Moving house, plus 4 months

We’ve been in our new house now a little over four months. It’s gone quickly, but at the same time feels like we’ve been here longer than that. I’ve said before that we both immediately felt at home here, and that’s not changed. Phew.

One thing I’m aware of is that I’ve not shared much about why we moved, the move or our new house here yet. On reflection I think that’s for a couple, or many reasons. Mostly perhaps because moving house is a lot. It’s a lot both emotionally, physically and often financially too, let alone the actual logistics of packing up one home and establishing a new one. And that’s without throwing in a Carpal Tunnel Syndrome operation less than a month before moving date, like me!

There’s also knowing where to start, and avoiding appearing in your own brag-fest.

So while I’ve already shared monthly updates from our new garden, including our rather lovely wall, there’s been little else. After four months here though, and a blog name change thrown into the mix, things are settling down and I’ve some more headspace so I’m hoping to share more. This post is hopefully where I discover where to start, and I hope it and those that follow don’t fall into the brag-fest category, that’s definitely not my intention.

We’ve mostly emptied all the boxes - though some remain in the house, and there’s still more than a few in the garage. We’ve got a date in the diary to meet up with friends in London to mark our escape to the country, as there just wasn’t time to arrange anything before we left as everything moved at about 110mph in the last month or so in our old home!

We still have plenty to do here. We don’t yet have a doorbell, my temporary house sign is still up albeit now complete with faded washi tape, we’re waiting for some furniture to arrive and waiting to order some more. MOH is beginning work on sorting out the garage, and although we’ve painted the trellis around the heat pump, we don’t have any further plans yet for the garden though I am sure these will follow.

From old…

We moved from a 150 year old three storey Victorian converted former coach house in South East London. Our house was on a fairly busy road, the A207 and close to the Sun in the Sands roundabout which many Londoners hear regularly on the morning traffic bulletins. For where we were we had a large, narrow and well established garden which we loved that was a place where you really couldn’t hear the traffic. Our house was well positioned for local transport with a bus stop almost outside the door, in between two train stations taking us quickly into Kings Cross, London Bridge or Cannon Street, plus it was easy to access the DLR at Lewisham and Greenwich, and the tube network at North Greenwich after a short bus ride.

Our house served us well, it was our first home together and we lived there for almost twenty one years, making many improvements and redecorating along the way - MOH vowed he would never again put a new kitchen in, and still stands by that today. We loved our house even holding our wedding reception in the garden, but with us both giving up work we knew we wanted to move somewhere out of London, to probably somewhere quieter.

That wasn’t an overnight decision, but one that brewed for a while; brewing more quickly and ferociously during lockdown, as many things did. It was then though that we started to think about where, make plans and to seriously think if giving up work and moving home was what we wanted or just a pie in the sky idea.

It wasn’t.

The more we looked into it and talked about it, along with the many ‘what-ifs’ we knew where we were heading, we were less sure about how to make it happen but we put a longer term plan together, using holidays to check out potential areas to live, without really letting on to anyone just yet. We started to implement our plan in earnest when I handed my notice in at work in January 2022, agreeing a leaving date in early May. Definitely an eek moment, as I’d not resigned from my role before.

It didn’t all go exactly to plan, but what does - there’s probably another post in here somewhere about selling our house and what we learnt - but the short version is MOH carried on contracting for almost another year which gave us the flexibility that was helpful.

…to new (literally)

We didn’t downsize when we moved and that was very much part of our plan, enabling both of us to have a ‘day space’ each. The last thing we wanted was to give up work, spend all of our time together and literally be living on top of each other too, so having space - for me that’s a craft room - was essential. We also wanted more space around us, giving easy access to the countryside but to keep journeys to family relatively straightforward. We also wanted to locate ourselves within easy reach of a larger town, so in the end our searches were based around Newark and Grantham, with Newark being our preference.

Our new house is a new build barn, which is quite a mind twister. It’s built on a small development of nine dwellings on a former farm in a small village about five miles south west of Newark-on-Trent in Nottinghamshire, and so we are the ‘northest’ of our families! The development is a mix of new builds and renovations of existing barns on the farm, work on two is still taking place. The village is quiet, there’s no pub or shop (they are both in the next village), but we do have a post box, a church, plenty of history and a choice of three/four buses to Newark, Bingham and Nottingham.

