Dishcloths as log burner knob holders

The new house has two log burners in the sitting room. I love a log burner but they are unpredictable creatures and the door knobs have a tendency to get very hot indeed. For a few days I was bringing a tea towel out of the kitchen to hold on to the hot knobs whenever I was needing to open the doors to put in yet more logs and I was pondering what might be a better solution. Something knitted seemed a good idea but what pattern and size eluded me for a while. Then I happened to find an old dishcloth which had been relegated to outdoor cleaning - garden furniture etc and I decided to give an old standard pattern a go. Grandmother's favourite dishcloth is a good design and I found that using double strands of bamboo cotton produced a sturdy decent sized cloth which, folded in two, was perfect for opening hot log burner doors. So I made two.

The garden - makes the trauma of the move a distant memory

More finished "move" knits

I like knitting and I don't really object to sewing up but I find sewing on buttons a pain. To begin with there is the finding of appropriately sized buttons, and in the right colour. Then there is the frustration of needing 6 buttons when they come on a card of 5. Then it is buying the buttons and putting them on one side ready to sew on when the item is finished - and not remembering where that one side is.

Today I sewed on the buttons to two of the baby cardigans I had been knitting during the house move. I bought the same buttons for both which was great as 14 buttons were needed and there were 5 on a card so only one left over. Pretty sparkly buttons too and green which matched the two cardigans. I only had to unpick 3 or 4. I never seem to get the spacing right, even if I count the rows in between and match up with the buttonholes as I am going along. I have tried many techniques including starting at the top and the bottom and hoping that by the time I get to the middle there is enough space left for the final button. These don't look too bad if you don't look too closely.

Moved in at last!

I love the view I now wake up to.

I now just need to become a much better photographer.

The move, the stress, the knits

It has been a stressful few weeks.

The move was arranged for the 16th with all the legal niceties taking place on the previous Friday. Our removers wanted to move us over a three day period so were booked to start to do the deed on the Monday. Friday afternoon we waited for confirmation, and waited. Our solicitors said they were ready and just waiting for our buyers......silence. Our deadline to postpone the removers passed. Later that evening we contacted our buyers and eventually they called back. Their buyer had raised some ridiculous last minute queries and this looked as if it was going to delay the whole move.

We had thought the chain was small enough to be uneventful - a first time buyer at the bottom of the chain, a young doctor keen to move to the suburb. Then our buyers, selling their little house to the doctor and keen to buy our house for their young family to grow up in, especially in the amazing garden. Then us, buying from a couple moving out to live the good life in Portugal with no property to buy immediately. How wrong could we have been,

Monday came and we called the removers - they could delay by a day and then take our furniture into store - this seems preferable to losing all our money already paid for the move. Extra costs would just be storage and then the move into the new place. Just - good word! Wednesday came and still no news from the bottom of the chain - at this point we were getting increasingly cross with the estate agent who had known about the problems on the Friday but never got round to telephoning and alerting us - their clients! Thursday our house was empty and I cleaned and cleaned - it looked wonderful. A suitcase each the husband and I divided to spend the next however long miles apart. 

Easter intervened and a few.days spent with the daughters took our mind off the crisis - a little bit. The promise was exchange to take place on Wednesday 23rd and completion on the 25th. The removers were alerted but- yet another spanner in the works - no available slots until May!

I went out and bought some expensive baby yarn.

Wednesday came - silence.

This time we phoned the estate agent - again they knew what was happening and didn't bother tell us. This time the same person was alleging problems with her finances.

I started on the third baby cardigan.

Thursday afternoon I got a phone call for the solicitor - did you want to move tomorrow? She asked. I explained that we would like to buy the house but dreaded to think when we might actually move - and it happened - we exchanged contracts.

I started to make the phone calls. I am quite efficient and had a spreadsheet of all the people I needed to call, all the people I needed to tell and I sat down with 2 phones, one spreadsheet, one notepad and a pen.

This continued the following day - hours on hold, being cut off, passed from one department to another but - we eventually completed the sale and purchase and became the proud owners of a lovely old cottage in the country.

We haven't moved in. The removers can only move us in over 2 days - but not two consecutive days. We have our lovely new home but nothing in it. I am still living out of a suitcase in South Wales and the husband is living out of a suitcase in the Midlands. I am going to our new house every day to clean and get it ready for the first batch of furniture. I just hope that the first batch includes a bed.

