We're getting to the stage where we could, if necessary, put things in cupboards and throw our house to the mercy of the market in its current state (although we'd rather finish off a few little bits first). It feels nearly there.

We've started to look at new houses again. We never stopped looking on the internet, of course, but after a brief flurry a couple of years ago we hadn't visited any, as we knew we just weren't ready to sell. Now it feels like we could if we found the right house, so our weekends are a mix of DIY and pottering around other people's houses. 

We've seen three in the last few weeks - all lovely on paper, but not-quite-right in reality. The first was near here, and had lots of rooms, but they were all smaller than the rooms we have here, and some were very dark. It's the perfect house for someone though and is already sold. 

The second we adored. Old and higgledy piggledy and cottagey, with lawns and vegetable beds and outbuildings, and not too far away from work. But again, the rooms were small, and an odd layout, and even I had to duck to go through some of the doorways. We would have made it work - but not for the price the current owners wanted. We've left that information with them and I don't expect to hear back. 

Yesterday's house was pretty. We had an inkling it would be too small, and it was, although downstairs was more spacious than we thought. The garden though was lovely - but overlooked by the houses over the road, which hadn't been clear on the pictures. Having lived here, where the street runs right past the garden, I'm fed up of being watched while I potter. 

But it's making me ponder on the intangible something we want from a new house, which is so hard to define. We tell estate agents we want somewhere detached, with a decent, non-overlooked garden with room for chickens, and a spare downstairs room to use for music - and those are our main requirements. There are plenty of houses that have those things, but they're just not right, for reasons we're finding hard to explain even to ourselves. 

Maybe we don't have to explain. Maybe we'll know it when we feel it. Or maybe not - maybe there are many potential future homes that we would be very happy in, and the trick is just finding one we can afford that's close enough to work. We don't have an endless budget, after all, so we're unlikely to get everything we'd like in one house. 

One thing we've decided that we do want, and that is quite hard to explain to estate agents, is hanging out space. We want to be able to have people sitting round the kitchen table, and still have room to make tea. We want to lounge in the living room and not feel like the walls are closing in. I'm thinking we may need something slightly larger than a teensy cottage (however cute). 

So the search continues, and we try to turn each trip into a mini adventure, exploring new places (or revisiting old ones). Yesterday we were particularly fortunate as the sun shone, and we ate a chip butty sitting on the steps in a little market town I've not been to for fifteen years. 

The scenery on the journey was glorious, but even thirty miles was just too far for a daily commute on those roads. It took forever to get home (I admit it would have been slightly quicker if I hadn't kept stopping to take photographs).

So we're back to the (online) drawing board. In the meantime, today we are most excited to be putting down the landing carpet after treading only on floorboards for over a year. But first it's such a sunshiney day that I'm going to sneak off on my bike for an hour. 

Let's start with some home made scones, shall we? Because DIY is always more fun when you have a snack, especially a home made one. 

The last week or two of DIY for me has focused on the spare room. This is the smallest bedroom, next to the bathroom, which we've always used as a workshop and general dumping ground. Over the last few months (years) we've slowly been patching up the plaster on the walls, installing window frames and skirting boards (you'd think a room would have had these already, but clearly not) and fixing the floor. 

I spent a couple of nights last week up the ladder painting the ancient polystyrene ceiling tiles. We daren't take them down for fear of what we might find underneath, but they were grubby and speckled with unidentifiable black grime so I slapped on a coat of white paint and we're hoping they're unnoticeable. 

​The next thing to tackle was the floor. 

We've never done anything with this, but before we moved here various bits of it were painted different colours so was a bit of a hotchpotch. We had a large rug we planned to use in here, so we didn't do any fancy sanding or anything, just mended a couple of boards where they'd suffered mishaps over the years, and gave the whole thing a couple of coats of dark brown fence paint, which was extremely satisfying. 

