Hotel 38: Slack

Having been here for 9 weeks now!!! I am totally owning up to being SLACK! I have not written anything, I have not taken many photos of progress and I have been through this house and garden like a bull in a china shop.

When we moved in, it hit me hard how much work we had to do to get the house on track..it is/was wrecked. The garden was EVEN worse, if you can imagine wild jungle/barren wasteland that has been left to turn into some kind of weird jungle that has odd metal poles and tons and tons of brambles, rocks, cement, glass, bomb shelters, three metal crates the size of a skip and bugs everywhere...then times it by a squillion and imagine a shedload of cuts, bruises and stings...well that is what we have had to deal with. The pictures I am about to post were taken after two weeks of solid work..four trips to the dump and all the junk in each picture is what we uncovered in just one part of the garden!

I must confess that I have not put nearly as much energy into the house (my main passion to begin with) and I have totally ignored my knitting and crochet..nope, the garden has me hooked. We are going to ruin the shit out of the bad times and make it all new and amazing. I have tons of pictures of progress but none of the start so I will have to use them as reference points in the future...but for now, I mission on. I will come back and say hi soon and try and update about the house too...not very good at blogging about it like I said, oh well.

The back door area..when we moved in the drain was SO blocked with fat from cooking that the back wall of the house and the surrounding area STANK and flooded constantly - the estate agents like to keep lovely features like that a secret, just in case you can't help but buy the house for the sheer appeal of the drain stench..urrgh. Note the weird metal shelf screwed into the wall...why? We found the belfast sink in a 'plant bed- aka shithole' in the middle part of the garden, it weighed the same amount at six elephants and had a HUGE spider and a slow worm living behind it. Cool. All the green you see here we planted in the first week..there was nothing here before, it was truly miserable.

Opposite the back door there was what I thought was a flower bed, I was right, it did use to be a flower bed..The rose bush was so big and hanging so low that it could've killed a man in a slight gust, so I chopped it back and made it a bit more of a reasonable shape. Hung a bunch of hippy stuff off it to give it a bit more of a homey feel..then added a bunch of little bits and bobs underneath and begged my bay tree in a pot to hang out with the baddies and play nice. I love the birdcage, it's now the spiders new favourite home and therefore, I must move it away soon. See the very sexy drain poles in the picture, Our new neighbour told us (about one hundred times) that the old owners used to tip their fat down the drain ''for about fifty years'' Excellent. So that is how long I will be stabbing the fatty lardycakes down the drain then..great.

On the first sunny day after we moved in, we decided to destory a godawful 'rockery' that was against that brick wall, It was about five foot high and full of brambles, a belfast sink (the one by the back door) and sixty tons of buried GIANT boulders..urrgh. Oh, and six fur trees, a metal post that was buried four and a half feet down in the middle of the bed and some giant root balls dumped into the mix. YES. So, we destroyed everything that was in that area, pulled out all the boulders and weeds and saved what could be saved, then, after almost passing out from exhaustion, we made the bed that can be seen above. It isn't the best flower bed I have ever seen, but it is the best make-do and mend flower bed made from entirely rubbish bits of crap found in the jungle that was the 'rockery' Note: the GORGOEUS and totally pointless double height fence and wire roll, the falling apart brick wall for soldiers to hide behind before they launch their attack?!?!?! what are these things for? who knows? The weird spidery shape wooden fence towards the back of the picture, well that was completely obscured by brambles that had been growing for about fifty years, I found sleeping beauty behind there, the dragon had died of boredom waiting for someone to get past the bramble hell so we used him as a planting feature..anyway, after 3 hard days, I found this fence. I hate it but my entire family seem to think it is nice..hrm.

Behind these dear sweet apple trees, you can see the hell that is the weeds that was the 'lawn' 150 foot of 'lawn' we managed to strim a space to plant apple trees. They are there to encourage bees and to fend off the misery that strimming the rest will cause me. Look at the beautiful upright fence, not rotten at all. Look at the old bomb shelter trying desperately not to drown in the weeds...heeellllp mmmmeeee!

Evidence of bramble wall of doom, look, I killed it dead...yeh! Also see nice six foot high mesh wall..for what reason are you there mesh wall? You know not? Me either!

Beautiful skeleton of greenhouse, included is live wire running to non-existing light fitting and potting table made of woodworm and mould and exhausted bubble wrap...too tired to bear the hell of the garden it fell down and gave up.

There are no words. I have an old pub table I spray painted pink..I hate the colour, but I love it more than the hell hole it sits in..what IS the point of the fence..? It has since been killed. Phew.

Random metal poles..these were hidden by a world of ....BRAMBLES..yes, because you can't have enough spiky bastards in your garden if you live here...we spent 3 days ripping them all out. I genuinely had no idea there was a bed this big here, I thought it was much smaller. We found two french door glass panes..there are no french doors here?! We turned the soil over, we hurt ourselves..we nearly gave up. It is now our veggie patch..HA! beat that brambles.