Grey.

Not so cold today with full cloud cover making it gloomy and grey.

When the garage roof, which was falling in when we moved in, was replaced the builder and Peter thought it would be a good idea to use up a sheet of insulation to fill in the gap between the walls and roof. However with the cold weather we're getting some condensation in the garage, mainly on the tins of paint and the tools which are hung up on the walls. So it's time to increase the ventilation. Today the plan was to prise out the blocks of 4" thick insulation but I found this was easier said than done. No chance of just pinging out the dense foam which was firmly wedged in place. I tried cutting away at it with an old kitchen knife but it was slow going and left me covered in tiny bits of foam. We'll try option 2 which is to drill large holes in the wooden doors. There are three wooden doors but two are currently covered with planks and other 'useful' bits of wood so it will take a bit of organising.

Instead I moved indoors and started with the small job of disguising the metal clips holding up the venetian blind in the sitting room. This was the first blind we put up and never having installed one before when it came with six fittings we used all of them (later discovering that we only needed three). Not only that but the silver colour made them stand out in a way that was catching my eyes in a bad way. (above) Painting the clips wasn't an option so I came up with the idea of using white Blutak which while still being visible is a lot less intrusive than the clips. (below)

My next small job was to drill into the wall, which was originally the outside of the place, to fit a screw to hang a lovely photo of the North Devon coast showing Lundy on the horizon. After that came the job I was not looking forward to, scraping the paint from the wall on one side of the French doors. The year that we waited for the render on the outside to be repaired had allowed the rain to come through in a couple of places and caused the paint to bubble and flake. I carefully scraped off the paint up to half-way up the wall and bleached some mould that had begun to grow. Once the plaster has fully dried out I can then paint the wall back to pristine white.

Finally, while Peter went off to row I went out to the back garden where first I measured the area I plan to pave over so that I can work out how to arrange the mix of slabs I've got saved. After that I did an emergency planting of about 300 bulbs I'd stored optimistically thinking I'd be able to plant them in the new raised beds in the front garden. Hah! Today I dug a couple of trenches in a bed in the back garden and planted the bulbs in those as they were already beginning to sprout. I think they're a mix of garden daffodils and Welsh daffodils with maybe a few other things mixed in but it would have been a shame to leave them after carefully rescuing them from planters and beds around the garden.

Then I had a break before coming to blog and I should have enough time to play the piano and do some Duo Lingo before supper.