Makes quite a difference, doesn't it? If you look closely you can still see lumps of glue and goodness knows what under the paint, but, well, if you come into this house and start looking under the rugs for blemishes then you might find yourself swiftly escorted out of the door...

After all that painting, we hopped to the city farm for a snack, and it was warm enough to sit outside there for the first time this year. 

We've been keeping an eye out on Freegle for a bed for the spare room, but last weekend a friend mentioned that her parents were taking one to the charity shop and would we like it instead? Yes please - we don't need it in the long term so we'll pass it on to the charity shop when we're done. Today I laid out the rug, put the bed together, and the whole thing is starting to look like a room in a normal house. 

Gosh. We've still got a few bits and pieces of furniture to go in here (chair, desk, standard lamp) that are dotted about the house, and I need to figure out what I've done with the single duvet, but this really does feel like progress. Right now it's the tidiest room in the house, and I can see it becoming a temporary reading room and sanctuary from the chaos in the coming weeks. 

​Getting there... 

I've taken to making these delicious chocolate brownies in fairy cake cases. Ostensibly I make them for work - I freeze them and take two with me each day - but this weekend I couldn't pretend they were for work, as I made them on Saturday afternoon and all 24 of them were gone by Sunday evening. 

In our defence (kind of) it's important to have something to keep you going while you're doing DIY (although the fact that I've adopted this attitude for a good couple of years now may have something to do with why many of my clothes don't fit...). This was my view for much of the rest of the weekend. 

Yes, I'm mixing sand with paint in a margerine tub - an activity that should be outlawed after you leave school (although it was kind of fun). It's not one of my 'hot decorating tips' (in fact I'm not sure I have any of those) - it's an attempt to match the rest of the oddly-surfaced wall in the spare room after we mended a large hole. 

I admit it was quite fun to paint, and it looks pretty unobtrusive now it's the same colour as the rest of the wall. Phew. 

Slightly less fun was this polystyrene ceiling. 

I believe these have been banned now (something to do with not meeting fire regulations) but this one's been here for 30 years and I'm not taking it down now. It was, however, disgustingly grubby, and I spent much of Sunday covering the grubbiness with white emulsion. A satisfying job, if a bit tough on the neck. 

You might not believe it (I'm not sure I believe it) but the spare room is actually starting to feel somewhat like a bedroom now, rather than the workshop it's been for the last 27 years. The ceiling is (nearly) painted, the walls are painted, we've acquired a single bed and some other furniture. Just need to get rid of this mess (to where?) and get the floor painted. A job for next weekend I think... 

This is my view a lot of the time. Tea (of course). Bags of plaster littering the kitchen. And my trusty decorating suit (as worn by 'scene of crime' officers, apparently). This suit has lasted through months of plastering and painting, but is finally on its last legs and I have ordered some Proper Overalls which (I hope) will give the impression that I know what I'm doing. 

A lot of the DIY time this week as been taken sorting out these teensy internal windows. They look fine from the landing, but the view from the other room was, er, rather less finished. 

There was also the small matter of the hole that they replaced. 

Oh dear. Still, it looks a lot better now, even if it's not *quite* finished (depending on who you talk to).

This is the spare room, which has never been a bedroom as long as we've lived here, but I hope will do a passable impression of one for our house-selling photos. The light in there is lovely at certain times of day. Once this wall is sorted out, it'll be time to paint the floorboards, and then we can start moving furniture in. 

There's also been a fair bit going on in the rest of the house - re-sealing round the bath (don't ask), and today I'm painting the kitchen ceiling, which I confess is not my favourite job so far. 

​But my pictures from the last week or so show that I've also found time for a few other things. See if you can spot a theme. 

Yep, home made scones, home made heart-shaped carrot cake muffins, home made bread with home made damson jam, and a sneaky breakfast at the Women's Institute cafe yesterday, Uber Frugal January be damned (actually, it cost £3.05 for two cups of tea, two slices of toast, a piece of cake, and a flapjack, which seems pretty frugal to me).

So January, it seems, has been a mix of DIY and tea and cake. Not a bad combination (although less of the DIY in the future please, my enthusiasm is wearing rather thin). 

Round up of Uber Frugal January in a few days! 

Happy New Year! 

I thought I'd start the year off with a look back at last year - then we can move on to looking forwards. I have some exciting plans for 2017, hope you do too! 

In January, I started my new job, and pondered how we'd likely be moving house in the first half of 2016. Hmm - now aiming for the first half of 2017... I looked back at 2015, and finally got round to making my third blog book (for 2011 - got a bit of catching up to do). 

In February, we started decorating the house in earnest (much of 2015 was taken up with packing things into small boxes), and finally emptied the spare room (it's not been empty since - but an update coming soon!) I also hopped across the channel to visit my friend in Belgium for a weekend. 

​March was a waffly month. We had a weekend at the seaside, spring arrived, and I tried to find bubbles of peace in an increasingly chaotic house. 

I had some time off work, which I spent running, cycling, and we wandered the countryside in search of a nice place to live, heading south, and east this time. The sun came out, I visited family, and pondered the nature of self-reliance after trying to get to grips with some particularly rotten decorating jobs. I did some wandering round town, and started knitting a pair of socks. 

I was still off work for the first week of April, so did some more cycling, and we wandered looking for a new place to live again - north this time. I pottered about at home, we had the downstairs windows replaced, and I waffled on about DIY (again) and self-sufficiency. I did some more waffling about running (again), and we finished laying the landing floorboards, which led to new levels of floorboard-appreciation.

In May I pondered getting older, me and my sister did a triathlon (her first!), we abandoned the DIY and went wandering about the Peak District, and I did a whole load of plastering. 

In June, I accepted (temporarily) that we wouldn't be moving house any time soon. I finished my sock, and did a half marathon with my sister. We visited our friend Fay in Scotland, and, inspired by her garden, I spent a lot of time in ours, sitting about and playing with the compost. I also got uncharacteristically political (don't worry, it doesn't happen often) and my sister and I did another race around Sheffield with a friend. 

In July I went to Norway for work, and made good progress with the plastering, finishing both by the bed and the bathroom. I hopped across to visit my sister at the seaside, and my mum came to help with the gardening. 

In August, we went to visit our friends in the Welsh hills (we just stayed with them for new year as well), and had quite a few little jaunts here and there too. I started keeping track of what I was reading, and the garden was looking increasingly lush. In contrast, the house was looking increasingly dire, and we declared that Everything Will Be Finished by the end of September... 

In September I finally finished my second sock, did some more reading, and waffled on about how much I love cafes. I did some visiting, some running, an update about the garden - and we didn't finish the house. 

I was quiet in October, as work got busy. Apparently I spent a lot of time in cafes though, did quite a bit of running, and appreciated the changing seasons. 

In November I spent a lot of time in the woods, and we had our first frost. We sneaked off to the seaside for the weekend (again), I did a lot more reading, and waffled on about being thrifty (a nice precursor to Uber Frugal January).

Demember came around quickly. We got all cosy, and finally felt like we were getting somewhere with the house, especially after my sister came to help us paint.  I didn't feel remotely ready for Christmas, but it came round anyway. I did a spot of walking, and some cycling, and made preparations to join in with Uber Frugal January. I ended the year with a teensy bit of greenery poking through in the garden. A good ending. 

So there we are - 2016, a year of decorating and DIY, but also running, cycling, cafes, cake, a bit of knitting, a bit of reading, a bit of visiting. Pretty much like most years... 

Merry Christmas! 

It's been a quiet day round here. A restful lie in, and then a spot of leisurely present-opening with a nice cup of tea (those are for the whole of our families, by the way, not just us two). A couple of chocolate coins before a wholesome porridgey breakfast, and then a couple of hours of reading, a spot of yoga, and then we settled in for a tasty dinner on a makeshift picnic basket table. 

After dinner we went for a walk around the fields. The light was fading a little, but it was lovely to be out, and we barely saw a soul. 

After it went dark, I went back out for a run. The sky was bright, and the clouds seemed almost lit up as they scudded across the sky. 

This time of year always feel spare somehow, separate from the rest of the year. For the past few years I've been fortunate to be able to take a couple of years off work over Christmas, and so the whole fortnight feels like the start of the new year. Today I feel like I've started as I mean to go on next year - fresh air, exercise, and a whole lot of sitting down and reading. I hope you had a good day too, whatever you've been doing.  

I don't feel remotely prepared for Christmas this year. Last year, I was uncharacteristically ready weeks in advance, and vowed to do the same in all future years. Needless to say, that hasn't happened. A combination of DIY, working full time, and general overwhelmedness has conspired to ensure that I will be out finishing my shopping on Christmas eve, like all the other unprepared fools.

Oh well. It's too late to do anything about it now, except don my festive earrings and enter the thronging hoards (and, of course, vow to be more organised next year). I'm looking forward to wrapping it all once I'm home, maybe with a glass of advocaat and something festive on the tv. 

I love Christmas, but I have a slightly ambivalent relationship with gift-giving. I love giving people things - I just fret wildly about getting just the right thing, and that can sometimes make present-buying (or making) quite a stressful experience. I've had to work hard over the years to remind myself that I don't have to buy everyone just what they'd buy for themselves, and that sometimes the gift you never even thought of yourself is the very thing you end up loving. But I still haven't quite conquered the fear of giving someone a present that they really don't like.

My family and friends are grateful and appreciate recipients, so I don't know where this has come from. I really do wish I could let go of it, as it can be quite debilitating sometimes. I think I need to cultivate the habit of collecting things when I see them throughout the year, rather than trying to be inspired all at once. 

Another thing I'm not ready for is my upcoming half marathon. I ran ten miles along this trail last weekend, but it was slow and ponderous and not at all reassuring. 

Oh well. Both Christmas and the race will arrive whether I'm ready for them or not, so I might as well just face forwards and do what I can with the time I have left. 

We've had some progress on the house front today - again as the result of a bit of outsourcing. We don't have much carpet in the house, and most of what we do have isn't being replaced, but the bedroom carpet has been there for 30 years and was rather a mess. 

No amount of hoovering is going to make that look any better. And so, far too early this morning, a nice young man came and fitted us a new carpet. I think I last showed you this room back in August, when we'd finished the cladding and started the painting, but not finished. One wall was still dark green, the paintwork was gold (and royal blue on the landing), the carpet was covered in plastic from when the plastering was done several months ago, and you can't really see it, but there was no skirting board at all on the cladded wall. 

Well, this morning it looked like this. 

Slight improvement, yes? Ignore the piles of stuff on the shelves outside the door (oh, and ignore the fact that there's no door - there's not even one on the bathroom at the minute).

I'm not sure how long this room will stay empty for. There's a chaise lounge in the kitchen that needs a new home for a start. But right now it feels good to have one room free of paint tins and screwdrivers. 

So bring on Christmas, and the half marathon. I might not be properly prepared, but I'm ready enough (or at least I will be after tomorrow's shopping trip). 

This is what we look like most of the time now. Glamorous, yes? This is what happens when you refuse to get other people in to do the decorating. 

We did relent a little this week though - my sister very kindly hopped on a train and came over to help us paint the spare room. 

Plemty of people have offered to help over the last few months, and usually we've said no. We really don't want to seem ungrateful - we're just not very sociable DIY-ers. When a job is straightforward (like painting an empty room), it's fun to have others in to help, but most of our jobs haven't been like that. 

Take this week, for example. Last Monday night after work, I decided the time had come to replace the bathroom door, which is too small for the frame, and will be going on the spare room. We have a new door, so I hoped it'd be a straight swap. 

