Wiltshire Cured Ham

As I noted, we collected the half-pig from the butchers after getting home from Ludlow yesterday. As normal, we're turning some of it into bacon and hams, and leaving some as joints for casseroles or roasting. There are also a number of chops (which, it turns out, are huge), and we've also got a bag of 'bits' (tails, trotters, kidney, heart, liver), which need different processing.

In previous years we've also made sausages, but we've actually still got loads left from last year, so we're not doing that. (It must be said, we also don't really have time for sausage-making at the moment.) Instead, we're mincing the trimmed scraps of meat (about 5lb), mixing them into sausagemeat, and freezing them in patties. If we do run out of sausages before next autumn, and want to, we can always make them as needed, after all.

The sausagemeat made, we mixed up the curing brine for the bacon and hams. We're repeating the Wiltshire cure, which is a beer-based brine:

• 4l beer (again, the Harvest Mild I brewed a few months ago)
• 1900g salt
• 1000g black treacle
• 65g saltpetre
• 50g black peppercorns
• 50 juniper berries

Once mixed, that's brought to the boil, and simmered for 10–15 minutes. I'll chill it overnight, and add the joints in the morning. They're refrigerated, stirring whenever I remember, for 36 hours (the bacon) or 3.5 days (the hams).

Malvern Autumn

We've had a weekend away, visiting Ludlow, and spending Sunday with Liz's grandmother at the Malvern autumn show, which we've not been to before.

It's less of a garden show than, say, Tatton Park, with only a few gardens, and a lot of 'country living' stallholders. However, there was a very good apple pavilion, with an impressive display of apples from RV Roger (who supplied all of the maiden trees for our apple walk earlier this year). We watched a very entertaining, and pertinent, 'conversation' between Joe Swift and Monty Don in the Good Life theatre, and spent a lot of the afternoon browsing the plant nursery stalls, and wondering over the size of the mammoth veg. The prize-winning pumpkin was 472kg, which was, frankly, astonishing, but only slightly more so than the 152kg cabbage, or the 6.3(ish)m beetroot and parsnip, each, apparently, world records. How one digs up a 6m parsnip root, I know not.

(Why, I know not, either.)

Anyway, we managed to fill grandma's not insignificant boot, with thirty-five plants of our own, and a number of hers, and we added a few from her garden to take home, meaning our little Corsa was well loaded for the return journey.

• Two Crocosmia 'Sunglow', and two 'Buttercup'
• a 'Twyning's After Eight' dahlia
• Three white Japanese anemones, 'Honorine Jobert'
• Two giant scabious
• Three new heucheras, 'Fire Chief', 'xxx' and 'xxx'
• A pair of variegated sedums, 'Frosty Morn'
• A painted fern, 'Burgundy Lace'
• Three Panicum grasses, 'Squaw'
• An astrantia, A. major 'Lars'
• And a tray of obscenely cheap Cyclamen hederifolium; fifteen at a pound apiece.

We finally, definitively, learnt the reason for the riduculously low end-of-show prices. Apparently, the nurseries want to offload the last of their stock at almost any price, because for the quantity involved, the cost of transporting them back to the nursery exceeds the market value—hence selling things at a pound/pot is actually financially better than transporting the stock 'home', and selling it at market value later. I'm happy to help.

We got home about five, and I nipped out to pick up the rest of our pig, having collected the bucket of blood last Wednesday, before planting everything out.

Autumn Cut

We've enjoyed the wildflowers in the orchard this summer, which is one reason why I've left large swathes of it uncut for some time, only clearing paths through it. However, as autumn enters, I've now gone over the entire orchard, cutting it back as close as I can, so that it stays neat, and walkable, over the winter. Heavy work, even in the milder temperature, but it actually only took about three hours, which isn't bad. It looks a lot neater, even with the strewn vegetation.

Before doing that, though, this morning I've painted the arches of the apple walk, coating the steel rebar with cream-coloured metal paint. The arches now really stand out, and will stand the weather much better.

