2024 Quick Daily Posts

[Mabel Figworthy]

After which, counting the sheep whose wool was being spun was probably beneficial!

[richardandtracy]

Unfortunately, once in a while I have a dream where it happens. Tracy's usually woken up by my squeaking in my sleep before the point where I hit out, and wakes me up before I damage my knuckles or (rather more importantly) her. Last week she was off at a church residential course in Canterbury & as a result wasn't there to hear the first signs. Rather embarrassing to demonstrate so effectively that I can't even sleep quietly without help.

Regards,

Richard

[Mabel Figworthy]

Oh dear, Richard, I shouldn't but your description did make me smile. I hope Tracy enjoyed her residential - Canterbury is lovely so I hope she had some looking-around time as well as her course.

[richardandtracy]

She loved it. Much was based in Kings School, but there was lots of traipsing to & from the cathedral. Her highlight was a candlelit tour of the cathedral after dark one evening.

She ended up walking 15,000 steps a day for the week.

Regards,

Richard.

[Steam.Jo]

Today I purchased my first raw sheep fleece to provide stuffing for a bolster I am planning to make. I would have shown you a picture of washing the fleece but it looked so revolting sitting there in the brown water. I was pleased it did not leave a mark in my bath.

What I found bizarre was when I added some more warm water the heat did not spread out through the water but remained localised even after about 10 mins. The fleece is now is a bucket soaking until the morning when I will finish rinsing it out. Then I will have to discourage the birdies from pinching bits for their nests (they have already had to have a nose in the bucket in case I was hiding something edible in there)

1Kg of raw wool fleece I have discovered is not enough to fill my bolster, maybe a small cushion.

Jo

[Mabel Figworthy]

Sheep do get themselves very dirty....

Friends of ours are in the midst of lambing at the moment, they have the most adorable Leicester Longwool lambs!

[Serinde]

Hope the weather improves for the lambs. It's been pretty bad (cold, wet) so far. Also hope your friends have a good home for all that gorgeous wool!

[richardandtracy]

Sheep.
Yes, they can get utterly caked in muck.

I will confess I viewed my mum's sheep as the most willfully stupid creatures on the planet. One or two could get through any fence on the farm, but when the rest of the flock didn't follow, they wanted to get back. And could they ever get back in the field? Not ever. Not once. Once we tried to herd the escapees in through the field gate, and they took off along the lane. There was no short cut we could take to get ahead and turn them around. We ended up with a 6 mile round trip to get them back, always herding them forwards around a ring of lanes... Gaah!

However, we did have a couple of problems with the poor sheep not of their making. There were two ironstone outcrops in the water meadows, and they got struck much more frequently by lightning than you'd expect, despite being virtually the lowest points on the 27 acre farm. After one thunderstorm we went down to check the sheep were OK, and found six were not. They were apparently unharmed, but dead in a ring about 10ft diameter around the strike point. We think induced currents stopped their hearts. Another occasion there were four cooked sheep dead adjacent to a strike. And by cooked, I do mean lightly roasted and still hot to the touch when we got there after the storm went over. Must have had an absolutely stupendous current pass through them. This was over a period of 22 years, so not a 'common' occurrence. We didn't move the sheep as a storm came over because it was difficult to get enough notice one was coming where we were - Devon's a bit hilly and the view amounted to 10 minutes or so notice, barely enough time to get to the fields, let alone move them on.

Regards,

Richard

[Steam.Jo]

Thankfully this fleece is not that mucky and I have just finished rinsing in the wheelbarrow and it is sat out to dry. Next time I might do a pre rinse in the wheelbarrow before doing the soap wash in my bath

It looks and feels lovely a very long fibre but not very strong. If the birds leave it alone I will bring it in later and it will go for stuffing purposes. Based on this experience I need another 4 fleeces to make my bolster. I have put the word out locally for some more fleeces .

Jo

[Mabel Figworthy]

Richard, this gives a whole new meaning to "roast lamb" Your theory about their hearts stopping is, I think, correct - I once read about being near an impact you must make yourself as small as possible (or was it as long as possible? Oops, I can't remember...) to minimise the risk of that.

Serinde, I'll ask what they do with the wool at shearing time, I never thought to find out!

[richardandtracy]

Steam.Jo I wish you all the best with it. We gave up processing our own fleeces as they were way too much like hard work!

Regards,

Richard.

[richardandtracy]

Saw my brother for the first time in 32 years when I went to see my dad over the weekend.

My brother was exactly as he was, and totally different at the same time. He's bigger than I remembered, and now is covered in body builder's muscle and a bodybuilder's tan. His taste in clothes has deteriorated even further, he was wearing eye-wateringly tight 7/8 length skintight beige trousers, a shirt that gaped between every button (due to being 3 sizes too small) and orange, red & florescent green trainers. His hair is almost as white as mine.

His voice & personality haven't changed at all.

My dad had just returned from hospital to his care home (UTI mostly dealt with), and fell asleep after 1.5 hrs of visiting, so I tiptoed away after a further hour and tried to do a few things in the garden at his place. First mow of the season was an effort before my brother turned up from Spain, as the grass was up to 14" long. I discovered the boiler is dripping, every one of the 4 toilets in his house has at least one problem with flushing, overflow dripping or wobbly seat. The 'designer' kitchen tap demanded by my step mother spurts water in all sorts of un-intended directions. The roof has two leaks. The upstairs has at least 2, maybe more, delaminated sections of chipboard flooring. The house is up a shared private road over a shared private bridge, and the road has vast pot-holes in it, while the bridge strength limit has been reduced to 4 tonnes, and has two rotting cars abandoned on it. My van grounds on the potholes every time I go over the bridge, the potholes are that deep. Then there is a narrow 1 in 3 drive up to his house.

