Baby, baby, baby

Posted by Caroline Elliott

The only word I can think up to sum up this week is “baby!” Because, since our scan on Tuesday, the fact that we are having another baby has suddenly become more real. Whether it is because we know “it” is in fact a “she,” or because we know that she is growing well in there I’m not sure, but she has now become a reality.

It’s suddenly dawned on me that we are in no way ready for another baby! I know we have a while to go yet and so I am not overly stressed or panicky, but I am suddenly feeling that we aren’t ready, and I so hate being unprepared for things. Complete control freak! I know I’ve been thinking about things like whether to get a new buggy, but that’s as far as we’ve got, thinking. My lovely physio (who is also pregnant, and due a week or 2 before I am) was asking me last week if we had everything and if we were ready, and I was so blasé and said we were pretty sorted, when we really aren’t!

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Adding some colour to the garden

Posted by Caroline Elliott

A big project for us this year has been our garden. Regular readers will know all about Operation Garden Renovation and the time and effort we have put into turning our garden from this:

(although at this point we had already removed the approx. 15 conifer trees that covered the perimeter of the garden) to this:

The work is still ongoing though and we have started planting the garden… and we have been looking at some other ways of adding some colour to the garden! There is a trend at the moment for using some non-traditional colours to paint fences and woodwork, and, well, both hubby and I love it! So we decided we would go for it and add some colour to the garden.

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Helping Daddy Dig!

Posted by Caroline Elliott

Now that the landscaping has finished in the garden renovation, we are starting to think about plants! Money is a little tight at the moment though, so as it was my birthday I asked people for plants and garden centre vouchers, and thankfully, a few people obliged, yay! So we popped out last sunday and bought our first few plants!

Unfortunately the the beautiful hydrangeas are actually a birthday present for hubby’s sister in law, lucky thing, it’s only unfortunate, because I am jealous of them lol! We did buy a hydrangea, but ours won’t flower until later in the year.

Anyway, we realised that before we planted them, we needed to dig over the beds. One is really full of clay, and another is a lot drier, which is slightly bizarre as they are all basically the same but hey ho. So Daddy, with a lot of erm “help” from Monkey spent a while out there digging over the beds, to combine the two a little, and then we will add some compost when we actually plant them.

Monkey had a lot of fun though and needed a good bath before nap time that day as he was covered!

Mammasaurus and How Does Your Garden Grow?

Operation Garden Renovation #7 The Landscaping is finished!

Posted by Caroline Elliott

Yep this is it, big reveal time! Although the garden is far from finished and we still have a lot of work to do, the landscaping work has now been done.

First of all a reminder at what the garden looked like before. Huge ugly conifers, shed and arbour off to one side and a dodgy uneven patio.

Now though, we have opened it all up! We have a lovely wavy patio out the back doors and round behind the conservatory.

With a tree in the corner this is the only area of the garden that ever gets any shade, which is why we thought we would use it for the patio. We will (eventually) buy a nice new patio table and chairs out there as ours is a hand me down hubby got from a friend before we even met! It’ll do for now though!

The best thing about our lovely new garden is our new huge bit of lawn. We knew that the layout of the old garden made it feel smaller than it is, but in truth we had no idea quite how big the garden would look with everything gone. It’s huge! Yay!

Its still very new so we can’t walk on the turf at the moment, but when we can I know Monkey is going to love playing out there! We’ve deliberately not put any beds on that side of the garden so that he can have a big expanse to play on. I think the garage wall could do with a nice colourful mural at some point too! We will see what we can come up with!

So there we have it, the big work has been done, and thank goodness, Monkey and I have already been out there with his sand table and bubbles, we are going to have so much fun out there this summer, and I am dead excited about it!!

The landscapers have been great and done an amazing job, but there is still a lot more that we want to do to make it ours, Operation Garden Renovation is far from over!

The fences need painting, we have tons of plants to buy, soil to dig over and then the actual planting all of the plants. We want to buy some planters and some outdoor play toys for Monkey. But, well, we can’t afford to everything all in one go, getting the landscaping done has been expensive enough! So the rest of it will be done in bits and bobs, probably over the next few years, though we hope to get some more done this year.

So what do you think?

A glimpse into our home…

Posted by Caroline Elliott

I’ve talked a lot about our garden recently, and there will be another update about that on Thursday! I’ve also recently shown you Monkey’s bedroom, but as the theme for The Theme Game this week is “home” I thought I would give you a few sneak peeks into our house, by just showing you a few of my favourite things, that make me feel really happy to be hom.

Starting in the hallway, where we have a hanging I bought on my travels, in Xi’an, China, to be exact. I just love it.

Also in the hall is a lovely montage of is and our family. We try to update it fairly regularly, and we like fairly candid shots if we can, just all of us having fun :). The frame was a wedding present from my big brother, and its a bit dodgy now as it fell off the wall in our old house and broke 🙁 but we still love it.

