Autumn Clean.

My burst of sudden strength and energetic activity has come to a stop. I have done lots this last couple of week and I must say it has taken it's toll on my right arm, my wrist and forearm has been sore the last couple of days, probably from gripping hammers and drills and lifting heavy things up ladders into the loft. Still, my garage is looking lovely, I have sorted out the leaking washing machine (for some inexplicable reason the hose had perished and was pouring water out), sorted the spare room out, built a bed, floored the loft, wrapped up my plant pots for winter, tidied the garden, cleared the leaves and generally got the house looking clean and tidy throughout, what you may call a good Autumn clean. I think it is safe to say, I have done what needs to be done for now and can rest easy.

I now have the pleasure of browsing all the seed catalogues that have been delivered recently and can plan what I would like to grow next year, both veg and flowers. So many possibilities. I am a naturally organised soul and like to plan what I am going to sow and where I am going to sow it, but I like the result to look haphazard. I can't wait!

I am going to see someone today about possibly doing their garden on a potentially regular basis, I think this would be a nice little extra earner if it works and perhaps I can get more than one person and build up a day of it eventually. I would certainly enjoy it and it would be a nice second string as they say. We will see. I am not sure it is safe to only have one profession these days, unless it happens to be a very safe one. My own is not, so the more I can diversify the better.

If I sometimes feel melancholy, it is because I don't like to be unsettled and my life is a little unsettled at the moment, to say the least. BUT, at the same time, it is humming with possibilities and I hope to be on the brink of something new and interesting.

My Embarrassing Secret

Hello everyone,
Well you have seen me slowly turn my rundown cottage into a real home, you have seen me paint and decorate, build beds, floor a loft, transform a garden and generally begin to enjoy my home here in the country.

But among all of these lovely things I had an embarrassing secret that I just was too ashamed to ever talk about.

 MY GARAGE!!!!!!

Here is why I was so ashamed of it:

It was a serious dumping ground of Crap with a capital C. It was virtually impossible to walk from end to end without risking life and limb on some strewn garden implement of death and absolutely impossible to find anything.

Opening the freezer always meant moving countless things and as for trying to find anything at the bottom of the freezer, well it was virtually impossible because there was nowhere to put anything that I got out. I had to move things before I could use the washing machine and generally I hated having to step foot in here.
The floor was littered with bits of wood shavings and dust from the various DIY jobs I did (don't even ask how I managed to work in there while sawing wood etc) and this would all get walked into the house, every time I went in, meaning I had to then vacuum the house.

My enormous collection of tools was all thrown in a heap and trying to find the right spanner for a job because a task of such magnitude that I often gave up.

My original idea of piling boxes on top of each other, a bit like shelves, clearly hadn't worked as they had all collapsed on top of each other, spewing out a multitude of contents everywhere!

Today, I decided was the day to solve my troubles and sort out all the crap.

Let's start by getting the plant pots sorted. One box of seed pots and trays, one of individual small pots and then the larger ones together in another. At least I can find what I need there now.

The tools was a job I nearly gave up on, it was so hideous to do. I can't say it is perfect, but at least I am in with a chance to find the right tool for the right job now, sort of.

Finally I can walk from one end to the other and, although it may not be perfect (my friend called it 'a man's garage, with everything shoved to the sides) at least I am no longer ashamed if someone sees it. Everything is together in sections, tools and plant pots on the right, garden tools, spare wood and lawn mower and strimmer on the left, with some ladders and buckets etc.

Wow, I can get to the washing machine and freezer without breaking a leg.

They're clean too.

I can't quite escape my obsession with keeping old bottles though! Well you never know when they may be useful? (lots of lovely, free Champagne up there for Christmas time).

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud. My loft now looks like this:

I've been a clever boy again!

More DIY ing today.

Now that I have cleared my spare room by getting a lot of the excess into the new loft space I wanted to get a spare bed for guests. Obviously I didn't really want to buy one! I had a matress that I had aquired for free, but it wasn't really nice to just have a matress on the floor in there.

I looked into bed bases but the cheapest one I found that would fit was £65 and said 'suitable for children or light adults', to me that says, will fall apart in 3 months.

I was a bit hampered by having too much in the room and was running on a very exact amount of room for the bed, one cm over here and there and it wouldn't have fitted.

So I did the best thing I could in the circumstances and made one myself.

It needed to fit in the corner by the wardrobe so I took very careful measurements and made a nice simple design that I thought I could follow myself and so took myself off to the shop to buy some wood. I had some in the garage so just needed a few extra bits.

Spent the first half of the afternoon cutting up the lengths of wood to the right size and beginning to assemble them in the way I thought would work.

It was a lovely sunny day, so I had the doors open and had breaks outside on the deck.

I had a nosy visitor mid-afternoon.

Made it in two halves so that it is easy to move about (unlike so many beds). Here it the first half with legs on.

In position. Perfect fit.

Second half made and a job well done. It is very very solid and will take more than a child or small adult.

Ready for visitors. It's very comfortable too.

All together it cost me £35 so as a single bed base, made to measure, not bad going at all and a lot less than buying one would have cost me.

Preparing for winter.

Thank you so much everyone for your lovely comments about the singing clip I posted on here on Saturday, very kind of you all and much appreciated.

Now back to reality.

