Little updates

Here is the after shot of the front beds where I pulled out all the rosemary - not very exciting but much tidier. I've staked up the roses before their winter prune, and we are ordering a wide variety of hellebores to be decorative but close to the ground. It was a satisfying bed to do - not the endless invasive grass - and delightful to dig in. I think it has been a garden bed for 150 years which is not at all what I'm used to.

And Dad here is visual proof of us putting the mulch back through again ... it definitely makes it a lot finer but I don't know if we can be bothered to do it routinely. We have SO MUCH to chip and we're putting the mulch on the ivy covered beds and it can kill whatever it wants until we get around to them. 

We've also built some firewood storage to keep it off the ground. It's not covered but that doesn't matter too much round here. Bessa bricks, stakes, random offcuts of wood we found in the garage. There are four of these side by side on the way to the clothesline. We put brand new mulch from the chipper underneath so in a season or two we can figure out a more elegant solution for the firewood and turn the area into garden beds, as originally planned. We have a lot of plans.

Here is another after shot - we did this a while ago but the kitchen stuff is in the kitchen where it belongs and the books are in the bookshelf. Double stacked, but we did do a big clear out of books down the coast so will take some there ... and get rid of others, honestly. This is one of our two new double-glazed roof skylights - we had just the corrugated see-through stuff which isn't insulating at all, and replaced it with a double-glazed unit in this room and the kitchen.

Custom built of course, at vast expense, because nothing is square, and they don't open. The advice was to leave the laser light in because you don't mess with things that don't leak, and just put the glass underneath. I am a bit nervous about something completely inaccessible for reasons of condensation / cleaning ... but nobody else seemed bothered so we will just wait and see. It does seem to be noticeably warmer but it's hard to tell because it has become so much colder! The bird bath was frozen over until midday.