It's been all go here, I can tell you...

Never mind that it was Saturday, that sacred day for car washing, and ignoring the fact that the remains of Hurricane Bertha were hurtling rapidly towards us bringing unknown weather....

Saturday was the day we created the great dustcloud!

Neil the sandblaster worked singlehandedly and pretty much solid for 10 hours, stopping only briefly for the odd cup of coffee. I don't know if he ate (I did offer him our homemade minestrone soup at one point, fearing he might fall off the scaffolding from hunger, but he refused merrily and carried on blasting) and if he stopped for a sneaky wee in the bushes he was amazingly quick.

It all seemed very exciting for the first few hours, until we all realised we couldn't see anything and the dust was started to creep into the 2 end rooms and the porch despite all our and the builder's best efforts to seal everything up beforehand.  I think the children may have got fed up of me screaming "Don't open that door!" whenever one of them walked in the vague direction of the downstairs loo.

Actually I think we escaped pretty well - for the first 6 hours or so we could still play in the garden as the dust blew the other way over the driveway and the carpark, and we became accustomed to the high pitched vibrating whine of the machine. Later, as Neil moved around to the front we had to batten down the hatches and stay indoors as the dustcloud swirled around the garden.

And then suddenly, it was finished!

It's weird, I was so worried about what might lie beneath - and it looks almost like it matches the 'new' porch building!

We now have what looks just like 3 inches of Lyme Regis beach on the drive...

Some pretty entertaining holes between stones leading right into the wall, which are probably already attracting the attention of birds and insects looking for a des res for the winter

Celebrations atop the scaffolding when we discover that the stone wall is, thank heavens, in a reasonable enough state to be able to be left bare stone (once raked out and repointed) so that it can breathe away happily to itself in the future

This is as far as we decided to remove along the footpath wall - the rest of the wall isn't as bad at all as the end gable, and will just need a good wire brushing to remove flaky paint before a fresh coat is applied.  Besides, now we're mortgage free, we couldn't see the point of having to remortgage to fund total sandblasting on walls which seem to be behaving themselves fine.

As always with old houses, there were some entertaining (!) discoveries as the paint came off - 1 or 2 (or even 3) random cables which don't seem to be connected to anything at all but were still attached to the wall..., 4 concrete 'lintels' which don't seem to relate to any visible former filled in window or doorway...and cement fillet topping the buttress which has curiously been applied ON TOP of the paint in the past, and then painted over! Hey ho.

So far so good.

But now the builder is starting to twitch nervously as he notices me looking longingly at the scraggy bit of wall on the other side of the porch...He's concerned that it might not be so pretty under the paint and random render here.  As we discovered when lifting L's carpet to paint his room, the old inglenook room window has a replacement concrete lintel, and the wall between the two windows may have sagged before the lintel was replaced and probably had to be patched.  Given the fact that the 'pointing' here appears to have been drawn on by someone's finger, he's likely not far wrong:

There could indeed be any sort of mess of materials under here.

Just next to this is the awful craggy render line where the old boiler house used to abut the main wall:

He persuaded me to leave it (for now - cue evil cackle of laughter), as the wall here doesn't appear to be struggling under the painted surface...and to be honest we couldn't afford it anyway!

But I might be tempted to have a go at it with a chisel when we turn our attentions to prepping the outside walls for repainting here once the mess of repointing the newly cleaned wall is finished....

Well, I'm off to carry on dust removal inside the house xxx

Things that go bump in the night!

Well, in the evening anyway....I met this not-so-little fella whilst I was doing a spot of post-bedtime weeding in the circle bed.

He is huge! About as long as my palm and as thick as my thumb, and a pretty fast mover I can tell you.  I got the fright of my life.

Elephant Hawk Moth caterpillar found in the circle bed

Following research, it seems he was on his way between the fuchsia bushes as apparently that's what he eats.

I was a bit mean and put him back in the woodland border instead as I didn't really want to spear him accidentally with the garden fork and the light levels were dropping quite a bit.

Trying to show how long he is!
Apparently he will turn into a pretty pink moth so girly you wouldn't believe...

Shade tolerant woodland border ideas from Dunster Castle Gardens

Having decided that, come the damper Autumn weather, I will force myself to tackle the 'elephant in the room' of the scary woodland border revamp (before allowing myself to get distracted by fiddling with the 'easier' parts of the garden), I have been thinking more and more about this area and keeping my mind and eyes open for inspiration.

Today I took the children for a day out to Dunster Castle on the West Somerset coast, actually our main purpose was to see the sheepdog display but of course I couldn't miss out on a leisurely stroll through the amazing gardens and the obligatory cream tea at the water mill....

I love the sub-tropical planting up near the top of the garden, which is sheltered in its own micro climate and so the planting is full of agapanthus, salvias, red hot pokers and crocosmias.  But today my eye was focussing on the many many stretches of shady, woodland floor planting, so I thought I might take a few notes to remind me later for my planning.

Lovely berries on this Hypericum, which looked fab with the fern fronds growing up through

Asplenium scolopendrium, together with what might be a Dryopteris of some sort? and I was surprised at how attractive the Spotted Laurel looked - perhaps it was a different variety to the more garish one we have by the school car park wall? or just less brightly spotted because its in the shade?  Must research further...

Delightful hydrangea with white and limey green flowerheads on at the same time

I have always liked this delicate dangly pale pink fuchsia ever since I first saw one at Heligan in Cornwall

Noting the useful contrast in texture between the fern and the pale pink hydrangea

Just to prove to myself that shade can be colourful in summer as well as spring!

Shame the camera didn't really manage to capture the deep velvety carmine rose pink of this lovely dark hydrangea - thankfully labelled by those thoughtful NT gardeners! Hydrangea macrophylla 'Rotschwanz'. It would make an interesting element of variety amid the usual paler shades of the hydrangeas

That trusty stalwart Euonymous Emerald Gaiety (I think) doing an excellent ground cover job whilst at the same time adding some lightness and contrast

Here's that chi chi spotted laurel again...I must discover what its called

Another pretty hydrangea with a pleasingly more airy growth habit

A shot to remind me that I liked the idea of creating a relaxed log branch edge to my 'path' through the back of the border for maintenance - but could this idea also possibly be helpful in 'edging' the border itself to help stop the lawn encroaching into the border? Or am I really going to have to resign myself to edging all the way along with shears every time the lawn is mowed?

Well, lots to think about and ponder on.  It's probably a good job that my gardening hands are effectively tied by the children off school at the moment.  Or I might be dangerously tempted to start wading in and brandishing my fork about in the border now - which would be disastrous as its way too dry to move plants about and expect them to survive! And I really do realise that planning, planning, planning, is the only way to deal with this particular 'elephant'! xxx