I've planted out the autumn-planting onions (100 Radar) and garlic (30-odd Marco) in the herb garden, through weed-proof membrane.

Last thing, I managed (just, before the light faded and drizzle set in) to mow the lawn. I managed to do the games lawn a while ago, but it's been some time since the rest has been done, and it really needed it. Hopefully, as the weather cools and the days shorten, it'll be a while until I have to do it again. I am hoping to manage to keep trimming it through the winter, weather permitting, this year. I do still need to take the brushcutter to the copse, though, and tidy the verges of the lane, so my grass-cutting isn't over for the year...

Fitted Furniture

As hoped, I've been able to order the cabinets today. There's a lot of them, because it includes cabinets for both bathrooms, and wardrobes for all three guest rooms. All being well, they should arrive in late October, ready to go straight in when we have a few days off. And in two weeks, the drainage works will happen, meaning there's actually a pipe for everything to plumb in to.

Doors & Studs

Moving doors took longer than expected. The doors into the guest room and study have always had a relatively large lobby outside them, which is another example of space we'd rather have in the rooms, rather than the landing. Today's first work was taking them, and the bit of wall they hung in, down, and rebuilding the walls in a more efficient position. It took a while, though, to get the doors straight, level, and latching, which meant it was late before we got on to the other part of today's work, removing the stud wall dividing the two rooms.

As a result, it's not entirely down. 90% of the plasterboard is out, and a good fraction of the timber frame. With a couple of sheets hung up, the eventual feel of the front room is there, but the remaining frame makes it harder to get a sense of the back room. However, it seems to be working.

Getting the wall down, and the front wall insulated, has allowed us to finalize the measurements of both, which means I'll be able to order the fitted furniture this week.

Chimney Breast

It's proving, inevitably, to be another long weekend of work on the house. Today we've been working on the current study (the larger spare room, at the front of the house; it's going to wind up being one of two similar-sized guest rooms). We had hoped that the chimney breast in the room would turn out to be an attractive bit of stonework, hidden behind plaster and awful wood-chip wallpaper (soon to be entirely banished from the house: only a small quantity remains...).

It turned out not to be: instead the original stone lintels and mantel have been built (rebuilt, I assume) around with bricks (scuppering my long-held belief that the bricks we dig up in the garden are rubble from elsewhere). We'll have to see whether it's worth exposing those stones, and the fireplace, or better to plaster in the whole stack. The fireplace, like in the master bedroom, is on the left of the breast: to the right is the flue for the fireplace below—in this case, the unused one in the dining room, which is capped in that room. Of course, neither of these two are useable, as this chimney ends in the loft space, and no longer penetrates the roof.

Having established that, we turned to stripping the front wall of plaster, and getting the other preparations made. In this room, that meant preparing an extension to the ring main (that wall has a single socket, which has never been enough), and moving the pipes for one of the radiators ready to rehang on the bathroom stud wall that we'll be constructing in a few weeks.

The usual work then followed: horizontal battens, insulation foil, vertical battens, and plasterboard. There's one radiator staying, which went on with only minor kerfuffle (a slight mismeasure by me, sadly).

Quite enough for one day, with an 0200 finish (this is, as before, timestamped to the Saturday, nonetheless: at 2355 we were busily working, not blogging!).

Apple Harvest

It's not been a good year, at all, for apples—the fruit, at least: the apple trees have all grown well, especially the apple walk, which despite only going in at the end of last winter, have established extremely quickly. We spent half an hour yesterday tying in the last of this season's growth, and several will be ready to be cut back to their third tier in January.

Fruit yield, though, has been rather poor. I've collected everything this evening, while Liz picked blackberries, and we've only got a couple of crates full. The best have come from the two established trees right on the left of the orchard. The taste and texture are good, and they're a decent size, it's just there aren't very many. Never mind: we also had about eight fruit off the James Grieve and Falstaff (planted February 2013), which are very attractive, and taste great.