The old door came off easily (hooray!) and I tested the new one just to make sure it would fit. I don't think it will come as any surprise that it didn't. 

Theoretically, the door was exactly the same size as the frame - but the frame isn't quite straight, and isn't quite the same size all the way round. No problem, I thought, I'll just neaten the edge of the frame a little. ​

Much swearing ensued, a trip to buy a new set of chisels, and seven days later the door has been attached  (no thanks to me, I might add), but didn't actually close, so is now removed again.

It hasn't exactly been a sociable job, and most of them have been like this. We're quite aware that we're not that much fun to be around in the face of minor house-fixing fiascos, and so I hope family and friends will forgive us when we rebuff their offers of DIY help. I'm sure there'll be plenty of opportunity in the new house! 

Having said all that, it was lovely to have my sister come and help with the spare room, which now looks much better. 

In fact, we worked so quickly that we also got round to painting some of the kitchen. This room is an odd mix of woodchip and cladding (we ignored the cladding for now, and we're just painting over the woodchip, not replacing it). One wall was 30-year-old grey/blue, with faded patches around where picture frames had been, and another wall was bright yellow, painted several years ago in a bid to brighten the place up. I'd painted over the black paintwork earlier in the week, so things were already looking up. 

We've got with a pretty shade of 'English sage', and I'm quite taken with it. It already looks much better, even though we still need to do the fiddly bits round the window and the boiler, and the whole thing will need a second coat to properly cover the yellow. 

So we're getting there, even if at times I feel like we're going backwards. This week I'll patch up the rest of the kitchen painting, and we're having the bedroom carpet replaced on Friday so we'll need to empty the entire room before then. 

I'm looking forward to some time off over Christmas - a few days of lounging around and visiting family in various parts of the country, and then a week or so to get stuck in to some uninterrupted decorating. We might even be finished soon, you never know... 

This has been my view for much of today. This is the bannister rail at the top of the stairs, which was previously painted in royal blue gloss, which doesn't go well with the new 'soft cream' colour scheme. 

Here's a tip: if anyone asks you to strip gloss paint from a bannister, just say no. Stick your fingers in your ears, sing loudly, and then go and put the kettle on and make them a nice cake, and say no again. 

I confess that Peter has taken most of this off, with a heat gun and a scraper. It's taken months - it's hard work and quite dull, so is done between other jobs. But this week I'd taken the stair carpet up (to paint over - not strip - the royal blue gloss on the skirting board), and I decided to get the last bits off with paint stripper before putting the carpet back down, in that way that one job leads to another which leads to another... 

Paint stripper is a wonderful invention. Normally I try to avoid particularly noxious chemicals, but I think we've used our share of elbow grease on this job, and the scraper was struggling with the curves in the wood. Twenty minutes of paint stripper, a lot more elbow grease, one ruined toothbrush, several sheets of sandpaper, and a stint with an electric sander, and I think we're finally getting there. We'll finish it off properly another day - once the paint stripper was out of the way, it was time to replace the carpet. 

I have no experience of fitting carpets, and while that doesn't usually stop me, I won't be ruining the new carpet we're putting in the bedroom by fitting it myself. However, I only took the stairs carpet off the other day, and folded it all concertina-like in the kitchen, so I figured it would be pretty easy to just plonk it back on in the same position it was in before. 

The strips of underlay were separate, and in an ideal world I might have replaced them, as they were quite thin and worn, but this carpet is old, and I don't have any underlay in the house, so I turned each piece round so the worn part is at the back of the step, and it's made a remarkable difference to how the carpet feels. I suppose it's a bit like turning your mattress (although you wouldn't usually wait til it was completely crushed flat to do that). 

It was surprisingly easy to refit the carpet, and it makes me wonder whether fitting a new carpet is really as difficult as people make out, especially on the stairs where you're only trying to get a small bit flat at a time - although I suppose I was cheating in a way as my carpet was already stairs-shaped.

