The Garden

I am now beginning to realise that this garden will never ever be finished! As fast as I do one part the rest unravels, blimey, why did I buy a house with such a big garden? The raised beds along the edge are coming along nicely, coming to life with bulbs, but the rest of the plants have struggled with the cold weather, we shall see.

The new potting shed is looking good, but of course I forgot to water the plants over the winter and they are not looking good, in fact they are very very dead. But the shed looks good! It's also full already of stuff I don't need.

Now the vegetable patch is half done, the sleepers are done and the soil is in. I ended up with injections in my wrists after moving 3 tons of soil last year so I am taking it easier this year! Planning to sort out the area between the beds and cover it with gravel and log slabs. If I can get that done this year I will be happy. Making the small beds into a herb garden and a salad garden, then an asparagus bed, and two veg plots. Should keep me out of mischief. Here are pictures how it is today.

The little black thing in the bottom of the picture is a sonic cat scarer off ebay. I bought it because next door had a new kitten who thought my veg patch was a nice large litter tray, grrrrrrrrr. Sadly I heard today he was run over on the busy main road so my gadget is redundant for now.

Anyway I will post later in the year and show the progress.

The Kitchen

The builder had renovated the kitchen before I moved it. I really liked the style, it was very simple and functional, but small! Eeeeeeeeeeek it was minute! I invited Holly and Jon around for Sunday lunch, and got well stressed as I had no room for anything. I decided to have an extension. Outside behind the kitchen was an ugly outbuilding,(an outside toilet) adjoining next door's wall and it was hideous. Building an extension would remove the outhouse, and obliterate the ugly view of the wall.

I called the same builder back and we decided to double the size of the kitchen, making it into a long galley kitchen. We would keep the same units and just add to them. The building work took ages to happen, being complicated by the fact that nobody was living next door to give me permission to join the wall. Eventually the same builder bought next door so the problem was sorted. He renovated next door to match my half which was great I thought.

My building work went well; I liked the work in spite of long delays which made it seem forever. But oh dear, when they fitted the interior they made it into a disaster, too long to go into here. In the end I found the courage to sack the builder, and finished it mostly by myself. Also held back a couple of grand to complete it, so felt that justice was served.

It is lovely now, really nice looking and works well when one is cooking. if there are two of you, then you need to be quite friendly as your bottoms touch as you pass. Bit of a nuisance if it is a work man fixing things!

Fitting the furniture in

Well moving from quite a large 4 bedroomed house into a cottage was tricky, everything was too big and I had too much of everything. My neighbour Liz had said to me to not get rid of anything, just in case and shove it all in, so I took her advice and did just that, and also put some stuff in Holly's attic.
In the cottage of course there was no storage whatsoever, the attic was a bedroom and not even an understairs cupboard, so nowhere to hide anything. I ordered a gigantic shed to go at the bottom of the garden and then started to fit everything in.
As well as the furniture being too big, it also had to negotiate very narrow stairs with a door on them, and a 180 degree turn, we ended up dismantling all the upstairs furniture and re-building it, nothing seemed simple. I was lucky that Mike and Sally, my friends in Sussex were near enough to help me, as long as you supply Mike with coffee and chocolate he just works down the list, how lucky I am to have friends like that.
I saw an advert in the village for a handyman, he also needed coffee and chocolate, and to this day he has not completed my list either, he did put the shed up though and build some decking in front too.
I managed to get someone from round the corner in the village to widen the drive, and build some steps, he also recommended someone who helped me with some wrought iron gates; things were starting to take shape a last.

The Gardens at Kings Cottages

Kings Cottages are a row of 3 storey cottages built in the 1890s. They are set back from the road and raised up which is just as well as the area around Wateringbury is prone to flooding. They all have long thin gardens about 150 feet in length. Traditionally they had a narrow path down one side of the garden and all had those washing lines that look like they are a ship's mast. Each garden would have a small private section near the house and the rest was kept open and the neighbours used to chat and swap produce etc, Lovely I thought!
Next door on one side are Betty and Derek, who have become good friends.
The other half of my house belonged to John Wilson; he had a sign which said "Holler" as he was deaf, in his 80s and a keen gardener. He had been widowed in 1954 and spent his working life at East Malling Research which specialised in fruit tree grafting.His garden was overcrowded but amazing, full of apples, plums pears vegetables and even grapevines, you could hardly move in there.
The weekend I was moving in John was flying to Russia for a holiday, he used to fly to Moscow, catch a train and travel. Sadly this time he never returned; 3 hours from Moscow he had a stroke. He eventually was flown back to hospital in Bristol, but died there. I was very sad to lose my new neighbour and had been looking forward to geting to know him. After his death I did get to know his daughter Paula but thats for another time.

Before I moved in the builder had annihiallated my garden, removed everything and turfed over all the rubbish. Some of it was ok but some of it was dreadful, lumpy bumpy and dried out sods of turf. The job is still unfinished. Here are some photos of it when I moved in.

Moving to Kent

I moved here to Kent in 2007, living in a place called Kings Hill first. Kings Hill is a new housing area built on an old airfield so it's very flat. It had everything I needed and I was in a really smart new flat, but I couldn't settle there, it felt very unreal and plastic.

I looked around for somewhere to buy and found this lovely cottage on the market, it had a really good feel to it, but had several down points. It was on a very busy main road with a narrow drive and was dangerous manouvering off the noisy road. Also the windows are quite small so not as light as I wanted.

I bought it and decided to widen the drive and put some safe gates on to protect the grandchildren when they play in the garden.

The kitchen was also very small with a separate toilet outside; I decided to knock down the outhouse and extend the kitchen. I had to take out a second mortgage to do that!

I moved in at the August Bank Holiday weekend, what a job that was! Some of my belongings came from my home in the north west, some from friends houses, some from Kings Hill and some from Holly's. I thought I would never get straight ever again. Add to that I had been in Turkey the whole of August so I was ill prepared. Also I had to get rid of a lot of items when I moved originally, and then had to start buying all over again, nightmare.

I started my new job the following week so it was quite some time before my feet hit the ground. Ended up with a migraine on the second day of my new job too.