First week of annual leave is finished and what a busy week it’s been.
Lots of changes around the house and gardens and still going!!

We had a 12 yard skip delivered on the first day, last Wednesday. It was a bigger skip than intended because they don’t like garden rubbish in the 10 yard skips for some reason, anyway, it was just as well we got the bigger skip because we filled it!!

Weds, Thurs and Fri last week were spent hacking back the front and back gardens. They haven’t had a good hack back for a couple of years. I had intended to do it gradually this year but after lockdown stopped the green pickups, the gardens took a back seat and went wild! The amount of cutting back that needed doing meant a skip was our only option. We also had a pile of rubbish in the back garden that had built up over lockdown as we sorted through things in the house and garage.

These are just a few pictures to give you an idea of just how much we cut back.
Ordinarily I would have kept the budlea because the butterflies absolutely LOVE it, however, it gets hacked back every two years and was due to be cut back before winter this year and as we don’t know what the situation in the country will be, we took the opportunity to do it while we had the skip.

Luckily we got all this done while the weather was good. It then started raining over the weekend and if we’d left it any later we probably wouldn’t have got it all done.
The garden now looks like a hurricane has come through but the fine tidy up can be done now when I have a little more time.

After the garden we moved our attention to the house.
Some shopping on Friday afternoon and Saturday saw us purchase a new three piece suite for our living room and a new bed base. For the last 15 years we’ve had chocolate leather sofa’s. We saw this suite and fell in love. It’s so comfortable and colourful and now that the kids are old enough to have a little bit of respect for it, we decided that this would be our new addition.

The arm chair will be Mummy’s new domain when watching movies!!
Unfortunately we’ve got 8 – 10 weeks to wait until it arrives.

Saturday proved to be an expensive day because we also went out looking at cars.
I had a budget set aside for a new car but hadn’t intended on actually getting one until Ian goes back to work which probably won’t be happening until the end of the year or even early next year. We had only intended to get some ideas of what kind of car to get, however, we stumbled on a car that was too good an opportunity to miss.

This is Evin (long story) and we picked him up yesterday.
He may only be a 1.0 but he’s really nippy and he’s really pretty. He has half leather seats and I can use my Spotify account via blue tooth and the stereo sounds great. He’s only 4 years old and my insurance has halved!! Road tax is only £20 for the year! Perfect for running too and from work.
The only downside is that all the kids fit in this one comfortably. (Kidding!!!)

So, the attention then moved to the house.
A reorganisation of furniture in the living room and dining room was first.
The dining room now has one of the two seater leather sofas in it and it has become a bit of a hobby snug. Model collections, musical instruments etc.
We are moving a large sideboard into the garage at the weekend to create a little more space in the living room.

Tuesday was spent in Dharma’s room. It needed gutting and she wanted to have a move around. We were ruthless. 5 huge bags of rubbish went into the skip along with her old wardrobe that was falling apart. We replaced the wardrobe with a spare one from my room. This took all day and at one point I really didn’t think we would get it finished.

This coming weekend we will be working on our room.
The old broken divan bed base went into the skip while we had it and our new solid wooden bed frame will be arriving in a week or two.
With the spare wardrobe now in dharma’s room and the divan out of the way, we have a chance to organise the rest of the room which has been taken over by Ian’s home work space and boxes of his modelling/gaming hobby.

Tomorrow will see the arrival of some Ikea Billy’s with doors and a new desk top so that we can create a better working environment for Ian now that he is working from home indefinitely and storage for all his gaming crap…. I mean models!!
Once this is sorted, the only thing left to do will be to get the bed base in place when it arrives.

Then I can slow down a little and pootle around at my own pace just tidying things up and hopefully, my last week of annual leave will be a little more relaxing!! Although I’ll probably have heart failure when I have a chance to think about the money we’ve just spent!!!