Foraging in Your Own Backyard

There was probably a point where I thought that the next blog post I put up would be about the glorious construction of the garden wall, with pictures of it gleaming in the sun whilst a Golem sprinted up the steps to demonstrate how wonderful it is to have rear access to the property.

Alas, as you can probably guess, the wall is still not started, and the slope of doom persists. Of course, it's been there for months now, but somehow this last few weeks of waiting for the builder to finish the job before us is dragging on spectacularly. The monster job which is re-roofing 3 tile roofs, installing one green roof (probably), re-roofing 4 flat roofs with fibreglass, re-cladding the dormers, repainting the front of the house and possibly replacing the entire guttering system awaits us, but we can't do a thing to start it (apart from working out the nitty gritty of how the hell we're going to do it) until the wall is done. Sad times.

There are a few things I've been doing in the meantime though, and being me they are all about the permaculture. Although my design for the garden is nowhere near completed, I've been trying to think of positive things to do to while away the waiting for the wall, and what with Spring having Sprung, there are all the lovely plants which will one day grace our garden to think about.

My garden design will focus heavily on perennials, partly because they're a vital part of any productive permaculture system, but also because they are resillient enough to cope with changing tenants and changing priorities. A garden of annuals relies on a gardener with the time and energy to get it up and running every year, but in a house where the tenants may change relatively frequently, and where the work needed on the house might drain energy and attention away from the garden, this can't be relied on. Perennial plantings are relatively neglect-proof, and should produce edible produce even if they're completely left alone, and in years where there are people here who fancy applying some TLC, the plants will quickly respond and become more productive.

Our current plantings are all perennials in pots

So to add to the perennials we already house (mostly herbs and berries) we now have a sea beet, some mountain sorrel, and some water dropwort. Finn and I will soon be planting seeds of globe artichoke, fennel, watercress and nasturtium (not perennial, but a prolific self-seeder) to add to them, and whenever the chance arises I'll be adding plants to our pot collection so that when we're in a position to start on the garden, the plants are ready and waiting.

Sea beet with a (when it gets established) groundcover of mountain sorrel

Water dropwort ('Flamingo'), which tastes like a cross between celery and something else...

We'll soon be foraging for co-op meals from our diverse and low-maintenance garden, and in the meantime we get the enjoyment of hunting for plants in the wider world, and scouring the slope of doom for materials for paving and raised bed building. This is our current crop, and it's nothing to what we might be able to forage out before the builder backfills behind the new wall and buries it all again.

Bricks at the back and stone at the front.

And it still looks like this!

Just to balance this post out with news of what some other people have been up to, Rob and Flick have been painting in the spare room, and barring a second coat on the cupboard and some touching up, it's done. The tiles have been bought, but aren't up yet. If anyone out there adores tiling then feel free to rescue me from this task - I've taken it on but I'm rubbish at tiling! There's almost certainly lunch and some baked goods in it for you :D

Sven and Cass fitted the extractor fan to the kitchen window, and both the prepayment meters have gone so we're in the process of switching to Good Energy for gas and electric. We had a maintenance workshop and now have a much more holistic maintenance plan which will hopefully ensure that when we do work on one element of the house, we do as much as we can at once (hence the slightly daunting list of work to do while the house is scaffolded). Games have been played, tea has been drunk. House life ticks on.

Hopefully my next post will manage to feature our good and glorious wall, but we shall see. Wish us luck ;)

- Hannah

All The Small Things

So we're into our first winter living in the house, and only 4 months away from finishing the first year here. Christmas was a low-key event with some co-op members and some guests present, and we had a separate co-op Christmas day when the rest of the co-op were back. In general people were home lots, and this meant that things got done. A lot of the things were small, annoying jobs which have somehow lingered for months and months, so it was very exciting to get them out of the way!

Firstly, between me and Sven the kitchen floor is now entirely tiled! OK, so the wall behind the door isn't done, but it's still progress. It actually looks quite smart, and will look even better when the grout dirties up to match the rest of the floor.

Everyone realised they'd been stepping over this gap since we moved in!

Sven and I replaced the pane of glass in the kitchen window, which got cracked in August. We've had the glass since September, but it's only just been done - shocking! There were huge amounts of putty to hack off, and it turned out that the window had been interestingly altered by a previous bodger, so we had to bodge it back together in our own way. It's looking good now though, and when the putty's hardened we can paint the outside of the frame to protect it a bit more. Alas, we're still awaiting an exchange on the extractor fan which broke very soon after we got it. I wonder if manufacturers will ever learn that making moving parts out of tiny bits of plastic is a bad plan?

It's destined to look a lot less scraggy, I promise!

I finally finished altering the kitchen plumbing to include a pipe for the boiler condensate outlet thingy. Fun times!

Sven made a blackboard for the kitchen so it's easier for us to see what the next stage of different jobs is, and I think it's really helping.

Made out of stuff lying around the house by Sven's fair hands!

