A parcel arrives...

...and inside is some beautiful wallpaper for what-is-now-Ruth's-but-will-become-Elsie's room. It's truly gorgeous wallpaper.  I just hope I have more success at putting it up than my last attempt. And I hope it covers the strange lumps and bumps in the plaster in that room. Luckily my Dad will be here soon and I'm sure he'll be willing to lend a hand! Watch this space.

Oh, we did tell you about Elsie, didn't we? She's the newest arrival here at Twenty Four and the Door.

Door to the playroom

Finally we've cut through the wall - this is the first view of it. There will be a cupboard on the left with a cupboard in the old toilet on the right. The toilet itself has already been moved to the new room.

New door in the kitchen

Actually a whole new doorway. The new playroom for the kids is getting closer... It's finally making good use of the tiny one room studio appartment that came with the house.

The other door to the playroom is already waiting to be revealed behind the wall of the current downstairs toilet. Knocking that down will be a more of a messy job...

Today's ROSPA special

The melted chocolate extension plug behind the microwave - that's where my chocolate went. I wore my rubber-soled wellies to clean this one up...

Fibres

This little flashing box is our new fibre-optic internet connection (+multicast TV) - nominally up to 100Mb/s download AND upload. Actually, I get about 65 Mb/s directly connected and about 45 Mb/s on the wireless N. The high upload rate is very handy.

It's really waiting for our electrician to finish wiring up, first the electricity, then the gigabit ethernet that's going into every room. Then I'll have an enormous switch plugged into this to distribute it all over the house. The wireless will have to do for now...

Flower bed

Catching up now on all the things we did over the summer - this was one of the first - bringing the old flower bed back to life. We killed all the existing stuff and have now put in a geotextile underlay with lots of bark chips on top. It's got automatic watering laid in there too, so it hasn't been too much work to maintain over the summer. Weeds are amazing things though, and they still manage to poke through the slightest gap in the bark chips...

Water water everywhere

The obsession with pipes continues - this is but a small part of the garden watering system we've been putting into the garden.

It's spent the summer watering the tomatoes and our new flower bed, but I have greater plans for it...

There's a couple of conduits built in the concrete wall supporting the balcony - they were previously used to get water to and from the old swimming pool. I plan to use them to get the house cave-drain through the wall and down to the bottom of the garden where there's a real drain (underground).

We'll also take a garden water pipe through the wall to get the water out into the rest of the garden and down to the bottom of the garden where we'd like to put the chickens.