Garden23rd August 2020<31st March 2022 Beautiful Perennial Garden design What is perennial garden design? Perennial garden design refers to a type of planting but also a way of ensuring your garden looks good…
Garden18th March 2020<26th August 2020 Beds, beds, beds and more beds So, as predicted the number of beds in the main garden has increased (see above). We’re now really aiming for this part of the…
Garden8th September 2019<26th August 2020 Late Summer Garden 2019 It’s that time of the year when the sun is lower in the sky, the light becomes magical and spiders webs appear from nowhere,…
Garden25th March 2019<20th June 2020 Garden Update – Spring 2019 Four and a bit years ago we moved into Penraevon. It was the middle of December and snow was threatening. We knew the house…
Garden22nd July 2018<19th August 2019 Summer Garden 2018 It’s summer and the garden is bursting with colour and buzzing with wildlife. It’s three and a half years since we bought the house…
Garden4th June 2017<25th January 2021 June Garden 2017 When all the hard work feels like it’s really starting to pay off! A gorgeous warm day and a beautiful evening in the courtyard….
Garden29th April 2017<20th June 2020 Spring Garden 2017 People ask me ‘what are you doing this weekend?’…I say ‘gardening’. This year we’ve been cracking on with some new bits of the garden,…
Garden23rd October 2016<20th June 2020 Autumn Garden 2016 So far, 2016 has been the year of the kitchen renovation, sorting out some of the outside of the house and the gardens. We…
Garden, The Courtyard6th August 2016<20th June 2020 Building a Banquette Now we have completed the courtyard we needed to put some seating under the veranda and opted to build our own banquette. This would…
About10th May 2016<25th January 2021 Cragside The four month push to get the Kitchen finished is finally coming to an end, so we hopped off for a week away at…
Interior, Kitchen22nd December 2015<25th January 2021 The Secret Wall Exciting day today as we solved one of the puzzles of our house by discovering a secret wall! It’s Christmas holidays, and so it’s…
Garden13th December 2015<13th December 2015 Winter Garden So here we are in the middle of December, a strange time to write a post about the garden, but I thought I should…
Interior, Kitchen18th October 2015<25th January 2021 Restoring the Kitchen Dining Room Restoring The Dining Room This is a bit of a work in progress post – as you will see. I needed to use up some…
Coach house21st September 2015<20th August 2019 Limewashing the Coach House What is Limewash? Limewash is not paint, instead it cures. It has the advantage of letting the brick of the walls still breath and…
Exterior, Products29th August 2015<20th August 2019 Building our own Log Store Building a log store With two new woodburning stoves we needed a wood store. We’re in the middle of getting the Coach House roof…
Garden28th August 2015<22nd September 2015 Summer Garden We’ve made our first tentative steps in the garden. It’s big, it’s a bit weedy and while we’re focusing on doing up the house…
Coach house9th August 2015<21st October 2015 Work on the Coach House begins We have a coach house at the back of the house. You can read a description of it here in an old For Sale…
Garden3rd May 2015<3rd May 2015 Bluebells and Beech Trees When we moved in it was the beginning of December (we’ve been here 6 months now!). The garden was sparse and a bit derelict…