Into the downstairs shower-room. We converted what was a really dingy little toilet, and a hall cupboard into a little shower-room. it’s all very simple and white, with just a fun hint of colour in the form of sparkly tiles in the shower and behind the sink.

Into the living room, and you start to see how much we love colour! We have a bright blue wall, and a gorgeous mirror which I just adore. Lots of colourful blankets and cushions, a little area behind the sofa for Monkey’s toys and some of his millions of books! We also have a gorgeous armchair in about the funkiest fabric we could find, and I love the framed picture of the coordinates to our home (though hubby has decreed I am not allowed to publish that picture, in case someone looks up where we live!).

Off sideways into the kitchen, another room we completely renovated, and just a simple shot out of the kitchen window. I love looking out at all the fresh green at this time of year.

Through into the dining room, where we have our most grown-up piece of furniture, a gorgeous dresser, and our photo wall, which again we try to update regularly.

Upstairs we have our spare room/office, otherwise known as the map room, for obvious reasons! It’s quite often a mess and covered in laundry and paperwork but it’s such a tranquil space to spend some time when it is actually tidy. This picture was taken when it was first decorated, as it is a right mess in there at the moment lol!

I won’t show you too much of our bedroom, but I love this photo. I took this picture of the door of a temple in Luang Prabang in Laos. And I adore it. I have had it in my bedroom for years and all of the walls and bedding and accessories are themed around it.

We have one room upstairs which is basically a tip – full of all sorts of bits and bobs that haven’t yet been thrown out or made it to the garage or loft. But that will have to change soon as that is to become the new baby’s room, so at some point this year we will have to get around to painting it (it is currently decorated in a dark grey) and putting some flooring down!

So there you have it, just a sneak peak into our home! Reminds of that old Lloyd Grossman programme, Through the keyhole. “Who lives in a house like this?” A generally happy little family, that’s who :).

#AllAboutYou Link & Pin Party Mama and More

Operation Garden Renovation #6 – Work begins!

Posted by Caroline Elliott

Regular readers will know that we have been renovating our garden. It has been a real labour of love and we spent about 5 weeks on the clearance side. We decided to get landscapers in to do the actual um… rebuilding of the garden as we know our limits! We couldn’t get booked in quite as early as we would have liked and a few rainy days put them a bit behind schedule (boo :() but we have now started and they are making excellent progress!

They started by digging out where the patio is going to be. It’s amazing how much dirt they have removed from just that area – basically an entire huge skip just of soil! Sadly we don’t have any pictures of the skip so you’ll have to take my word for it! One of neighbours did ask if they could have some of the soil for their garden, and of course I said yes! Why not?

Then they laid stones down for the foundation of the patio, and flattened with a very noisy vibrating machine.

They then re-rotivated the old lawn, as the grass had re-seeded itself since we did it! Their machine was much more heavy duty than ours so it is milled a bit finer than when we rotivated it. They also dug an edge, as they are going to be lining the edge of the lawn with blocks too, to keep things neat and tidy. then they brought some big piles of sand in and we were under strict instructions not to let Monkey loose in the garden while we waited for the stones to arrive!

So then it was a matter of waiting for the stones to arrive so they can get laying! Eek! It’s so great to see some progress finally! With the combination of the arrival of warmer weather, and all the problems with my pelvis, I can’t wait to be able to just go in the garden with Monkey! Thankfully we’ve been spending some time in my neighbour’s garden but I am so looking forward to a summer of fun in the back garden!!

And just quickly, in other garden news, we have buds on the bluebells! Woohoo! Very excited Hello beautiful bluebells outside my kitchen window 🙂

A spot of weeding in the sunshine

Posted by Caroline Elliott

As the clearance stage of Operation Garden renovation is over, and we are waiting for our contractor to start work on making the garden pretty again, we have been enjoying a bit of a rest from garden stuff. However the front garden has definitely been a bit neglected and is in serious need of some weeding and TLC.

So with the sun out on Saturday we went out for a spot of weeding in the warm weather. Monkey helped a bit too, though mainly he just played in the mud. We didn’t mind him entertaining himself though 🙂

It was good to see some soil around the plants rather than just weeds!

It was also lovely to have a good look at some of the plants. There were a few shrubs that we thought hadn’t survived after our long summer last year and the very wet winter, but to our delight even the most dead looking plants have got some beautiful green buds.

I love the little flowers on this gorgeous shrub too, Spring is well and truly here, hip hip hooray!!

Unfortunately we have quite a bit more weeding yet to accomplish but we at least made a good start. I’m just looking forward to my bluebells flowering now!!

How does your garden grow?