We have four bedrooms, though one of those is my craft room, a double height kitchen diner, a utility room, downstairs loo (both of those are new things to us, as is our en-suite!), a plant room (of the gubbings sort, not the green variety), a pantry and two lounges, one of which is MOH’s domain, though in reality I use this room more than he’ll ever use my craft room.

The garden, as you’ve seen, is a good size and behind the house is grass right up to the Grade II former farm wall. Closer to the garage and bin area is our border, which was planted up as part of the build along with the turf, which I know not all new builds come with, and is where I currently get my gardening fix. We also have a border outside of our garden wall, so there’s plenty to keep us both busy.

That first night we sat in our new home surrounded by boxes after a long moving day - which involved us but not our movers, getting caught in stationary traffic on the A1 - it felt like home, and exactly the right thing to do. That day we also discovered we had good neighbours, as they took care of our movers providing them with a cup of tea and somewhere off the road to park, so our movers were happy too.

Getting settled

Even though we’d moved to a new build we knew there’d be things to do - some obvious, some not so.

The obvious included getting light fittings - bare bulbs aren’t my thing, and those paper shades are a big no for MOH - and window coverings to replace the temporary stick up Ikea blinds were high on our list, as was painting the trellis around the heat pump for me at least (we tackled that in the nice weather at the start of October in the end). Less obvious to start with but increasingly important was to kit out the bathrooms with loo roll holders, and changing the name of my blog!

We had family over the first two weekends we were here, and managed to have somewhere not too box heavy for them to sleep, so that was good. Since then we’ve emptied many more boxes, but a few ‘boxes of doom’ remain. These are the boxes of things you’re not quite sure you need, and if you do you’re not sure where they should go, and if you don’t need them then there’s the question of how to actually get rid of them! Some are now on our growing pile of things to eBay, along with things that we thought we’d need, or wanted to keep but are no longer important to us.

We’re waiting on shelving for the pantry and utility room, which in turn will free us of some more boxes and help get things straight(er) in the main downstairs area. I’m currently using the dresser, which we had in our conservatory in London, as a food cupboard so many of the things that usually live there are displaced. Thankfully it’s a large dresser though!

We’ve started to get the garage straight but before we can do too much the floor needs sealing and we want to paint the breeze block walls. I’ve further plans here but we need to get this done before we can sort out some shelving, which in turn will help empty those boxes.

Back indoors we have to sort through lots of pictures and bizarrely rugs. Only a few pictures from our old house have made it onto the walls here so far and I’m still not sure everything that once was on a wall will find a space in our new house. As for the rugs, we came from a house with wooden floors with only one room carpeted. Here only one room doesn’t have carpet, and rugs on carpet is definitely not going to happen.

I’ve got my eye on a console table or two, but after some not very successful online shopping for units for the dressing area, I’m being a little more cautious and want to see the quality for myself before I commit. We’ve a new TV unit on order which we’re hopeful will be here before Christmas, and if all goes well will house a new TV to replace our existing TV which didn’t enjoy the move as much as we have. It’s still watchable in the evenings, which luckily is when we mainly watch it, but sport and any daytime viewings are a hard watch on it, sadly.

So that’s where we’re at so far, and I think a good summary and introduction to our Bosworth Life. I plan to start to share more about our new house and how we’re making it our home, and maybe I’ll share more about what we learnt selling our last house, and maybe, just maybe at some point we’ll even get a door bell, or some pictures on the walls!

My garden in October

I ended last month’s post wondering where autumn was, well it definitely arrived! In less than a month, while there are still glimpses of sun, the weather has most definitely changed. So much so, that there’s a nod to winter’s arrival already too. That’s reflected by how much time we’re spending in the garden too - at the start of October the weather was still warm and sunny, so we started (and finished) painting the trellis around the heat pump. Between us we covered the three outer sides, then MOH quite literally picked up the brush to complete the inner three sides, once we’d replenished the paint.

