Hillfoot House

Oh dear, I’m not good at keeping up with this regularly.  We have been very busy and have been entertaining in quantity.  The main problem with a kitchen of this size is that we have not just one, nor even only two fridges: there are three.  The one that lives by the kettle is the one with milk, some soft drinks and some other bottles in it; the big American fridge holds our main daily things (cheese, meat, etc and some drinks) and the one in the utility room holds drinks.  Which means that Ian gets easily confused and he keeps accidentally buying another half dozen bottles of prosecco, telling me happily that he thought it would be useful for the next round of visitors.  I point out that we are really doing quite nicely on the prosecco front; and he confidently corrects me and tells me he could only find one bottle (or two) and then I send him on a tour of the fridges (and the wine rack in the pantry)…  The Jubilee weekend was lovely and there is bunting all down the fence next to the road: we’ll leave it up till after the Olympics, because apart from anything else, it’s really useful for telling people how to find us.

View of the cellar from the bottom of the stairs

Our growing strong friendship with the staff at Laithwaites in Theale means that we are seriously considering starting to store some wine in the cellar.  A friendly builder man said that we should put a min/max thermometer down there for a month or two to see how much the temperature actually fluctuates before attempting anything.  The cellar gets damp but so far we haven’t had more than a bit of a puddle (admittedly a flowing puddle) in there.  The hartshorn ferns love the dampness and the light from the coalhole window.

The brilliant news is that the second opinion on the roof is that it’s in much better condition than either the surveyor or the first builder suggested.  We can trust it and worry about it in a couple of year’s time.  Though we have already gone through the first delivery of oil for the Aga and central heating and have had to top up the tank at very short notice (thank you to the lovely oil company who responded so quickly) so the lack of insulation on the roof at the front will mean higher fuel bills for a while. We are starting to believe we live here and that we’re not just on a fabulous once-in-a-lifetime holiday in someone else’s house.  Slowly but surely we are getting to know the quirks, noises, and oddities in the house.

This week we had a lovely girl from Laura Ashley’s design team to visit, and she has come up with some lovely thoughts on decorating.  At the moment we have a decorator busily painting the girls’ bedrooms; more of that next time because I do want to finish off the ground floor at this point.  Following her suggestions, we’ve made some apparently really minor rearrangements of the furniture in the sittingroom (one sofa moved by about three inches, the other moved so that its lamp table is on the other side) and this has made a startling difference. Ian has bought some off-the-peg curtains for his study in the Laura Ashley sale, and has had a lovely time hanging them this afternoon. (We’ve saved the old curtains in case the previous owners would like them when they settle down in their next home!)  We also rearranged his furniture and have come up with an arrangement that means that if he wanders down to the study to “just check something” he is then lost for several hours because he’s so happy in the space.

The filing cabinet doesn’t hold very much, and the whole of the bottom drawer is full of my family history files – but during the move, the drawer was locked and the key was lost, so we can’t currently get in there anyway.  The only use to the filing cabinet, frankly, is to provide a surface for the printer.

Looking through the door on the right you can see the shelves where we have currently filed our entire CD collection.  We had no idea we had so many CDs because we had a number in boxes and in the attic and in storage before we moved.  I kept loading the shelves when we moved in and was sure that the DVD collection would fit on there too.  How naive can you get.  But the shelves are wonderfully useful there, as are the coat hooks where we have most of our coats hanging cheerfully. Ian thinks that the golf bag is a useful ornament to the room.  Bless.

The DVDs went into the library.  We’re calling it the library (and I am being teased mercilessly by my colleagues – I made the mistake of saying that we had another box of books to unpack, and that we couldn’t decide whether to put those books into the drawing room or the library…)  but it used to be a sort of storage/office room and was previously a bathroom. It’s not a big room but it has wonderful beams again and once we have taken out the storage units and had shelves built to go round the walls, it will be a wonderful space.  Pity my taste is so trashy in novels: but I do understand, from my reading about Georgian houses, that no home was complete without a library. So we are only following the trend, perhaps 275 years later…

The doorway is a sort of Piccadilly Circus point.  As I stand to take the photo, I’m slightly to the right of the crossroads that connects the corridor between the sitting room and the study, and the front door to the rear door with the cat litter tray. From inside the library you can see all the different entrances and directions.

The junction of doors and corridors

The beams are lovely, though.  There are peg holes in the beams – at least, that’s what I think they are.

Beams in the library

That should more or less polish off the ground floor.  I’ve had a look at my stats and I think I’m being read by Sarah, Karen and Christine mainly which is lovely! Not having had much experience of blogs, I was very nervous that I would be viewed by lots and lots of strangers which isn’t really the intention at all, so I feel reassured that I do know who I’m talking to.

And given who I think my audience is, here is a lovely photo of Rose who is sleeping on her chair (woe betide anyone else who tries to sleep there…).  Her cushions were thoroughly hoovered yesterday as we needed to use the chair for our guests.  She was not impressed.

Rose, with her paw over her eyes while she sleeps