Insulating the Landing

After yesterday's 17 hour day, we've stacked up another 15 today. Distressingly, that does mean that we've spent 64 man-hours on the landing, but at least there's something to show for it. Much of the insulation work doesn't actually leave one with much impression of what's been done. That's no bad thing, in some ways, as we always hoped that the insulation would make little visual impact, and not reduce the room size noticeably—but it's a little depressing, after hours and hours of work, to have nothing much to see that's changed.

The landing's rather different, though, as the room's changed shape and size, even if the external wall doesn't look that different.

It took nearly three hours to get the old plaster off, not helped by the fact that it's not all the softer lime plaster, but had cementitious plaster over large sections, and the section outside the guest room was a horrible laminate construction of two sorts of plasterboard, and two sorts of plaster, which was a dusty mess to get off.

We took a break from the wall to get the bathroom sink moved, which went surprisingly well, once I'd figured out how to remove it without destroying it. The tap connections have been 'sealed' (read 'bodged') with some sort of foam, meaning they're impossible to ever remove, if watertight.

As normal, the process of stripping the wall back, and then getting the horizontal timber battens attached, is what takes the time. As well as limited windows, there was only one single switch to replace, too, and a smallish radiator to take down and re-hang. The other, we moved yesterday to the opposite side of the room, as this makes the space rather more flexible.

Attaching the horizontal battens takes so long that Liz was able to keep pace with cutting these to length while I put them up, and also had time to cut the insulation foil to size. That did, though, mean that as soon as I had all the battens up, we could very quickly work together to hang the foil and attach the vertical battens. Attaching the plasterboard's always slow, but one does make reasonable progress, as they're tall enough to span the height, and 120cm wide. Rehanging the radiator has been made much simpler by a tweak to the insulation foil (basically, using a sort that doesn't have a non-woven mat of polymer 'wool' inside it, which is impossible to drill; making it a nightmare to mount the anchor bolts into the wall to hold the radiator brackets), so even that was reasonably simple.

A big tidy-up later, and the landing's done. Next weekend will, all being well, see us empty the guest room and 'old' study at the end of the house, into the 'new' study and house bathroom (as the en suite is now fully functional). We'll then be able to strip the walls and dismantle the stud wall dividing the two, ready to reconfigure the space into two guest rooms and a shared en suite.

Like I say, 'all being well'.

Reconfiguring the Landing

It's been a horribly long day: I've set the timestamp for this entry to be just before midnight, so that the date is 'right' for Saturday 13th...but we only finished the work involved at 0230 on Sunday morning, in fact.

Today's big exercise has been taking down the stud framework of the wall that divides the landing from the master bedroom, and replacing it with a new drywall a couple of feet further into our room. This takes the landing from being big but too small to use other than as a landing, to big enough to function as a study, too, with room along the new wall for a couple of desks, while still having room for shelves. It also has room for the chest of drawers/dresser that's been at the foot of our bed, which—because of having 600mm less space in that dimension—needed a new home.

While we were building the new wall, I've taken the opportunity to add a new switch for our bedroom light, so that there's one near the door, and one on the other side of the room (by my bedside), which I'll change, later, to a clever programmable timer switch. Similarly, although there was a double socket on one side of the bed, and a single spur socket on the other, this was never enough, so I've extended the ring main to give us a double socket on both sides. As there were no sockets at all on the reverse of the wall (the landing side), which wouldn't work for a study, I've also added two further double sockets on that side. In retrospect, I'm not sure that three on each side wouldn't have been excessive, in fact. Perhaps before plastering, I'll add more.

As well as this, we've moved the radiator plumbing for the en suite's radiator across the room, so that it will go on the (yet to be built) internal stud wall, not under the sink. The radiator in the house bathroom (which won't be a bathroom, soon) also needed preparing for its move onto the same unbuilt room, which meant fishing the pipes out from under the floor, and sending them under the newly discovered cement-block wall, to emerge from what is currently the floor of the en suite.

Through all the works on the house in the last weeks, we found that the construction (in this case, of a stud wall) was relatively quick, but the associated plumbing and electrics are what eats up the time. There we go.