The result is a much smarter housing for the heat pump, which now blends into the garage rather than being the prominent feature. It’s no surprise that this was one of the first jobs we tackled as even when we were viewing the house, this was something that was on our list.

WE DID PAINT OVER THE 1990S SHELL SUIT DIAGONAL DESIGN!

This month I’ve been tracking the mahonias and hebes which have started to do their thing. We had neither in our previous garden, though many years ago there was a large hebe at the end of our garden - it had grown so big that it didn’t enjoy the pruning we gave it, oops! Here though they’re smaller so we’ll be able to control those more - they’ve some really pretty flowers too, at the start of the month the flowers were just starting, so I’ll save the pictures for later in this post.

We have two mahonias and I’m keen to see how each do in the spots they’re in. One definitely has more sun, and it’s that one that I’ve snapped during the month. The other is in the inner border, and it’ll be interesting to compare them - though it’s currently much smaller and less developed. They’re fascinating plants, this one I’ve snapped leaning over the wall to get a top-down shot of it in the outer border.

As well as this there’s been other major news. Remember the potted rosemary that I brought with us from London, which I thought had died? Well, it seems not to have died after all - early in the month I snapped this admittedly blurry photo, with its returning green tips. Most bizarre, but perhaps it wasn’t a fan of the spot it was in - too much wind maybe? Anyway, I’ve moved it somewhere a little more sheltered to see how it gets on - hopefully it will pull through, but even so I may get another just in case.

You may have seen my post last week about Bramley Apple Day, well my crab apples have been having their say this month too. I wasn’t sure when to harvest them, and if I’m honest I think October was too late - they looked more apple like in September, so that’s something to note for next year.

They turned a glorious yellow shade though on the tree, with the branches truly overladen with fruit. I’d hoped to pick them and use them to make crab apple jelly, but even in the first week of the month I think they were too ripe. So a bit of a fail on using them, but definitely a learning point.

The hebe flowers are making up for it though, aren’t they delicately beautiful?

And look at the difference to the mahonia during the month - I can’t wait for this to burst into flower, and for the top to be crowned with its yellow flowers.

As you can see we still had gloriously blue skies in the middle of the month, and the butterflies were still regular visitors to the buddleia which is clearly enjoying its stay of execution - I’m so glad I went on easy on it, though it’s also blessing me with plenty of seedlings in the gravel so I know that if I choose to move it away from the tree then I can, as long as I do some pre work to ensure that if it doesn’t go to plan, I’ll have a backup plant ready to put in its place.

Towards the end of the month, and after Storm Babet which gave us a month’s rainfall in a single day, causing lots of problems and flooding throughout the county (thankfully though not for us, though the fields near to us did flood), the crab apples took a turn for the worse, and the poor tree looked even more laden down than before.

MOH gave the grass its last cut - once again prompted by the brown bin collection - and it was clear that more and more of crab apples were falling onto the grass, so as the tree was growing a little taller than we’d like we decided to give it a trim. The ladder came out for the first time since we’ve been here and I gave it a gentle prune, realising that the branches would spring up once the weight of the fruits was removed. I left them longer than perhaps I would have cut them, reasoning that if anything were to happen to it over winter, there’d still be room to manoeuvre.

It still has some fruit, though much less than before, and its retained its shape. Our plan is to keep this at a height that we can manage ourselves, but also to make use of the fruits. Since I made my autumnal wreath I’ve also plans to incorporate some of the fruits into next year’s version!

The rowan tree is also looking quite autumnal and suffering a little from Storm Babet, but I think that adds to its charm.

But it really is the hebe flowers for me this month. I’m not sure I’d ever looked at the detail of them before, but they are exquisite.

And talking of detail, I couldn’t help but take a photo of the dew on this spider’s web on our garden furniture.

Another pretty thing, though I’m less keen on its inhabitant not that it was anywhere to be seen - it was most likely making itself comfortable indoors, but that’s a whole other story!

Garden ornaments and Bramley Apple Day

One of the things we like about Newark and the surrounding areas is the relatively large number of independent and antique-type shops, but one of the things we’ve done very little of since we’ve been here is visit shops like this. In fairness we’ve had a lot going on with getting our new house how we want it, and our trips into Newark have been almost entirely functional.

However after having dropped MOH off at the station and with some time to myself ahead of an appointment I had time for a little mooch around, finding two new-to-me vintage shops which I know I’ll be back to visit.

One of them, based in an old Methodist Chapel has plenty to explore, but what caught my eye immediately were the iron garden ornaments and signs.

They were reasonably priced too, so I’m sure I’ll be back at some point as these would look great in any garden, but something that adds height and structure is definitely something I’m keen on for our new build garden. While I have some ideas, they’re very early stages and something like these garden ornaments could definitely help both in the short and more longer term.

There were also stacks of the traditional hooped plant supports, what I would have done to know about this place for our previous garden. I’d often see these types of plant supports in gardens we’d visit and admire them, but the garden centres near us in London had nothing like this, or at least not at prices I’d be willing to pay. Now though, I just need some plants to support but that will come!

The only other picture I snapped in here was of these vintage metal signs, mainly to remind myself to go back and look at in more detail, as I’m sure there will be ones that will make us smile, some for brands we may remember and many more to admire too.

I’m very much of the opinion of the more you look the more you see.

Which I know makes sense, but often when you look regularly inspiration strikes and if you’re very lucky then you might find something that’s absolutely perfect that you didn’t know you were even looking for! As someone who likes a quirk to their decor (which is thankfully mostly accommodated by MOH), these shops provide plenty of opportunities to add something with character into the mix.

Bramley Apple Day

Being new to the area one of the things we’re doing is keeping an eye out for local events, mostly this is through Facebook groups, but not always. There’s a lot going on, especially in the run up to Christmas with plenty of local fairs and Christmas Markets appearing almost weekly.

We went to one, and not a Christmas related one, last weekend. We saw that Southwell Minster were holding a Bramley Apple Food and Drink Festival in the Minster, and as it’s somewhere we’ve been a couple of times now we thought we’d go along.

We didn’t realise the significance of the event, or of Bramley Apple Day (28 October), though as we approached the town we started to get an idea that it was bigger than we’d anticipated as car parking spaces were few and far between. We tried our usual two car parks, both were full and ended up in a third getting lucky with a space.

As we walked back through the town towards the Minster we spotted a lot of apples, and a lot of shops adding them to their windows, this one even had a sign.

Still not realising the full significance until later, when I learnt that the first Bramley apple tree was sown in Southwell in 1809, and the original tree is still there, which seems incredible. To be honest I’d never thought about when or where an apple would originate, but there’s a lot more information on the Bramley Apples website if you want to know more.

Consequently it’s a day, a week after the UK’s national Apple Day, that is celebrated in a town that’s about half an hour down the road. Who knew?!

But anyway, in the Minster there was a throng of food and drink stalls and plenty of people. The church was decorated with apples too and it seemed unusual to see the refrigerated cabinets in the main body of the church, until you think back to the bible stories and illustrations with traders and markets doing this very same thing. Then it’s not such a giant leap from our more established and traditional views of what a church is and should be used for. I’m also sure that churches, of all denominations and sizes up and down the country, like many businesses need to diversify and work with and alongside their communities to survive, and this is no different. It seems odd at first, but it makes an awful lot of sense.

We’ve been to a couple of events where the traditional church set up has been very much not the setup, and it’s great to see. We left the food and drink festival armed with some local cider, and more unusually a homemade keema lamb curry, samosas and a huge onion bhaji, which are now in the freezer ready for a day when we need an easy evening meal.

Obviously the cider’s not in the freezer, that didn’t hang around for long as while chatting to the brewer he helped us match cider to our dinner the following night - a pot roasted chicken cooked with fennel, celery and white beans. And both were very nice indeed!

Southwell has some great shops too, and once again I found myself looking at things I didn’t know I needed, and wasn’t even sure I wanted. These large glass jars caught my eye, and the ones with the larger necks could potentially be used with a candle, similar to a hurricane lamp I think.

And you can’t beat a florist’s display can you? Hydrangeas and eucalyptus are both favourites, but even so I left the bouquet there - and remembered to add both to my plant wish list!

It’s good to get out and do something for fun every now and then, especially when it reminds you of where you are in the country, and why.