www.9thcircle.co.uk

2009-05-03T18:39:00.002Z

one step beyond

This morning, the view from our kitchen window was this:

Then the Fella started doing this:

And I got dolled up like this (complete with drawn on snout for that Swine Flu Paranoia look):

And I had a go too:

We made a lot of mess:

And then we had to tidy it all up. Which took 12 trips to the tip. But the end result is worth it:

2009-04-12T19:00:00.000Z

it's nearly a garden

Honest!

2009-04-11T14:26:00.003Z

a simple maths lesson

Hurrah!

2009-04-09T16:56:00.004Z

getting there

Today, with the help of my parents and a chainsaw, we chopped up all the roof ready for the skip on Saturday. Wheee!

Then The Fella got home, with his little friend:

And decided the door could do with a catflap:

Here's Johnny!

2009-04-04T20:19:00.003Z

We're going to need a skip!

The garage roof is gone!

It used to look something like this:

We are one step closer to getting this:

Woohoo!

2008-08-14T13:01:00.002Z

it was a very good year...

We've had the house for a year! Mental! Developments have included:
- adding a new electricity meter cupboard next to the original. To house the new fuse box after the first went up in an arc of sparks and smoke...
- lifting all the tarmac from the front path to reveal lovely slate flags.
- taking all the plants out of the front garden ready to dig it up and terrace it with railway sleepers, gravel and pots full of pretty things.
- this weekend the garage roof might be coming off! Ready for getting the back garden done... have been taking inspiration from small gardens at Chelsea.

Living here is ace! It's our place and it's just wonderful.

2008-02-22T16:15:00.003Z

if not you, then who else?

Today I have been up to River Darwen Parkway with a bunch of volunteers, organised by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust. Click here to read more about their work at RDP. It's a lovely big bit of land, with good views and nice wide open spaces for getting lots of lovely fresh air. Community projects like this are only as good as the people involved in them - so support your local community projects!

I've had a really good laugh today - we were working on an area of heather, that is being encroached upon by trees. So, trees that had taken root in the heather needed to be pulled out before they affected the pH balance of the soil and cause the heather to die, and the bigger trees needed to be cut down to prevent their effects on the soil.

I was trusted with a band saw and a pruning saw and everything. And I only nearly hit a person with a tree once, so all is good.

Look at the views and space - a brilliant amenity for the people of Ewood and Fernhurst - but do they know it's there and what's going on there?

Click here to read about the site on Blackburn Council's Website

Click here to see how work done by Changing Places on the site.

2008-02-21T13:32:00.002Z

Blast from the past

(image provided by Frederic N. T. Lloyd-Jones for use in the Cotton Town digitisation project: www.cottontown.org.)

If you squint - you can see our house in 1948 near the back of the tram. I'm hoping to get some census records about who lived here too. S'all good.

2008-01-24T22:20:00.000Z

new year, new update

Just so you can see what's currently occuring at Hooligan's Island...

The dining room, with prettiful new desk.

The kitchen - spot the domestic goddess style mixer, and the chalkboard custom-purchased for insults and obscenities.

The living room aka the wii bowling alley.

The aquarium. The snuggliest cosy corner in the house IMHO - stack of cushions in the corner at the head of the bed, and I'm at set for a reading marathon.

The labour of love that is our bathroom. Complete with the oh so slight Lush showergel addiction.

Apologies for the curvy walls - fish eye lens. Although, it's a fairly accurate representation of how squiffy every wall in the house actually is - the new shelves in the back bedroom were a joy to fit!

2007-11-07T22:08:00.000Z

Good fings about owning your own place

1. Making yourself a peanut butter and jam sandwich when you get in from work. And sniggering at your boyfriend when he does exactly the same thing when he gets in.

2. Eating hot breaded Camembert late in the evening. It is now known as feet food however, because of the smell. But hey, s'our house, so we can eat whatever stinky food we want!

3. Wandering round in various states of undress.

4. Doing your marking in your boyfriend's dressing gown whilst drinking cider.

5. Listening to lots of New Orleans jazz band CDs. In the living room. Without being disturbed.

7. Learning that you take your socks off in very random places and leave them there. When nobody comes along and takes them away you suddenly realise you do it.

