Put away your purse & become debt-averse

Onebrokelady

I am speechless with shock 🙀🐓🙀🐓🙀🐓🙀🐓

foxgloves

Oh my goodness, I have come to a complete standstill on the sofa, which is where I intend to stay for the rest of the evening. The builders finished today. We are really pleased with everything, I paid the balance & we managed to wedge a couple more bits of tat in the skip before it's picked up tomorrow. So we now have a new tiny utility room, a proper walk in pantry, new gas central heating & new boiler. We have also had a fair bit of external render removed to expose the dpc (which should never have been covered up) to facilitate investigation of our damp wall. Cause of damp defo found, but will require remedial work. Have asked our builders to supply me with a quote for getting this work done. No sooner had builder truck disappeared, electrician arrived to discuss our list of jobs. Awaiting quote on that too.
Stuff I managed to do today: Prepped & froze beans, divvied up remains of that expensive replacement chicken & got the carcass into my SC for stock, baked biscuits, planted hyacinths, irises, a pot of pansies to fit in the top of my vintage chimney pot & potted up a couple of geraniums ready to come indoors when the weather turns.
Tomorrow, I really need to sort out Foxgloves HQ, which will involve lots of vacuuming & damp dusting activity, as I definitely need to get back to my routines.
A flock of long-tailed tits in our apple tree today - gorgeous - such busy cheery little souls. 
F x

foxgloves

Morning all, 
First day without builders. Mr F has just set off for work & the house is soooo quiet. All I can hear is sparrows twittering in our front hedge & a crow cawing. I am intending to have a really productive day, so for motivation, I'll pop back later with what I've achieved.
Feeling fed-up about the covid situation, but also resigned to it. There is nothing I can do to change the situation, except contunue to follow the safety rules & try to stand well apart from those who are under the assumption that pandemic rules don't apply to them. Mixed messages from the Government over the past months have definitely not helped.
Anyway, must crack on as I don't want to squander my surge of Doingstuffitis.
Chat later, 
F x

savingmore

have a fruitful day and enjoy yr utility room and new pantry.  would love a pantry!!!

Narola1976

Just stopping by to say how much I have enjoyed reading your diary over the last few weeks. I just wish I was like you. So productive and creative, and disciplined. I had to take a fortifying gulp of my water when I read you threw a chicken out! 

foxgloves

Savingmore - I haven't done half as much as I'd hoped, but my original plans were unrealistic - tomorrow after all is another day & I can do lots more then. The new pantry is a converted old understairs cupboard. It has been boarded out, plastered, the floor has been quarry tiled to match the kitchen & the builders really have fitted in as many shelves as possible. This was a smelly (dodgy washing machine pipework) cupboard which I hoped could look good, but they saw its potential, I guess because they know much better than me what can actually be done. So I suppose I'm saying that if you fancy a pantry one day & have a dank underwhelming old cupboard under the stairs, it could theoretically be possible.

Narola1976 - I'm glad I have been able to provide you with reading material & that you enjoy my diary. Yes, wasn't it shocking about the chicken? I haven't quite got over it yet?!
F 

foxgloves

Evening m'dears,
Well my head was simply fizzing with mental lists of tasks I thought I'd get done today, but it was all fairly unrealistic once I'd actually got started on things. I decided it would be best to concentrate my efforts on kitchen witchery. I've had a good tidy & put away, baked a sourdough loaf, made tomorrow's packed lunch & done today's garden pickings: 2 courgettes, 1.5kg apples, 2 red peppers & 650g chillies. The lemon drop chilli plants are now finished, so I've put them aside for chopping up for the compost bins when I have time & it isn't raining. I've frozen sufficient lemon drop chillies to make another batch of hot lemon chilli jam at some point over the next few months, as we are both really enjoying the first jar of the batch I made the other week. I decided to pickle 500g green chillies, as I had everything in - vinegar, the usual pickly sort of spices, bay leaves, sugar, etc. this made 3 jars. They need to mellow for at least a couple of weeks before sampling, so goodness knows what they'll be like. Mr F got quite excited when he came home tonight & spotted them, but as I've said before, the man has an asbestos mouth!
Now, I feel I must return to the Chicken Saga......when the (whispers it....) chicken chucking event occurred & we bought an expensive replacement from our local farm shop, I was determined to make karmic amends by using it as well as possible. I think I've achieved that. It was a pretty large chicken. There's only the two of us, but nevertheless, it did roast dinner on Sunday, cold chicken, jacket wedges & salad on Monday, on Tuesday Mr F turned some of into a stew, which he ate (colossal bowlful, I might add!) for dinner & also took some to work for today's lunch. Tonight, I made chicken fajhitas. I also made a big pan of chicken soup today, using the stock I made with the carcass yesterday, the rest of the meat & the usual soup veg. I had a big mugful for my lunch, put a jugful in the fridge for lunches over the next couple of days & also froze a portion. I'm quite pleased with that on the whole. If I'd done a pasta bake or a pizza or spice rice instead of the cold chicken & chips, I could have got an extra day out of it. I've never been a vegetarian, but I do think that if we are going to farm & eat animals then it behoves us to eat every scrap & not to be wasteful. 
Oh, & apples.......our windfalls are generally besieged by codling moth grubs so I wouldn't bite into an imperfect one, but cut up & cored, etc, they make lovely cooked apple, so I stewed up another big bowlful to use instead of fresh fruit for the next few days.
And while I was doing all that, I have to say that the Ironing Pixies did not sneak in through the back door & tiptoe upstairs to tackle the ironing pile......which means it is still all there ready for tomorrow. Boooooooo!
Stay safe all of you.......there are a lot of idiots about.......including too many who seem to think Covid is somehow spread by chins, so many chin masks have I seen in town & on the TV news.
Night all,
F x

DawnW

My larder is also a converted dank space under the stairs Foxgloves. There wasn't a cupboard before, just a space. No smelly pipes to deal with though, just tidying up of plasterwork, putting in shelves and making the door, and OH did those things. The builder who did the rest of the tiling had already done the floor. Actually OH made 2 cupboards - our stairs are narrow and steep (Edwardian, but a terraced workman's cottage, not the grander sort of house with a gracious hall and imposing staircase). The larger 'half' became the pantry, and the smaller, lower bit at the bottom of the stairs became a cupboard for the hoover, a folding airer, ironing board etc.

foxgloves

I think understairs cupboards can be a bit of a wasted space, Dawn. Ours was a pretty good size once the builders had bashed out some old partitioning. I had got stuck in a frame of mind re both newly converted areas were problems, but the builders are used to such things & could immediately see the potential. It helps to get another perspective from professionals. 
F x

DawnW

I hope you have fun filling it. We covered the shelves with different floral / ditsy patterned sticky black plastic stuff, and I arranged all my vintage tupperware in there   Not everyone's taste I know, but I love it!