Tuesday 24 June 2008

Sunshine Means Working Your Arse Off

God I am so knackered, its not easy this redundancy lark, being at home all the time I find the garden calls to me (especially when I should be doing other things!)

So far this week, we've cut the waist high grass down in the orchard (Rich was made to carefully cut around the pretty flowers like the Poppies and Anemones that have come up), I've weeded the veg patch (even though I cant get at most of it because it has been over taken by the potatoes who are having a stab at world domination), I've re-stacked the tomatoes (which have lots of fruit but it is all stubbornly refusing to turn red), planted the few plants we got from Morrison's and cleaned millions of tiles (ok, about 20!). How the hell did I fit in a full time job?!




Sorry, would be more pics of the veg patch but the camera decided to run out of battery, never mind here's some other shots of the rest of the garden, its all looking very lovely right now!



And now a quick up date of the tiles front...

Ok in case you lot have forgotten Rich and myself were attempting to find roughly about 1300 old Victorian quarry tiles to replace our crappy faded carpet throughout the ground floor of our cottage. We wanted reclaimed tiles as we felt they would fit the period of our cottage and they look so wonderful (plus I hated the idea of buying tiles imported all the way from Italy!), so we had resolved to find old ones using ebay, freecycle and salvoweb, oh how they laugh when we told people!

Well here we are, somewhere in the region of 1200 tiles later...


Ok I'm not entirely sure how many are there, it's definitely around 1200, it was hard to keep count as they were being loaded into the back of the van.
All of these were sourced from ebay or salvoweb, it did involve a lot of driving round the country and the renting of a transit van for a day to collect the larger loads but I worked out that for the same amount of tiles brought from the local reclamation yard, at £1.75 per tile we would of had to have spent £2,100, we actually spent £450 and £50 for the van hire!

The only slight draw back being they need cleaning up, some need the old grout knocking off and about 150 of them have lino stuck to them with, what I can only describe as marmalade?!
So we saved money but they will require some man hours, but that's ok, I like to think we rescued these tiles from landfill which is were they were heading and just think of the sense of achievement we'll get when there down and look great!

So in conclusion, we're knackered but a bit smug!

No comments: