! Also included are some other shots of the garden – the Bamboo and Clematis obviously haven’t realised it’s not summer anymore, as they’re still growing at a rate of knots!

Work on the house has slowed to a veritable crawl these days, hence the lack of updates, but I thought I’d stick up a few shots from around the house. The first couple show some of the new stuff we got for the garden recently, and the second 2 are the new frames Henry put up in the spare bedroom. Each frame has some nice shots from each of the holidays Sara and Henry have been on together – Rhodes, France, Portugal, New York, Scilly and Prague.

The final touches in the garden today, with Henry finally getting round to wiring up the rock speakers, and Sara buying him a new MP3 Stereo, especially for the garage, to hook them up to. Don’t worry though, it only cost £30! As well as those, we bought some nice candle-holding flower type things from Ikea, though we’ve not had a chance to try them out yet…

Reinforcements arrive to give our backs a bit of a break. The slabs are laid quickly, holes are dug for the bamboo, 21 bags of gravel are bought and hey presto, its done!

Mum arrived on Friday night and was itching to get going on the garden, so she started moving the pots off of the grass.

On Saturday morning we were up really early and started digging up the grass while waiting for HSS to open so we could get a wheelbarrow, spade (sorry shovel) and a skip ramp. Two attempts were made to HSS but eventually they delivered the lot instead. We made good headway with removing the grass. The slabs were delivered along with a tonne and a half of sharp sand. The thought of moving all of that was not a good one, especially as it was now chucking it down with rain, but being true brits we soldiered on until we were soaked to the skin and could move no more!