Operation Garden Renovation #5 Bringing in the Big Guns

Posted by Caroline Elliott

So far we have pruned, chopped, broken, burned and disposed of almost everything in the garden. After last weekend we had a pile of rubbish and broken slabs that wouldn’t fit into the skip, so we agreed we would need another. Another skip wasn’t the only thing we knew we would need though, oh no. We also hired some big machines to help us with the final clearance stage of Operation Garden Renovation!

A few of the stumps

A Stump Grinder, for all the tree stumps left from the huge conifers we had to tear down, and a Cultivator to churn up all of the soil and hopefully bring up any plant roots and Ivy! Hubby was pretty excited about the arrival of the awesome machines, boys and their toys!!

The stump grinder looked pretty terrifying to me though and very dangerous. with lovely warnings on the back about how bad the fumes are we decided I very much had to keep Monkey indoors while they were using it. Thankfully we got yet more help from our brothers, as it really was a two man job to use it.

As they got into the swing of things they made great progress with the stumps across the two days. This was also sadly the weekend we had the nighttime A&E trip with Monkey so on Sunday after very little sleep hubby was so very tired, but they weren’t cheap to hire and we knew we had to make the most of having the equipment. So he plowed on through bless him and did an amazing job, even though he was knackered.

Before the stump grinder..

Part way through…

After!! (or nearly finished at least)

After all the stumps had been chewed to a pulp and were a good few inches below ground level, it was time to get the cultivator out to chew up the garden. Thankfully this was now a much easier job as there was not much in the way – other than a single solitary daffodil, that we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to destroy!!

Although Monkey didn’t have quite the same reservations!

So there we have it, our garden is finally cleared and is now a big pile of mud :). There is a few bits of shrubbery still there but the guy who will be doing the hard work of giving us a nice looking garden again will have to prepare the ground anyway so I am sure he can manage those.

It has been a VERY hard 5 weeks of renovation and clearance and we couldn’t have done it without the help of our families, but we have saved ourselves a good few thousand pounds worth of labour by doing it this way. Even so the garden is still going to cost more than we want it to really but nowhere near as costly as it could have been.

The next garden renovation post should hopefully show the garden taking shape at last! It may not be for a few weeks though so stay tuned!

How does your garden grow?

Operation Garden #4 Patio Demolition

Posted by Caroline Elliott

Operation Garden Renovation is now WELL under way. So far we have cut down all of the bushes, torn down the shed and arbor, and had a big fire in the back garden to get rid of all of this wood.

This is where it starts to get a bit tough though, we now need to remove all the patio. Not an easy job, and we’ve decided the best way to get rid of it is to get a big skip. So on Friday, a big skip came, and Monkey helped me put some of the rubbish in, bless him he does like to help!

On Saturday my older brother came round and he and hubby set to the patio demolition. Unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as lifting the slabs and carried them round, as some of the slabs turned out to be much thicker than others and were far too harry for them to carry between them, or even to push in the wheel barrow.

As they themselves admit they aren’t the brawniest specimens of man so instead had to put their brains into action to come up with a solution. They found all that long gone scientific knowledge from school days about levers and pivots to be quite useful after all, and with what brute strength they had they found a way to smash up the slabs into more manageable pieces. Which basically involved, lifting on one end and resting it on a slab, then throwing another slab onto it in order to break it. Once they got the angles it right it was pretty effective!

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The wheel barrow was still seriously heavy when full though so they adopted a turkey walk to put the weight into their knees rather than backs! Brains over brawn! 🙂

They managed to get 2 1/2 of the patio areas done before my brother had to go home for the day, but thankfully my younger brother was headed over the following day to give us a hand. Though we didn’t exactly tell him what he was in for, when he arrived we made sure he knew how much work our older brother had done and how much more we expected of him ;). His lovely girlfriend came round too and had a play with Monkey while the boys got to work.

Using the technique perfected the previous day they got the rest of the patios destroyed but there was too much to go in the skip, so they had to pile up a load of it ready for another skip we assume (Not sure we could take a trip to the tip with it weighing the car down!).

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Then with the help of my brother’s lovely girlfriend we cleared a lot more of the foliage and she found one of the former occupants of the shed… shall we say it was a little bit crispy?! Yuk!

Everyone was shattered at the end of the weekend but there is still more to be done! This is how it looked at the end of the weekend and it feels like there is a long way to go yet!

We can’t wait to finish the clearance now and have some more relaxing weekends for a while!

Next week we are bringing in the big guns and hiring some machinery to remove tree stumps and all the plant roots!

Monkey is in charge of Operation Garden Renovation

Posted by Caroline Elliott

With Operation Garden Renovation consuming our lives at the moment, we haven’t been out and about quite as much as usual, but Monkey has been more than happy to help us in the garden, and has very much enjoyed all the time he has been able to spend out there with his uncles.

He has been helping us load up the skip