The blog category theme of ‘Retirement Projects. House and Garden. It’s gotten to that time to start digging and decorating again!’ continues.

It wasn’t intended to be a skills based blog. Just a collective of little insights to keep motivated in retirement. There are DIY and gardening project bloggers and businesses who have both liked past uploads and also ‘followed’ my naive ditty’s. In the future it might be considered that a room at a time can become a before and after blog. I have some photographs taken along the journey. One off titles re: living room, dining room, garden wild flower area, raised bed, etc. It isn’t interior/exterior designer land whatsoever. It’s about small eco friendly considerations and what went right or what went wrong. Naive, yet comfortable.

Yesterday. A new carpet laid.

Please tap on individual photographs to enlarge.

The home and garden were shocking. Truly terrible. We were both simply too busy with daily workload. My wife’s Wholefood shop ambitions and my nursing role. We are both getting older. This year I will reach 67 years old and nursing has left my muscles and bones having an evil little laugh amongst themselves. Many nurses do seem to get resulting negative health impact from their work interventions. So motivation and keeping moving was paramount in retirement. One huge positive? Stress, itself, literally left the head space building on my very last long day shift when leaving the hospital building. It was good to see it drop out of Summersville psyche and be waved off as it got on the train for a permanent vacation to somewhere Murakami would aptly describe. A few tapped out random photographs below, from dozens and dozens, concerning some of the other interventions during the past year and a half.

Please tap on individual photographs to enlarge.

The house? A flat roof leak a fair number of years ago impacted on the bathroom, top of stairs landing and two bedrooms. The wallpaper and plaster got damp, fell off and those resulting damp conditions had to be sorted. The replaced flat roof a decade ago could well do the same again. Because that is what flat roofs do. The garden was a jungle of brambles, ivy and weeds. There was no stair carpet, bare walls and an air of doom and gloom. We masked it well. Got it covered up with ‘stuff’ inherent. Taking it all away since starting this project it was ‘Cor Blimey, what an absolute shocker’ story. Visitors loved staying for camaraderie, an eclectic messy ambience of weird inclusions that drew the eyes away from the problems, nicely cooked meals, alcohol and trips out in the beautiful local Welsh surroundings.

So. To continue re: the living room. Not sure why you would ‘saw hack back unevenly’ at the front edges of mid to late 1800s pine window sills and cover them all over the house with pieces of UPVC sheets. Or chisel hack even more into one of the living room edges of sills. Just in order to sink and hide a TV aerial lead one side and a telephone line feed the other! Hide them under the UPVC windowsill sheets. Great idea……not.

Also in the living room, why did the previous owners take out the upper pine doors from the alcove cupboard, remove completely the small inbuilt low cupboard from the other alcove and line the resulting mess in chipboard covered with white cheap melamine? Also. Brick up a fireplace and put an electric fire on the wall. Put two double spotlights on the ceiling and take out the central light. Oh! It left a hole! Let’s just cover it with a battery driven fire alarm. I removed the spotlights, had to have a look at what fared electricity wise by taking up two floorboards in the bedroom. Floorboards I had stripped back, filled the gaps with lengths of wood strips (PVA glued in), waxed and looking nice. An electrician now needed to rewire the central light. In rural Wales? That isn’t easy.

Thank heavens they left the ceiling/wall plaster coving. So still have to do more to finish the room. Consider how to repair window sills; get wires from WiFi and telephone supply hidden; get paint from little hard to get at places in the stripped pine doors, shelf with a Dremel tool; wax the chalk painted skirting boards and the alcove shelves. Soon to order Roman blinds for windows, radiator covers and think about some artwork and give personality to the shelves and walls.

Okay. Enough wittering. It’s now at this stage below. And it is very cosy and warmer now.