8. Washing up when you feel like it.

9. Lots of other good things too.

2007-10-27T17:38:00.000Z

welcome to the frozen north

This was the view from outside B&Q on Wednesday morning. It was bloody cold - we'd had to de-ice the car and van so we could take the van back to the hire place. I'd slept in a jumper because I couldn't find my good pyjamas - it was freeeeezing! Thankfully it's not been so bad since, but boy are we going to know about winter in this house!

2007-10-27T17:19:00.000Z

Helter skelter

Today we went to John Lewis and used our vouchers towards a lovely shiny mirror for the chimney breast. The Trafford Centre is sheer hell on a Saturday afternoon, and I wasn't allowed to club people who I thought were Christmas shopping. Most disappointing. I did go and ogle a Kitchen Aid mixer though. I could be a real domestic goddess and make cakies and everything.

I was sitting in the Papasan chair in the living room before we left, dossing about on the internet, and I noticed that the chair was quite close to the wall and I didn't want it to scuff the paint. So I stood up, moved the chair, and then sat back down again. At which point I discovered it wasn't balanced properly, and it tipped me over backwards, complete with laptop in hand and legs in air through the open dining room doors. Which is preferable to falling through closed glass doors obviously. However, I now have a headache and a sore wrist, and am not relishing the prospect of going to Tesco later.

2007-10-26T23:18:00.001Z

virtual housewarming - grab a beer!

The kitchen - there would have been a breadmaker in this photo but it gave up with some very loud creaks and a bonk this morning!

The cool wall.

The dining room - just ignore the ladders, right?

The front bedroom - complete with Stashapotamous and Squishapotamous.

Groovy lights on the landing - the walls are going to go dark blue with loads of photos - like a rogues gallery!

The back bedroom. I may have had a little to do with the decoration *whistles*

The lovely bathroom:

Not a great pic, but this is the design on the frosted windows in the bathroom, dining room and kitchen:

And the living room - I think it's my favourite room. I'm sitting here now on the corner sofa, with a JD and Coke, watching Bottom Live, and it's f-ing magic!

Oh - and we finally replaced the defunct doorbell. We got one that you can record your own sound to. Remember Max's car alarm from Phoenix Nights? Guess what our sound is...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTDDlWtnvSE

2007-10-26T23:10:00.000Z

Are you moving house? Nope, just taking my furniture on vacation...

Here's your sign...

Jaysus - we're knackered! Several trips in a hired Transit, plus a couple of journeys in the car last night but everything is in! Packing, dust and unpacking are probably my least favourite thing at the moment. I have too much stuff! Can it be sleep tiem now plz?

Have a gratuitous photo of the boxes in the back bedroom. I should have taken a photo of my parents' living room stacked with boxes just to show the enormity of the situation...

2007-10-21T21:03:00.000Z

it's beginning to look a lot like our house!

Looooooook!

Just the place to curl up and read Where's My Cow? :)

Are Kid came and built our dining room furniture yesterday, and I painted the back bedroom in crazy shades of blue. Squeeee!

2007-10-14T23:29:00.000Z

and arch said "let there be light,"

I have been playing electrician -

And nothing went bang or anything.

My dad has also been playing electrician:

Although he did try to go up in the loft to pass the wires over the joists. The bathroom has a flat roof.

He discovered when fitting some other light fittings on the landing that there is a big hole in the old landing ceiling which is hidden by the newer ceiling. Just looking through the loft hatch and seeing the saggy laths and ancient wallpaper makes me think of photos of bombed out houses from the Blitz. Apparently if that's how it makes me feel just peering through the hatch, I shouldn't go up there!

Anyhoo - the bathroom lights give a lovely nice shiny light now - yum!

Chris has also given the little bits of wall around the door and boiler cupboard a lick of paint:

And he has glossed the woodwork in the dining room too - here is a picture of the brush to show that it was that pink paint that dries white. Although when the weather is chilly the stuff takes longer to dry than expected, so still looks pink when you think it should be dry...

2007-10-13T21:27:00.000Z

YES HE WAS A VERY NAUGHTY PIG, WASN'T HE?