Between a number of different Golems, the spare room is now painted! Well, the cupboard isn't, and the doorframe needs doing, and there's tiling to do too (once we've picked the tiles) but still, yay! Although it is in need of furniture, soft furnishings and things on the wall to make it homely, this still feels like progress. So much so, in fact, that Sven has finally moved the bed out of the tool room, so anyone staying from now on won't have to sleep amongst piles of tools and random timber. Huzzah!

Guests used to have this lovely pit to sleep in...

... but now they will have this beautiful pit instead!

The bed is a temporary measure, just so you know!

We've had one of our pay-as-you-go meters taken out, and the gas meter should be going in a week or so. This is exciting for two reasons. Firstly, no more running out of gas or electricity at random hours of the night - yay! And secondly, it will mean we can switch our power supplies to Good Energy. Win!

The last small thing I can think of is less practical, but still feels like a major achievement. When we moved in, we did a rough estimate of what we thought we needed to pay as a contribution to bills. Everyone decided it was easier to pay a flat rate payment each month so we could budget better, and we came up with a payment of £36. This was to cover gas, electric, water, internet and TV licence (council tax is included in our rent), but we soon discovered there was also enough money to cover washing up liquid, washing liquid, toilet rolls, toilet cleaner, teas of various sorts, coffee, sugar and milk of various sorts.

Even with all of these things being included, we discovered we were paying too much, so from February our bill payments will go down by £10 to £26. £26 for all of those things! Although it might need adjusting upwards in the future, this still seems fantastic to me, and it's all by virtue of having a lot of people living in one house. Even with our total lack of insulation and draught-proofing (not forever, but at the moment it is a leaky old house) none of us are struggling to pay energy bills, or having to decide between food or heat, and I think that's a pretty awesome thing.

So this is what even a young housing co-op can do: provide affordable rent and affordable bills, the knowledge that neither will go up without warning, and the income to keep improving the house so that our bills become even more affordable. Now I think about it, I don't think that's a small thing at all.

- Hannah

A big update

I promise we're still here, and still plodding on in our own way. It's just been a blog-free-from-me plod because I've been distracted. Luckily Cassian has been keeping you a bit up to date with wall-y shenanigans, and who doesn't love those?

Here's a little round up of other events chez Golem in recent months.

Toby came to stay for a week unexpectedly, and to make up for imposing on us so horrifically*, worked like a dog on the spare room. The removal of the tiles on the walls left hundreds of holes, large and small, and he filled them all up. Every last one!

B.T. (Before Toby)

A.T. (You get the idea)
 

This room has been patiently awaiting a paint job ever since, mostly because after Toby left, we filled it with bags full of broken up plasterboard from the hallway walls, and had to wait for that to be disposed of before we could even get through the door! It's clear again now, so will hopefully soon be looking swish and ready for a big reveal.

Speaking of the hallway walls, we have now gone from this, to this, to this!

Apologies for the rubbish shot, but you get the idea!

The hallway which gave this house it's original nickname (Labyrinth, for those who may not remember) is now wider and much, much lighter, and in the course of this big improvement we have made both Joe and Cassian's rooms bigger. Win all round! Their new walls are still at the plasterboard stage, but will hopefully be lovingly plastered soon. There is an enormous amount of making good to do, both in their rooms and in the hallway, but the big layout change is at least done, and sound insulation fitted in all the new partition walls. The studwork is staying here to be recycled, so we'll be taking it down in a leisurely fashion at some point soon. Toby came for another week and worked for days on this too, and very grateful for his help we are too.

This whole corner is now in Cass' room and not the hallway. Woop!

Outside of the house, there have been no big changes. We have finally accepted that rebuilding the wall is beyond us, and in mid-January a builder is coming to do the footings (and possibly the wall too). Although this is going to be a much more costly route, we have decided that delaying some other work in order to get this huge, lingering and in-the-meantime-quite-dangerous job done is something worthwhile. Personally, I can't wait for it to be done so we can start Operation Clean-up in the garden, which includes knocking down the breeze block wall which someone has plonked, very badly, on top of the Victorian stone wall between here and next door, and lifting the concrete. So much to do!

Speaking of paying professionals to swoop in and majestically fix things, we recently spent less than the cost of one new window to have six windows repaired. Between them they needed new hinges, handles, internal gear-y bits and panes of glass, and in the space of a few hours they were all as good as new. I swear the house has been less drafty as a result, Flick can now  see her wonderful view at last, and the frames should be good for a long time yet.

One of the hardest things I am finding about the work is that we are constantly delving into things and discovering over a century of tinkerers like ourselves and their weird ways of doing things. The house is not in a bad enough state to rip everything out completely and start again with bare walls, far from it, but I almost wish we could sometimes. This has obviously always been the case as lots of others have been there before us, adding layer upon layer of their own best efforts. The handrail of the stairs is a good example. It is completely different on each floor, and being me, I'd love to continue the small section of original handrail on the top floor back down to the bottom of all the stairs, and try to find some suitably authentic-ish spindles. Alas, someone has removed a key part of each stair on one section in order to fit their own bodge, so this would be much harder than it sounds. In order to make the handrail make sense, we would probably have to rip it all out, including the good bits, which seems to be the dilemma we arrive at in every room of the house.

