peds

I guess I'll just arrange a few garden chairs around it and call it a fire pit, keep a bag of marshmallows handy in case anyone gets suspicious.

You are in Ireland, right? Where do we stand legally with burning the wood that can't be salvaged? I'm not into throwing every bit of shite on the burn pile, even though we are hundreds of meters from the nearest neighbours, but I've nothing against getting rid of dry wood like that. Chatting to my boss earlier, he suggested digging a hole, burying the whole lot, and selling the spare topsoil... I'm not into that, either.

We'll be walking down the middle of those 2 options, definitely. All the unwanted metal will definitely be sold for scrap, it'll barely cover the cost of driving to the scrapyard but there you go. I'm going to be saving what I can of the plumbing and electrics, the watertank and fuse box can definitely be reused, but I'm not going to be too precious about it... most of the wiring and pipes can definitely go into the (medium sized) skip. The current toilet is going to be installed as a (private) composting toilet my shed, the bathtub is going to be sunken into the wooden deck with a lid to hide under, next to the sauna and hot tub, as a plunge pool. Guess what the hot tub is going to be made of...?

There's a few holes in the tin roof, and the bits beneath are visibly falling apart quicker than the rest. We bought the place 2 years ago, we emptied the seven-years-dead previous owners' lives into a skip (keeping and recycling whatever we could... the wardrobe is now a henhouse, the fridge is going to be an egg incubator/honey warming cabinet, the coconut matting from the mattress is lining my hanging baskets.. ), and it's crazy to see just how quickly the property continues to rot. It wouldn't be long before nature does the job for us.

Sounds exactly like what we've got up here in Sligo. It's a beautiful old building until you start looking closely at it.

All of the cills are a good block of stone, 6 of them, plus a doorstep. The lime plaster I've scraped off the walls so far shows a range of sizes underneath, there's some beautiful big bits. Our digger driver says we'll need to look out for any good bits around the hearth and chimney, too. It's all our local limestone, probably taken from the now defunct quarry just down the road, same geology as the cliffs up behind the house. The new extension (left of photo) is of concrete block construction, I'll even be tapping the mortar off of them and stacking them away for future use.

Growing up we had family friends move to Germany with 2 girls the same age as me. One stayed in Germany for ever, she switched to thinking in German at about age 25... and her English has been on the decline since. Funny how you lose it if you don't use it. Edit Anyway, beautiful sentences, better written than most people who still use the language every day.

They bloody won't. In a month's time they'll be under a roll of terram and a few hundred tons of limestone.

German. Bet you.

I'm not watching it again, but one thing that sticks out is yer man saying (paraphrasing) that "we should leave Russia to it and give them Ukraine because they've been talking about it for fifteen years." If I'd have known it was that easy to stake a claim on something, I'd have started mentioning having a bit of bum fun with the wife as soon as I'd met her, the clock would be running out on that one by now. Except... it doesn't work like that, does it? You can't just point at something that belongs to someone else and say "mine" again and again and again until people accept it... that's kind of... rude. I don't know though, maybe I'm just an idealist.

Bits of the content of his monologue, but predominantly the juxtaposition of "honest" and "Fox News".

^ that's just f*cking funny!

Thanks for the advice. We are trying to keep costs down as much as possible, but I can definitely see where putting a bit of money in would be worth it. That would make taking the roof off a lot easier.

Ahh, I'd love some new toys, the problem is passing it through the budget with the wife. It's a small building, I'll be gutting it into the skip with sledge, pick, and elbow grease, then when it's ready we'll be getting a fella with a JCB to knock the walls, carry on with the lane, and prep the site for groundworks and foundations all at the same time. Wouldn't mind a wee loader in the future, but there's a few purchases in line before that.

The rules and regs are infuriating, we have to keep the new building footprint as much as possible on the old one, we asked to move it just a few meters to the north to protect a beautiful big bay tree and less beautiful but quite nice eucalyptus, but no, the footprint can't be moved and the trees have to go. Still, I'll be keeping the wood from the bay tree specifically for the pizza oven. Every cloud.

Agreed, and the original plan was to knock a hole in the back wall and build a glorified (and well insulated) cow shed behind it. Second plan was to build the new house elsewhere on the site and keep these as my shed and greenhouse. But the practicalities, the cost of bringing the building up to spec, and the local planning restrictions put a stop to that. Big shame, but we'd rather have a home than be looking at an old cottage crumble into dust over the next few decades. Also, to be honest, this 3 room cottage isn't even a very good version of the form, of which there are literally billions out here in Ireland. There are better examples to save.

Anyone ever knocked down a house? Any advice to offer? I'm turning this wee one into empty space over the next few months. I'm keeping the windows and putting them in a future shed, the roof tiles and internal timbers on the left extension are in good nick and will be kept for something. The roof metal on the main bit of it looks a bit flaky, but I'll probably keep the best bits of it to roof a chicken coop. Excitingly, there's a whole old turf roof under the metal. They just built the new roof on top of the old one without getting rid of it. I'm going to see if I can get away with scattering the old turf around the garden if I can, to save space in the skip. The mortar is just falling apart, it's completely sodden. I'm surprised the house is still upright, to be honest. We are going to lift out the biggest stones as we go and use them to build walls around the garden, hopefully the bulk of it we are going to bury under the new drive, we've got another 100m or so to go, after doing the first 150m this time last year. I've something special to show you later, too. Makes me wonder what else we might find as we take the house down...

130 euro to fill my T5 on the road, 115 if you make a trip to the docks. Might get a horse and cart soon.

No shortage on the west coast of Ireland, I just can't afford it any more.

Handsome fella! 😁

Can I offer you a friendly bit of advice there, Mandy? Just keep a little piece of tape over your webcam. You never know who's watching. Wanna see?

Ah well.

Same shit, different day. Par for the course in the Kremlin, where Putin's vicious quashing of any dissent has led to his closest (he he) advisors being fearful of giving him anything close to the real picture. "Of course Ukraine will welcome our forces with open arms, regime change will be accomplished in a matter of days, our top generals definitely haven't been embezzling the money meant to be spent on fuel, our army is in high morale and of steadfast motivation even though they haven't been told where they are going or what they are doing. The whole thing will be done and dusted in but a few months ah ha ha ha, I mean weeks, of course!"

Nothing too sinister, the left one opens a hatch in the floor to an incinerator under the guy on the left, the right one orders tea and biscuits. And incinerates the guy on the right.

Here he is meeting two terrified-looking uniforms the other day, when announcing the recent nuclear escalation. Says a lot, really.