Tomorrow, which we shall no doubt start later than today, given the time we're going to get to bed, we plan to relocate the sink in our bathroom (to the opposite corner: I've done some of the preparatory plumbing, but the sink needs to be attached to the water supply and waste pipe), and insulate the external wall of the landing. That could take a while, as it's actually the longest single stretch of external wall, of about 9m length. A double-edged sword is that, despite this, it only has two 'small' windows (relatively, I mean; they're about 100x120cm): that means there's more wall, but less awkward apertures to work around.

Planting Out

It's been a little while since we actually spent much time in the garden, so it's been nice to get out today. We spent the morning at Harlow Carr, enjoying the start of the transition into autumn in the shrubs and trees, and the long borders are glorious in their late-summer show.

Once we were home, we started by doing some weeding in the herb garden, which really needs it, although the addition of the membrane & chippings path has significantly reduced the impact of walking on the ground. It did get very compacted, which made weeding hard work, and although there's a lot of grass to dig out, it's much better. The grass will, I'm sure, continue to be a problem for a year or more, as we weaken the remaining, creeping roots.

We didn't have time to finish the herb garden, though, so once we'd made a dent in it, we went down to the kitchen garden. Having weeded those beds, I planted out a few clumps of spring cabbages (Durham Early), which may not amount to much, but might provide some useful leaves. Spring cabbages aren't, for us, a particularly useful crop, as they seem to come ready a little late, when actually we want to be putting in new plants in their space. Much more effective, to date, have been the winter Savoy cabbages (January King, the last couple of winters), which is harvested at a more useful moment. Anyway, we had some Durham Early plants, so in they've gone.

We've cut down the fruited raspberry canes, leaving only the stems that have grown this year. Getting the pruning right (last autumn) has made a big difference to the plant health and the size of the harvest this year.

The spring cabbages are the last thing that we'll be planting out in the kitchen garden until spring, now, so the remaining empty space was weeded, raked, and sown with green manure. This is a winter mix of crimson and red clover (leguminous nitrogen fixer and weed suppressors), Italian ryegrass (good soil stabilization, and deep roots for mineral up-lift), and mustard (bulky foliage for digging in). We added extra Caliente mustard, which is a particularly good biofumigant, improving soil health when it's chopped into the ground in spring. The current weather is good for sowing green manure: the soil's still warm, and moist, so it should germinate well, and get a few weeks growth before it gets particularly cold. The mustard nor the crimson clover are particularly hardy, so they won't survive a bitter winter, but there's a window for them to do some work, at least.

The kitchen garden sorted, we spent half an hour tidying the long border, before planting out the plants we bought at York Gate and Wisley.

From York Gate: a white salvia (into the copse bed: Salvia paniculata, I think), a white Jacob's Ladder (P. caeruleum subsp. caeruleum f. album), a white phlox (P. paniculata), a helenium, and a golden oats (Stipa gigantea). Wisley yielded three variegated eupatorium ('Pink Elegans'), two variegated phlox (P. paniculata 'Norah Leigh'), three agastache ('Blackadder'), a crimson sedum ('Red Cauli'), and a molinia ('Skyracer'), which have, apart from 'Norah Leigh', gone into the long border.

Landing

We tried to get an early start today, as we spent quite a lot of time first thing yesterday checking that we were happy with how, particularly, the master bedroom was going to work once re-sized. We're sacrificing about 60cm from the room to make the landing bigger, and moving the door to the other side of the bed, closer to the stairs, so that you don't come through the landing (soon to be the study) to get to the bedroom. Losing the space means that the dresser that was at the foot of the bed will need to find a new home, and the bed will need to move sideways as well as forwards, but not by much. All in all, we're happy with how it will turn out.

Master bedroom from three angles, before moving around into new layout (© Ian 2014)

As a result, after we finished insulating the bathroom, and fitting (and checking!) the new shower over the bath, we spent the last few hours of today hanging up a curtain to screen the bedroom from dust, and started dismantling the stud wall that separates landing from bedroom.