The baby cardigans are lovely:

Filling the skip

The move is possibly imminent though not confirmed but, in hope and expectation, I ordered a skip - or a dumpster as my Canadian cousin reminded me - a much more appropriate name.

The skip arrived early this morning. Both sides of a the house have been piled up with rubbish for a couple of weeks:

The contents, almost entire, of the loft

The contents of 3 sheds

Detritus of 25 years hidden in every possible place

2 wardrobes - broken and irretrievable

A cot - in pieces 

Remnants of broken bookshelves - a mass of MDF.

The ring binders of work of 3 children from GCSE through A levels to 14 years' worth of university ( the non recyclable bits)

3 television tables - broken

One filing cabinet, collapsed

Odd shelves....... 2 broken desks.....

Anything metal has been left near to the road and immediately collected but the rest needed to go into the skip. I googled "how to fill a skip" and started with flat bits on the bottom - that took up quite a lot of space. Then  I started to throw in the bin liners. With hindsight this was not a good idea as they never went where I was hoping they would go - catching on bits of old wardrobe and leaving space beneath them I realised how expert builders who has worked her in the past and used skips had been in breaking down all their rubble to squeeze as much as possible into the space.

I returned to my knitting.

I have decided to knit some small items during this moving process rather than have a large log cabin on the go with its attendant multiple balls of yarn and needles. I finished a lovely baby cardigan in Debbie Bliis Baby Cashmerino save for the buttons and started the same pattern in Baby Alpaca. I'm not sure if I like this yarn - the stitches look uneven and, although it is a great colour - green, and soft, it looks badly knitted. I will persevere.

I returned to the skip and prodded a few items into gaps.

Then I got on with more paper recycling. By now the skip was looking full, the recycling bins were full and the amount of rubbish seems to just grow.

I decided to bubble wrap all the pictures and photographs.

The skip is pretty dominant at the front of the house but I think that it needs a stronger person to prod it a bit and squash down its current contents.

I caught up with the forums I follow discussing the happenings in The Archers.

Sorting, packing, knitting

The imminent house move dictates a massive attack on the detritus of 25 years. When we first moved here we had 3 small children. Even though they all left home some time ago their presence here over the years is still evident. Fourteen years between them at university generated an awful lot of ring binders - all of which came home in holidays and somehow never left. "Cute" collections lined shelves in childhood and remnants hid themselves away at the bottom of drawers, wardrobes, desks, beds. Birthday cards, postcards from friends on gap years, boarding passes from their own travels, all such items secreted themselves in little opened cupboards, only to be discovered in the light of The Imminent House Move (TIHM)!

Tackling this major sort out has necessitated a major action plan. Spreadsheets identified rooms and within rooms items of furniture and within these items smaller target areas - drawer 1, cupboard 2, shelf 3 etc. Names were allocated to each task - more in hope than expectation, but, broken down, the task seemed daunting but not insurmountable.

The only issue that I had not planned for was knitting.

I did recognise, very early on, that my knitting paraphernalia was going to produce a large a number of packing boxes but I had not really given serious thought to what my thoughts would be when coming across long hidden items of furniture.

From the loft came my son's old drum kit. It was all there apart from the drumsticks and the foot pedal for the bass drum. Drumsticks were retrieved from a bookcase - of course and I had vague recollections of the whereabouts of the bass pedal. Many years ago my mother had given me a Lloyd Loom linen basket. This was a tiny basket, not a lot of use for linen but useful to pop things into to hide them out of the way. Its contents:

Lego Technic - 3 boxes

Silk scarves - 4

Microscope in box

Drum Bass pedal.

Once empty I gave this linen box some thought. It had originally been a dusky pink colour but my mother had sprayed it some 30 odd years ago. I have no recollection of the original lid covering but as of last week it was bare wood and that is all I remember it ever being. I had been knitting a throw for my daughter in beautiful greys and pinks - a great 100% merino wool blnd too. Unfortunately, my mind probably more on TIHM than knitting, I had miscalculated the amount of yarn needed and so the throw became more of a chair cover - the chair being a Lloyd Loom nursing chair that my godmother had given to me many years ago - see where this is all going now. This chair had also been sprayed by my mother and was in serious need of a new covering for the seat. The daughter's throw became the seat cover and the yarn remaining was used in an improvised pattern sort of way to make a lid cover for the linen box. Of course, these had to be finished before I could proceed with the spreadsheet. Quite pleased with the results but now I feel I should pack away all knitting whilst continuing with sorting as time is limited - this is the most difficult aspect of the task in hand.