My Pratchett shelf. *beams broadly*

2007-10-07T19:58:00.000Z

rollin, rollin rollin

The dining room has paint! Although I got attacked by a very splattery roller when I was doing the blue bits. I have blue disease!

Here is the kitchen - looking more like a kitchen than a dumping ground for paint rollers.

Chris's mum scrubbed and painted the garden wall - now it's crazy bright white!

2007-10-06T19:50:00.000Z

once more unto the breach

Well, I'm back to work, and have spent this week shouting "louder!" at lots of children ready for the Harvest festival in church. They managed to be louder when it counted :)

In other news - here's what the house is doing:

The dining room is all papered and ready to be painted.

One of my many tester patches in the back bedroom - I used the whole pots on various parts of the room to check I liked it ;)

The bathroom is looking good, and since this photo has been taken the floor has been tiled and both walls and floor grouted. Poor Chris spent many hours today cleaning the grout off the tiles, then it's just time to decide what to do with the ceiling.

Here is the main bedroom - complete with sleeping bags which have been so delightfully described as Renton-from-Trainspotting's squat!

And finally, the living room - it looks like a home! The bookcases have been fixed to the walls today :D

2007-09-28T11:44:00.000Z

Shiny thing!

It's pretty, ain't it? Apparently the living room is a little sooty now, but nothing a good clean up won't fix. Simon had mummified the sofa in plastic dust sheets, so at least that's cool.

This is a person I love very much. Although things have been tough with the house, there's been a lot of setbacks, and a hell of a lot of shouting (all from me, much to my shame) without this person it simply wouldn't happen. No one is to blame for the problems that have cropped up, sometimes things just take longer than you think, or sometimes there are errors in communication, and things go a bit askew.
If, at the end of each day, you can't wipe the dust/soot/grout/manky bin juice off each other, have a cuddle (albeit a very brief one if bin juice has been involved) tell each other you love them and go to bed ready to face the next day, then perhaps cohabitation isn't for you. I like to think that we've managed to do that, and will live to fight another day.
So I thought I would say thank you to the most important person in my life in the best way I could think of - by posting a picture of him covered in dust and pulling a silly face on the internet.
Eddie, you're my gratest mate - love Rich x

2007-09-27T12:41:00.000Z

Too excited...

Am still off work. Tried to go in yesterday afternoon and was sent home on account of looking and feeling only marginally better than a corpse.

New fire is coming today. Eeeee!

It has to look better than the current situation:

So I am crossing all crossable bits in the hope that it gets sorted out smoothly today with no hitches. alas this means no more typing - typing with crossed fingers just feels damn weird!

2007-09-24T11:53:00.000Z

I don't even know where to start

So, last time we met dear reader I was Nitromorsing a fireplace in my pants. We chose a new fire, and arranged to get it delivered and fitted, keeping the original surround.

So it was looking like this:

In the second image you can see my dad prying it away from the wall. The marble backing eventually had to be smashed into bits to get it loose, but we got the surround off, and finished stripping it and re-undercoated it.

The guy came to fit the new fire place - much hooing and haaing ensued as it turned out that the granite backing had been cut too big (but not before it had been stuck to the wall) so we were told we would have to have a new surround (despite the big fuss about the custom size of the backing we'd had cut) from the shop (funny that) before common sense prevailed and they took the damn granite off the wall and back to the shop to be re cut.
It also turns out we need the chimney lining - the large amount of smoke filling the upstairs rooms when the guy did the smoke test was a bit of a giveaway. So all fireplace related gubbins will now take place on Thursday. Watch this space. Thankfully Chris and Simon (long standing crazy mate) removed all the old fire things from the front garden, as it was beginning to look a bit Clampitt-esque. Fireplace is currently big dark hole in wall. Could make a wicked open fire...

In other news, decoration in the living room is slowly coming along, and looking dandy:

Just to show, this is what it looked like before:

This first photo being from the estate agent.

And here's one of when it was our happy little squat - complete with my chair for sitting in to wait for deliveries. When we had no electricity - which seems like such a long time ago now!

So hey, any time before Christmas, right..