Half way up the stairs I found this. 

I've been ignoring this for months, if not years, but while I was sat on the stairs it seemed sensible to sort it out. But how? Various carpet-repairing websites suggested cutting a patch out of a spare bit of carpet (which we did have), enlarging the hole, and using carpet tape to stick the new bit in. I was reluctant - partly because we didn't have any carpet tape, which would have meant delaying the job, but also because this is on the edge of a step, so is likely to get caught by shoes on the way past (which is probably how it happened in the first place). 

Instead I settled for a kind of botched version of darning, using invisible thread. 

Not perfect, and I'll always be able to see it, but I doubt a casual visitor will notice when walking up the stairs. That carpet is nearly 25 years old, so anyone buying the house will likely want to replace it anyway, but at least this way the eye isn't drawn to an obvious hole. 

Somehow, those two jobs plus a trip to the DIY shop have taken most of the day. Isn't it always the way? 

This evening I suspect I'll mostly be lying on our newest item of furniture: 

Please excuse that dying plant, it's on its way to the compost bin, I just can't seem to keep it alive. But look at that chaise longue! We bought it second hand from Gumtree this week for £50 and we love it. We sleep on a mezzanine floor, so the ground floor of the bedroom can look a bit bare (when it's not full of decorating equipment, that is), and this, with a nice rug, will be the perfect addition. 

Of course, we need to remove all the decorating equipment, and get someone to replace the carpet first, so for now this is under the kitchen window. I love it, and might have to expand our new house criteria to include 'room for permanent chaise longue in kitchen'. Just the right place for lying for half an hour with a book, a cup of tea and a home made biscuit, wouldn't you say? 

As for the rest of the house... well. Many things are nearly-but-not-quite finished. Some things aren't even started. We're doing what we can, and the rest of the time I'm just lying on the chasie longue and closing my eyes so I can't see the mess. 

September has turned out to be quite cheerful in my little garden. 

At the end of August I had a big tidy up, and bought a load of autumn bedding plants. This isn't something I'd usually do, but at that point we were still planning to put the house on the market in September (needless to say, that overambitious plan has been well and truly abandoned), and I wanted to get something finished. So I tidied everything up, put woodchip over all the bare soil, went to the tip several times, and planted up all my containers with cheerful flowers.  

I've been delighted with the results. It turns out the garden is now the most relaxing place at home, because nothing needs doing. I don't think I've ever had that experience with a garden before. I've had my breakfast out there most days in September, which has made me remember just how cheerful this little city garden is. 

The light is lovely out there in the mornings at this time of year. Families walk past on their way to school, not realising I'm sat there behind a fence, and I hear snippets of their conversations about the day ahead. There are a surprising number of birds, and the lavender is full of bees. 

At the weekends I've taken to eating my lunch out there too, and lingering for a while with a book. 

(Yes, I had pancakes for lunch, and yes, that is a potato growing in amongst the violas).

​The front part of the garden still looks a bit uninspiring, but at least it's now tidy, and the raspberries which overhang the pavement have been livening up my breakfast for the past few weeks. 

I can even walk from one end of the garden to the other without tripping over old plant pots, prunings, and piles of sticks. 

So I'm feeling quite affectionate towards this little garden right now. I don't know how long that'll last. Right now we're past the summer months where everything grows faster than I can cut it done, and I know that once we get to February it will be entirely full of sticks and I will be all despondent again. 

But who knows? Now I've realised the joy of having a nicely kept garden, I might well keep on top of it. The advantage of a small garden, of course, is that it doesn't take too much maintenance. I can see an afternoon of spring bulb planting in the near future, especially as we now won't be selling the house until well after Christmas (well after Christmas 2017 the rate we're going...). 

​I just hope the weather stays nice enough to have a few more weeks of garden breakfasts...