WELL. It has been a rather frantic few weeks. The Shop on the Borderlands has been growing like a particularly enthusiastic weed, and, already pushed for space, we decided that we were really going to have to look at Doing Something. We now have stock in all the bedrooms, tucked under beds and packed onto shelves, and getting stuff up and down the stairs was starting to be a major chore.
We'd started to look vaguely at other houses, and then it occurred to me that I knew a few people who had moved to South Wales recently, so we started to look via the internet at that area too, particularly Pembrokeshire, which is rather like Cornwall in many ways, and before long we had a shortlist, and were starting to work on decluttering and painting the house to make it saleable...
Anyway, we'd got to that point when lockdown restrictions were eased, and since Pp was off to Bristol to pick up some more second hand games, we thought, why not pop over and take a look at a few areas, and actually, why not take a look at a house while he's there....
And then of course, I had to go and have a look too...
And now we have had an offer accepted on
this house and suddenly everything is moving very very fast! The photography really doesn't do that house justice. In fact, this was a bit of a theme of many places we looked at, the photography was often AWFUL and left a lot of questions open, which is just what you don't want in the land of Covid19. I'm thinking I probably would like to do the photography myself rather than rely on an estate agent to do it, since frankly most of them seem to be less good with a camera than I am.
We've had assorted shysters and pessimists of the Estate Agent variety to look at our Cornwall house, and we've been working flat out on rendering it relatively clean and neat inside and out. Am kicking myself for not having it painted back in June, when the painter I got to quote had lots of availability: I booked him for August, and now he's saying he can't do it till the second week in Sept, and since the outside of the house has big black seams where we had the render fixed, all the estate agents agree that painting the place is absolutely essential, sigh. And I *really* don't want to DIY that.
On the plus side, apparently people are fleeing the cities in the time of plague in the traditional manner, so our hopes are high that someone will want to flee to the Tamar Valley, where they can work from home.
What else has happened? Oh yes, further to my hip problems, I decided to do a course of
https://www.secondnature.io/ which is a sort of diet-and-lifestyle-change program, to try to relieve the weight on the hips. One of the key things is cutting right back on sugar and eating only smaller amounts of whole-grain carbohydrates and a lot more veg. I must say, I am somewhat amazed by how much of a change this has made to my energy levels, and my hips also have improved vastly. I've lost about 6 pounds in six weeks, which is not exactly a mountain of blubber, but it feels like a lot more. I no longer feel like I need to nap every afternoon, my hips are much happier, and I can both walk and garden energetically without feeling too zonked by it! So yes. Sugar. Delightful but better eaten rarely. Which I suppose is somewhat obvious, but still.