When the cat's away...

...the mice seem to get quite a lot of jobs done!

Had to spend the afternoon in town today having an emergency hair appointment (!) combined with a trip to Homebase for woodstain for the freshly delivered chicken house, leaving A in charge of the children and a hopeful list of chores and washing to hang out (well it has been the warmest and sunniest day so far this year).

Now if this situation were reversed, and it was me left home alone with the anklebiters on a sunny Saturday, I know for a fact that I wouldn't even get a chance to look at my 'to-do' list, never mind achieve any of it... evidently I must be going about things the wrong way...

I returned after 4 hours to find

one freshly constructed chicken house and wee run for the early days.  Admittedly, it is a cheapy one, and doesn't look like it will last a season before it warps and leaks, but hey, we have to start somewhere to decide what features are important etc, and A believes its better to make early mistakes with a cheap one than a £500 one.  This is obviously before its painted in its lovely Ronseal 'Spring Grass' colour...

Not a bad achievement considering that apparently he put it together once, inside the house in dining room, only to discover it was too wide to fit out of the door (ooo schoolboy error) and so had to take it to pieces and rebuild it outside on the driveway again!

This, however, was not all... we also now have a new (temporary) leaf bin

so that at least I can delve into the existing leaf mould/random compost mountain to mulch the flowerbeds, and have somewhere to put the stuff that I find that's not fit to use yet.  The plan is that by the autumn, hopefully before the leaves fall again (!) enough of the mountain will have been used to enable us to site a more organised run of bays with the openings facing north, which will be more easily accessible with the wheelbarrow and we will therefore have a pure leafmould production rather than the scary mixture of leafmould, grass clippings and 4 foot long branches that exists at the moment.

Of course this grand plan also involves the re-siting of the huge pile of huge logs still lingering there since the horse chestnut was felled last winter!  Fairly urgent plan to build a roofed log store for it all alongside the stone shed, as otherwise it's all just going to rot away and be no use at all.

And he even managed to remember to change over the washing!  Amazing...

All I have to do now is iron it all x