The en suite insulated and lined out (© Ian 2014)

From the ensuite through to the master bedroom, with the new shower and replaced bath on right (© Ian 2014)

The en suite's basin is still waiting to move... (© Ian 2014)

...over to this corner: the pipework's in the floor, ready. The cavity slab now fills the void where an old (first floor!) external doorway was: this was blocked up with a single skin of stone, and a timber frame inside. Interestingly, the tilework ran all the way to the door, so it was, presumably, a door into a tiled room before it was blocked, probably at the same time as the kitchen extension was built (the roof of which covers the blocked door) (© Ian 2014)

Before we did this, we actually spent a little while figuring out how the airing cupboard, currently between the two bathrooms, was constructed. In preparing for the shower installation, I spent some time in the loft, getting cable access sorted, and realised that the two bathrooms have a false ceiling. The original ceiling, about 10' tall and matching in finish the guest room and study ceiling (in the original cottage at the other end of the house), has been replaced some time ago (1970ish?) with an 8' ceiling that matches in finish the master bedroom and landing (the middle cottage). However, it's the only ceiling that was that high.

I'd never noticed, though the evidence has always been there to see: the ceiling in the airing cupboard, through which one ascends into the loft, is higher and different; and the loft itself is much shorter than elsewhere (much less space to stand). However, I only properly registered while trying to put a cable hole through the bathroom ceiling, and couldn't find it in the loft...

This has created a couple of complications. The airing cupboard is being taken out, and the space it occupied (plus a foot from the en suite) is being given to the bathroom (soon to be guest bedroom). That means all its walls are soon to be dismantled: but the ceiling is supported by them. Secondly, these walls, counter to my foolish assumption, are light cement block walls (not studs, as they are dividing bedroom from landing, and study from guest room).

We'll just have to cope with the extra work of dismantling cement block walls (fortunately, they're weak blocks, and not ridiculously strong mortar, like in the garage, which I eventually replaced with a deliberately weaker wall)

The unsupported ceiling, we'll probably deal with by removing the false ceiling from what will be the guest room, leaving it only in the en suite.

As this was not the job we had envisaged, we moved on to taking down the landing stud wall. It's come down reasonably easily, and we're now left with the timber framework.

The landing, with the shelves taken down, before we ripped off the plasterboard (© Ian 2014)

Landing from bedroom end, with shelves (© Ian 2014)

Landing from stairs end (© Ian 2014)

Bathroom

Today we've spent working on our en suite: we're now finished insulating all the walls, taking out the bath to do so and replacing it. I've created new pipes to supply the basin in its new position (opposite corner: strictly, I've re-purposed the bidet's pipes), and we've had installed a new electric shower above the bath. Once the insulation is complete, we'll be able to come back, and install the fitted furniture (yet to be ordered), and the shower-bath, basin and toilet (all ordered, to arrive later this month).

Tomorrow then we'll finish fitting the shower (the electrics and plumbing are ready, it just needs attaching), insulate the walls, and put the floor back together.

Near the End of Mowing

I was a little pushed for time, and only managed to do the games lawn, but I've mown some of the lawn tonight: that bit grows fastest. It's nearing the end of regular/frequent mowing, and hopefully I'll only have one or two more 'weekly' cuts to make. I shall try to do it once or twice over the winter, if there's a dry spell, to keep it neat.

On the other hand, I also need to cut the grass in the orchard in the next month or so. When I have a spare day.

Bathroom Planning

Today we've ordered some of the parts for new bathrooms on the first floor. Over the next few months (hopefully), our en suite will become a shared en suite for the master bedroom and a small guest room converted from the current 'house' bathroom next to it. Although we started this room about five weeks ago, we actually left off part way through, partly because we hadn't, at that point, decided whether to combine the wall insulation work with the remodelling of the first floor—which had implications for how we handled the toilet, sink, and bath.

Having now decided on a layout for the first floor, we've ordered the shower bath, basin, and toilet for both: fitted cabinets will follow once the walls are in place (so that they can be measured for the final space), and we'll have the work for a new waste drain in the new bathroom done. For now, though, I've ordered my first bathroom.