You may remember in an old post that I was lucky enough to get a whole load of great plant pots for free on freecycle. I still think that this is one of the most fortunate things I have ever received for free and they have mostly been used for one plant or another over the course of the summer, saving me a ton. Now winter is coming and I want both the plants and the pots to survive any hard frosts. So with just a couple of pounds and an hours work I have winter proofed them all and, I think anyway, made them quite pretty at the same time.

The hessian sacking was £2 and underneath there is a layer of bubble wrap that cost me £1.90. Hopefully this will winter proof the pots and protect the roots.
I will put on a mulch over the next few days and maybe decorate with a few pine cones.

For one night only....

Not really, but it was a good title.

I had a few requests yesterday started by lovely Ilona to show a video of me singing some opera. OK, so I am not naturally a show off (which is strange considering the job I am in), so I thought about this for a while and then in the end thought, what the hell, if people don't like it, too bad. I don't have a video that I am prepared to share, but I do have a soundtrack.
Normally I would make 1000 excuses as to why this or that top note wasn't quite right, or why I don't like this bit, or why my Italian sucked, but I will refrain on this occasion.
I will however apologise for the honky tonk, wild west quality of the piano, it was one of those concerts where we turned up and having been promised a decent piano, found that it was truly dreadful, nothing you can do.

Anyway, enough excuses, here it is.

This is me and Catriona Clark Soprano singing the very romantic duet from Pagliacci by Leoncavallo.  I've done this role twice, but this was just a concert performance a couple of years ago. Catriona has been my onstage wife in lots of productions of various operas and has become a very close friend, so it is nice to sing something so lovely with her.

The characters, Silvio and Nedda are very much in love and he is trying to persuade her to leave her husband and run away with him and she begs him not to tempt her. After an outburst of anger in which he accuses her of not really loving him, he sings a a quiet aria (about 3.45 minutes  into the clip) telling her how she has changed his life and awoken love in him. She relents and they sing of their love, planning to run away together later that night.

As is the way in opera of course, things don't run quite to plan and at the end the husband finds out and stabs them both to death in the last minute of the opera. Not exactly a barrel of laughs in the end.

Bulk cooking and a haircut.

Yesterday was cold and blustery and not much of a day for going out. However, I was beginning to resemble caveman and gave myself a scare when I looked in the mirror.

So I took myself off to the Barbers. Poor woman, there have been roadworks outside her shop for 3 months and she is hugely losing business, there is nowhere to park so she says she has lost lots of her pensioners and is now having to dip into her savings. It really isn't fair, particularly as when I left, the men were all either having a cuppa or picking their nose.

Anyway, one severe haircut later and I am back to my former beauty and feel ready to go out again:

Last night I had a bulk cooking session. I was inspired by Froogs in her post here, just how far she makes her minced beef stretch. I thought, if she can do it, so can I.

I had slightly more beef to play with as I had bought a 645gm pack while it was reduced in ASDA the other day. Can't remember what I paid but I think it was just over £2 I decided to use half to make a bolognaise and half to make a meat and potato pie.

Got them both started on the stove but then once the bolognaise was all browned and bubbling I transfered it to my slow cooker.

I got 6 good sized portions out of this, 5 of which are now in the freezer and one in the fridge to be eaten over the next few days. When my brother was over this weekend he had brought with him a bottle of red wine, so I used what was left in the sauce to make it rich, tastes good.

The second half was used to make a meat and potato pie, from my granny's old recipe, always a favourite with me.

I am seriously not the best pastry maker. This is not too bad for me, but my rolling out leaves a lot to be desired. The final result is that the pastry tore in the oven slightly and it looks a real sight. But who cares, it tasted very good and I am slowly improving at it.

I hadn't judged the pastry quantity very well and had some left over. Rolled it out to see how much and found it would fit this case:

So I decided on a quick quiche as the oven would be on for the pie anyway. Used lots of store cupboard bits and bobs, a tin of tuna and some olives, some cheese, 3 eggs and some milk (didn't have cream) and some onions which I cooked slowly until they were a caramel colour.

This will do a lunch or 3 (depending on my greed)

I love baking something off the cuff with some leftovers like this. I had no intention of making a quiche when I started cooking, but for very little money I have a few lunches sorted.

Bulk cooking is definitely the way to make things stretch. In the past I would probably have used all the mince for one thing and not stretched it out with veg and other things quite so much, but instead I have 9 meals out of one pack of mince and 3 meals out of some leftover pastry. I don't know the cost, because I am rubbish at adding up the cost of all the different bits and pieces, but as I didn't need to go out and buy one single thing for all of this, it was all storecupboard ingredients, I know it was a very cheap set of 12 meals.

Who's a clever boy then?

Thanks to those comments yesterday and welcome to my new followers. It was nice to read your ghost stories too!

I am rather proud of myself. I have floored my loft. I am always ready to give DIY a go, mainly because I am stingy at paying someone to do anything that I could possibly do myself.
Fortunately for me, laying a floor up in the loft was a much easier job than I anticipated, even though I am unfortunate enough to have joists that are all different widths apart (how annoying is that) which meant that I had to cut every single piece of flooring differently. Never mind.

Here is the final result though:

I have a good 10 metres squared of new floor space now which is going to be brilliant for storage. I even put in access hatches for where there were junction boxes (fortunately there weren't many of those).
One day I will do the other half (there is about 7m2 remaining on the other side of the hatch) but for now this will do nicely. All told, it cost less than £60 to do this and the lighting, not bad going and just 2 afternoons work.