Let There Be Light

We try and tackle at least one house-related task each week. Last weekend, in between attending three fantastic kids' birthday parties, we exchanged stern words with the rogue wisteria out the back.

When we first moved in, this was the view from the back door. 

Not so pretty; but in early summer when the wisteria comes into bloom? A different story.

A couple of years of neglect later, and we appear to have created a delightfully dank cave-like space with a hazardously sagging wooden pergola thingie that had to be propped up with the giant tube containing the 5m window cleaning device that Andre (fortuitously, as it turned out) insisted on buying recently. 

We intended just to give it a quick trim to relieve some of the pressure on the close-to-collapsing-but-not-so-close-that-we-can-be-bothered-to-fix-it frame, but even after taking off loads it wasn't enough, so we ended up chopping off the whole lot.

Wisteria grows like a virus so we're not unduly concerned about its prospects, and it's so much lighter out the back, even though our neighbour questioned mildly how long he would have to look at the newly-revealed shanty town-like structure. Not too long, we hope! The structural drawings are near completion, the schedule of works has been drafted, and we're just about ready to go out to tender for the building work that will hopefully be ready to start demolishing said shanty town-like structure, along with half the ground floor, early next year.

The next project? Stripping the front door. I've done the first coat of Homestrip and there only appear to be about three layers of paint which I assume means it's not the original door, unless some other poor sod had a crack at it before we moved in. We also have to shift about three cubic tonnes of newly delivered wood chip to the play area at the end of the garden, oh joy...