We need to rent or sell the place for my dad. In that state? Just emptying the house with the access problems is going to be difficult. Hmm. Not easy to fix from 250mile range.

Oh well.
Interesting weekend.

Regards,

Richard

[Mabel Figworthy]

Oh well.
Interesting weekend.

It sounds it . May I say that your brother sounds, ehm, rather different from you? The house - yes, that won't be an easy sell, both because of the state and because of its location. On the other hand, there are people who like that sort of thing; a challenge, so to speak. Let's hope you find that person to whom this particular challenge appeals!

[Steam.Jo]

Sorting out property for ones parents is always a hassle.

The house: it all depends if doing anything with it is going to substantially alter the value in comparison with the amount of your effort and cost required to get it to a sellable state remembering that the tax man will gain 40% of the increase in price and you might get conned with providing the effort and your siblings get an equal share in the improvement. Local thatched cottages in need of lots of TLC, plus a huge re-thatching bill, with Barns loads of C**p all round the place still command vast sums because being located in an inaccessible place seems to be desirable. The difference between a good one say £2.5M and a DIY job can be less than £200K.

Just get an estate agent in and tell them you want to know what it will get in its current state and what needs doing and how much you could get then. Remember the tax man will ultimately take his vast cut of any improvement in value.


Owning an AWD I don't see a problem with the access or moving the abandoned cars. Just take a few old bricks and put them in the bottom of the pot holes and they will be 2 1/4" shallower, if deeper use concrete blocks on their side: they take up 4".

Jo

[Roland]

I agree, it’s not always worth the time, effort, and expense to fix up for sale.

[richardandtracy]

I do understand what you're saying, but.. It's incredibly useful having a base to drop into when visiting my dad instead of having to book hotel rooms every 6-8 weeks.

My gut reaction is that if we could rent out most of it, and keep the extension (which is almost a granny flat except no cooking facilities - as required by the planning permission) for us to pop into once every 6 weeks or so. Then it shouldn't cost anything (net of expenses) to keep hold of and we could sell it after it grows in value as houses seem to keep doing in the UK. If we were to leave a year to sell it before my Dad needs the cash for his care home, then there could still be a bit of growth in it.

I ran through my memories of it and made an inventory of other problems on the place just to see if it's viable to keep without excessive work. The conservatory doorstep is rotting and leaks into the conservatory, the upstairs plumbing is very sluggish (insufficient fall on the soil pipes). All the rooms have built-in wardrobes and large inaccessible volumes taking up space, and the chipboard of the wardrobes is tired, which means complete removal and regaining the volume with ancillary redecoration. The wallpaper throughout is blown vinyl, and has worn away at dog level at every external corner, and the whole interior needs redecoration. All carpets need replacement. The laminate flooring in the kitchen doesn't go to the walls or have door tread edging, so new kitchen flooring. The 7 yo kitchen was expensive when put in but cheaply made and is giving up in places. The motorhome shelter built for a relative of my step mother is collapsing, as is the corrugated plastic lean-to behind the garage, both need taking down. The garage wall is wet due to blocked gutters. Huge amounts of plants are growing in the gutters throughout the place. Garden needs constant maintenance. The house is in a small quarry and need to look to see if the trees above the edge are slipping or getting dodgy and need removal.
And the result is that I am slowly being persuaded into the 'get rid of it now' camp.

And Jo's guess as to the amount of practical help my brother would provide is absolutely 100% accurate. He has owned properties he's rented out, and then proceeded to look stunned when I said I'd taught my girls how to make a slate roof so they could understand it and not be frightened by the process. For him, building a slate roof would be 'Phone builder, wait, pay bill'. Ah well, everyone is different.

Regards,

Richard

[Mabel Figworthy]

having a place to stay is very useful indeed, and definitely something to make part of the calculations.

I'd love to have a little place in my home town so I could just nip over for a few days (as I can't stay with my aunt anymore, she is just too frail), but we worked out that for the price of a flat (which is all we could conceivably afford, and even that is a stretch) plus the monthly service charges we could rent a really really good self-catering AirBnB several times a year for years.....

[Steam.Jo]

Let's assume you want to keep it and rent it out ... so let's give you a low effort option: The builder who did my work in deepest Hampshire also did a few "remote jobs" in Mid Wales where he got a place to stay in for a few weeks with his family for which he did the property up while his kids/wife enjoyed the location. The builder was paid for the materials and a small token payment for time. There was an agreement as to a minimum amount to get done each time. It was a win/win situation.

Jo

[Steam.Jo]

I noted this morning that the forum had exceeded its bandwidth limit and having got back in I noted that there is over 450 guests. This is a "feature" of the latest bots ( claudebot and amazonbot ) that are emanating out of Singapore. I am not sure what Alex uses to protect the forum from bots but blocking all Singapore IP addresses will stop this latest attack dead in its track.

For the rest of us what this means is the forum is likely to be overwhelmed, we will see that bandwidth limit warning screen, the bots will not be able to scrape the forum and loose interest, the bandwidth demand will reduce and a while later the forum will reappear (as will the bots some time later
)

Jo