Where to start...?

Well, I’m back. There’s too many exciting things happening not to blog! I may not be back to my daily digest, but I will try and do a couple of entries a week and see how it develops...

So it’s March and it feels like summer. The weather is gorgeous; not just bright and sunny but warm, too. A taste of what we have in store this summer? I certainly hope so because we have lots of exploring and walking we want to do, and doing it in glorious weather is always so much more fun. The nice thing about the unexpectedly nice weather is we get to do stuff when Cornwall is still quiet and not crawling with tourists (some places are literally transformed in the summer with the amount of people that arrive). So we can wake up and if it’s a beautiful day rather than have to drive miles to get somewhere, we’re pretty much already there!

The cottage is coming along really well. (The new Elfin Cottage sign arrived and has been put up inside, so as not to confuse the postman!) Yesterday the Plymouth lovelies gave up a day to help us paint the dining room and bathroom and it looks great. (I was actually excited to come downstairs this morning to see it!) We choose Willow Tree for the dining room (a light, creamy green) and corn silk for the bathroom (a soft, but still bright, yellow). The girls and my partner were great; working hard and taking lots of care. I was floating support! I can’t stand for too long, which does make me a bit useless for painting! Although I did manage to clean some walls, do the understairs wood and finish off cutting in on part of the wall so I did feel I was some help. I was also chief cook and bottle washer and did hotdogs for lunch (with chocolate pudding for afters) and roast chicken and salad for dinner with my partner making some homemade rolls as well. And I got people drinks when they needed top-ups. And in between all this I even managed to watch the rugby!

We will paint the rest of the house, but probably stick with the pale cream we have now because it really shows off just how sunny the house is. But for now, we wanted to just do a couple of rooms to really make the place our own. Anji put together our new chimenea which we lit (not very successfully!) last night so we could eat our dinner on the patio. It turned out to be a little ambitious as although the days are warm, the nights are still very cold.

Next weekend, we need to install some fencing as Pluto keeps jumping into our neighbour’s garden! So it’s off to Mole Valley Farmers Saturday morning to get the panels to make the garden a little more secure. Which means I can leave them in the garden unattended so that Bess can sunbathe which she absolutely loves to do!

Our next big job is the attic as that’s where we’ve put all the as yet unpacked boxes. We’re going to plan a day up there soon, with a bottle of wine and a radio and will unpack EVERYTHING! We need to; we’ve already had lots of visitors, but in a couple of weeks, we’re having three visitors at once and will need both spare rooms.

Otherwise, the chickens are doing well, the dogs are happy, as are we. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever been happier or healthier.