A long weekend, just for me

We had intended to head to Salisbury on Sunday, staying overnight and visiting The Builder's mother on Monday.  However, we had to cancel that because he has been making daily visits to the hospital to sort out his DVT and he obviously can't be at the hospital in Chesterfield if we are in Salisbury.  So we put the trip back to the beginning of April, which is his mother's birthday.  And I decided to keep the Monday off, just because.

And it was a very pleasant, quite relaxing long weekend.  We spent Saturday morning at Bishops' House and then went shopping with Freyja in the afternoon.  We pottered about in a fairly aimless sort of a way on Sunday, although The Builder did manage to fulfil a long held ambition of chopping the brambles back in the orchard, and pruning the apple trees. I began the digging over of the flower beds - also a long held ambition. I want to try and root out as much of the morning glory and buttercup as I can.  I know this is a doomed enterprise, but I thought I might at least be able to hold them back a bit!  It was quite a sunny weekend, and we had hoped to make further progress, but the wind was cold so we didn't spend too much time outside!

On Monday we embarked on another project hat we have been talking about for a long time.  Our dining room is painted on the bottom halves of three walls in a dark, fusty pink.  When we first moved in our thinking was that something would have to be done about that. The walls need to be much lighter. 9 years on we've finally got around to doing something about it!

This is how the dining room looks now:

We decided that the best thing to do would be to put a couple of coats of very cheap white paint on the walls and then to put a coat of a buttery coloured better quality paint on.  And we're going to paint all the dark wood in a stronger yellow colour.  The intention is to do this right through the whole house to make it all fresh, light and airy.  So we went to B&Q and bought tubs of their value white paint.  And The Builder is intending to make a start today

Starting by taking down the rails and the frieze by the window:

The cat was deeply suspicious when we started shifting the furniture out the way!!!

Given that we were out and about yesterday at lunchtime, we thought we would drop into the Three Cottages, assuming that it would be fairly quiet on a Monday.  But no. There were no free tables until 2 pm! So we went to the Wingerworth and had a lovely, impromptu pub lunch there instead. But who would have expected a pub to be fully booked out on a Monday?

Potato and cheese cake with celeriac and polenta chips

Oh - and we could have gone to Salisbury after all.  The Builder went to the hospital on Friday and was told he didn't need to go back until Tuesday.  But we weren't to know that in advance and if we were going to cancel the hotel without having to pay for a room we weren't able to use, it had to be done by Thursday.  Never mind.  It was a lovely weekend just pottering about at home!