Our financial year ends in a few days, so amongst other things we will be re-jigging all our work budgets, and re-planning out work priorities to match. Once the garden wall is done, we will probably be re-doing three of our four roofs, a thought which fills me with terror and delight in equal measures. Knowing the roofs are all in good nick will be the most wonderful thing, and we are hoping to re-roof the dormers and bay window at the same time. There's just the small matter of spending a few wintry weeks up four storeys of scaffolding to deal with! If that sounds like your thing, then please get in touch and we can let you know when we know more about dates.

I think that's everything, or everything major at least. I'll endeavour to update you more often, and will hopefully soon have a fabulous garden wall to show off. You never know!

- Hannah

* I jest, of course. He's been invaluable :D

Holes! In the wall!

I know, right? Awful picture. The house is wonky, but not *that* wonky; that was my laptop webcam being awkward to use.

However, it shows how different things are looking. That doorway to the right wasn't there before; this is the view from my bedroom door, which is also soon to move, and I previously was unable to see any of this. It was just wall. The studwork is pretending to be banisters for the time being.

Those pesky previous landlords, of which there is often at least one, decided that splitting our house into two flats was a good idea. So there were lots of funny shaped rooms and doorways in odd places. Coming down the stairs seemed like an epic mission to me, the sleepiest Golem, because to get upstairs from my room involved a weird U-turn detour thing.

It is now starting to open up and become glorious. The lightbulbs shine over a bigger area now, which saves electricity and makes the hallways safer, I feel. It would've become even more glorious today, except my lovely housemates held off on the work because I've been asleep all day with some kind of hideous stomach bug. What a bunch of legends.

The longer I am here, the more I get over my living-with-people grievances and love the place and its inhabitants.

This has gotten rambly. My point being, we're going to need to deal with an awful lot of plasterboard waste soon. At least it gets recycled, eh?

Removing a wall, a short story told only in pictures.

October Work Weekend Update

Well goodness! All my whinging that nothing much has happened, and then we go and have a pretty tiring and busy work weekend in which a couple of major things get done. What a relief!

The plan for the weekend was to focus on the spare room in order to hopefully get it finished. I'll be honest and say that it still isn't finished, but one of the major jobs got done and that feels like a big success. We wanted to build a cupboard around the boiler to make it look less minging, provide some storage for bedding for guests, and cut down some of the noise from the boiler for people who are staying there.

We managed to re-use a door which Sven had taken down in his room, and some architrave from the hallway we removed in the kitchen, but alas, (until our stocks are replenished by the massive wall-removing spree we're planning soon), we'd run out of stud work so bought some in instead. Sven and I set to it yesterday and made fantastic progress, with the last few bits being finished today by me and the lovely Zabelle.

Below you can see the cupboard springing into being, like a beautiful flower (or somesuch).

Unfortunately due to the epic dustiness created by the circular saw, and the general lack of space for additional people to work in the spare room, AND the fact we were having a Halloween party in the evening and everyone decided to make costumes, no other work on the spare room was carried out. It does feel like we might be on the home straight somewhat, though, as there's only filling the holes in the walls and then decorating to do before we can move furniture in!

If anyone fancies popping over and filling a few holes, we'd be most grateful. Or you can play with the toddler while I do some. There's dinner in it for you :)

Fortunately there was the unexpected bonus of another digger-day occurring, and some fantastic progress was made on the garden. We're working towards the next major phase, which will be digging the footings for the new wall. Getting rid of enough garden contents to do this has proved quite challenging, but after yesterday we are either there, or very nearly there! George has dug back to a previous wall, and uncovered what may be some quarry tiles or nice bricks forming a path (I'm guessing here) which I'm going to try to lift for re-use in the garden later on.

Here are before and after pictures for you to enjoy.

After the first two digger days

Third time's the charm!

Amongst all this excitement we managed to have a Halloween party, which featured some particularly awesome party food, and a truly spectacular costume from Joe, so I'm going to include some gratuitous pictures of them to show that we're not all about DIY :) - Hannah

Now I am just showing off

Okay but look what I made for our bathroom.

I know it's not really a big thing in the grand scheme of doing up the house, but I'm hoping it'll make a difference to how cluttered our little upstairs bathroom will feel when there's often more than 8 people sharing it.

Hannah says it's a bit impressive that I do it all with a hand-cranked Singer and I'm not sure why because I like the slow and steady approach. This particular model took three months for me to get a wiggle on, but I like that this whole thing cost £6.99 for the fabric (with some to spare) and used no electricity in the making. Perhaps electric sewing machines are faster? But what can I say, I am terrified of them.

I stole this picture from this other blog after googling "angry sewing machine" - win.