We've optimistically set November 10th as the date for the housewarming, but I've spent this week in various states of sleeping, crying, puking and other unpleasantness due to gastroenteritis.. so it will need some serious arsekicking once I can spend more than an hour on my feet without wanting to die (travelling is also interesting - bleurgh!)

I'm also being told "just one more day!" on the bathroom (which was what I was told on my birthday!) and apparently Deadly spent Saturday doing all the remaining cuts that need doing, leaving the finishing off to be something akin to a big jigsaw puzzle. He did think I'd kick his arse because it looks like nothing has been done though. Too tired to arsekick.

In other, slightly random news, it turns out that there is a guy selling a Rovers fanzine on the bridge near the house on matchdays - which I think is very cool. It's called 4000 Holes (but of course) and has a website http://www.4000holes.co.uk

2007-09-01T19:11:00.001Z

pants!

I started off by giving the fireplace a final coat of Nitromors and rub down with steel wool (it had four coats last night, after having four or five coats last week - it's been varnished, then painted beige, cream then white - the beige paint was stubborn stuff!)
I then wiped down the woodwork with white spirit and the dado rail which was due to be painted today. I couldn't be arsed working out how to get rid of the leftover tray of mucky white spirit, so left it on the hearthstone..
Chris was undercoating the dado at the other side of the room, which he wiped down last night (while I was doing the fireplace and generally getting a little drunk on Turbo Shandies, then singing loudly and doing silly dances.)
Then we both emulsioned the side and back walls of the room. By then, the dado by the fireplace was ready for me to undercoat. I was paying so much attention to not getting undercoat on the lining paper that I didn't notice where I put my knee.. yup - straight into the white spirit tray, so it was all up my leg, and all over the floor (luckily we'd rolled the carpet back)
So I went upstairs and ran my leg and jeans under the bath tap. And then put my jeans in the dryer. And spent the next two hours mooching around in my pants and socks (sexeh!) as I have no spare clothes at the house, but only in rooms with window film, as we've not put any curtains up yet. I had to keep my trainers on because there's still little bits of grit etc in the carpet from decorating. I bet I looked a right pretty picture doing the washing up!

2007-08-30T23:38:00.000Z

pix plz

it's a front door. Mmm, shiny.

Here's the kitchen, complete with Frigerifico (it's some language for fridge, but I reckon it's only to be used for ace fridges like this) and window fillum. Unfortunately now I'm on this computer to upload pics from phone, and the SLR pics from before are on the Mac. argh. ETA - here is a before pic:

The bathroom saga:
Er. There will be a before shot here with Pilks bumpy white tiles. Like this:

Then this:

Which is what happens whn your boyfriend goes mad with a bolster chisel and a hammer.
It was followed by this:

Which as we know was then followed by the render falling off the wall drama and Deadly wiggling breezeblocks in the wall. Eeeep.
So after the application of more Hardibacker (I kept out of the way and did not take any progress photos - it didn't seem appropriate) we've ended up with something that looks a bit like this:

And it will be finished on my birthday. Squee! Also had the phonecall earlier to arrnage delivery of the sofa, also on my birthday. So lots of squeeing all around, right after we've finished going crazy with rollers and brushes to get the living room finished before the suite turns up!

2007-08-26T23:18:00.000Z

front door

The door originally looked like this. I love the numbers. Not.

The net curtain left by the previous owners didn't look that filthy when it was hanging up. We knew it was probably coated in filth, but figured it could stay until we'd found something to replace it. When we took it down it was nearly black - should have realised with the amount of filth in the rest of the house - and was chucked out in the garage to go with the binmen when they came for everything else. In the picture it does look quite vile actually.
After a coat of Nitromors it looked like this (reminds me of that bit with Neve Campbell in the hospital in the Craft - because I'm sick.)

After a couple more coats of Nitromors, some sanding and some wire wool (which gave poor Hedgie a very sore face - no she wasn't using it on her face, but it shedded lots of fibres while she was working damn hard) I didn't really know when to stop; every time I did I saw a fresh little bit of paint leftover.

And now it looks like this:

Yesterday I got round to adding shiny chrome numbers and chrome letterbox, as well as a chrome door handle. Pics to follow.