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Crowditch

Crowditch

A Many Year Project

by Lydia

Two of my sisters – Ginny and Diff – came down from Caithness this weekend, to help with various things. They made a serious start on stripping the textured wallpaper from the guest room, something that is going to be an ongoing project for some time, I suspect. There are some patches in the house – the stairs being the worst one – where it has clearly previously been deemed that to remove the paper was too hard a job, so it has just been plastered over. Naturally, the plaster is now falling off in chunks, aided by little fingers that can’t help themselves. As much as the work ahead of us is really only just beginning (I describe our very-much-loved family home as being a “many year project”), it felt good to be making a start on some of the comparatively frivolous improvements we’ve identified.

The next morning, we set up some solar-powered lights in the pagoda in the garden, an endeavour which caused much hilarity. Meanwhile, Euan finally finished setting up the regulation size basketball ball net that he got for Christmas, while the girls ran round getting colder and colder in the bitter wind, but having a hilarious time switching between garden toys and sticks and shells.

March is currently being lion-like rather than lamb-like, but it is exciting to be heading towards spring. There is much to do outside, and I can’t wait to carry on chipping away at it all.

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Crowditch

Gardening, At Last

by Lydia

There was a healthy layer of frost this morning but, delightfully, the sun was warm enough that I made it outside this lunchtime to make a start on the front garden. Finally! I’ve been itching to for ages, but the weather hasn’t been playing ball. I couldn’t weed the rowing boat because it was still hard with frost, but I made progress on the beds.

The plans for the front are simple. I need to weed out the three skinny beds in front of the house, and I will certainly need to bolster the two at either side with more plants this spring. The one in the middle is a little different, as I am hoping last year’s peony makes a return this year, and hasn’t just given up entirely (there is new growth, so it is looking promising!). The plan for that one is to relocate the two roses in the archaic, broken wooden planters into the bed beside the peony, and hope that the reason they don’t seem to be thriving at the moment is because they need better earth that they haven’t already wrung dry of nutrients.

The tedious part will be weeding the gravel. I am not a fan of gravel, but it looks like we’re keeping it for now, at least, especially given the front of the house also acts as back-up parking. Once weeded, we’ll get another bag to layer over it, to better suppress the weeds and grasses that just can’t help themselves.

And then we have to order the hedging plants and the fruit trees. There is an ornamental cherry on the grass already, and Euan has assessed how many more healthy trees we can grow there. Auri and Euan are adamant we’re keeping the old rowing boat in the garden, so that will be planted up with wildflowers. The hedging will skirt round behind it, and I am yet to decide exactly what to do with the patch of grass in front. A bed, perhaps? Only I am hoping for something low maintenance. Bulbs in the green? We’ll see. I’m not worrying too much about that this side of summer.

The world, reflecting the afternoon sun.
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A barometer showing a drop in pressure.
Crowditch

Our First Anniversary

by Lydia

It is funny how storms mean something a bit different now, living in an old house which we are slowly bringing back to life as a long-term family home. Our house has stood for coming on for 200 years as far as we can tell (a trip to the Archives to find out more is still pending), so on the one hand that is a very good thing. It has survived many, many more storms than I should see in my lifetime. On the other hand, it needs a lot of ongoing care and attention, and it is hard to know where this will next unexpectedly need to be focussed, diverting what plans and schemes we have made so far.

Fortunately, though, Storm Éowyn didn’t do any damage. She did let her feelings be known, but the winds didn’t much top 50km per hour (or at least didn’t when I was checking my phone). One of the windows in my study was rattling away all afternoon, but fortunately that didn’t come to anything. The back three rooms upstairs, part of the 1970s (as far as we have been told – research and confirmation pending) extension, are all up in the roof, with no attics. As a result, you really do hear the winds as they sweep across, especially as we’re at the top of the hill. Later in the day, we all sat together, cosy, in the sitting room (I am still very much enjoying actually having heating in there after ten months without!), listening to the noises outside. Auri’s school closed at lunchtime, so there was a general feeling of giddiness and excitement. It was great fun.

It was Auri’s birthday last week, which was also the first anniversary of getting the keys to our new home. And, on Sunday, we celebrated our first year of moving in – well, actually, we were all so exhausted from Auri’s birthday party earlier in the day, we just crashed out in the sitting room. We had put a bottle of champagne we’d been brought at Christmas in the fridge to chill, but it can wait until this weekend when we’ll raise a toast to our family home.

The drop in pressure from Thursday night to Friday morning.
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A house, warmly lit up from light within, stands against a dark but starry sky.
Crowditch

And So To 2025

by Lydia

Christmas has now passed and January has come rushing at us thick and fast, but it was a marvellous first Christmas in our new home. There were day visits northward to visit family in Caithness, and there was a long-weekend visit from family from England and Spain. But Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day we spent at home (or in the local area), just us. All in all, it was pretty much perfect.

The family visit, hosting a houseful, was utter chaos, but exactly what we wanted when we bought the house. There were three families under one roof (totalling four cousins), with grandparents staying in a nearby hotel. The layout downstairs worked really well, with the large kitchen and the sitting room and our snug leading off it (one day, there will also be a dining room leading from the kitchen – but at the moment, that is full of boxes). I’ve always been a firm believer that the kitchen is the heart of the home, and it felt like it, even as it is right now with make-shift worktops and a mish-mash of furniture. Euan finished off the bar for the sitting room (a slim strip of oak on tall black legs), and we used it in the kitchen for extra worktop-height space. We moved the smaller table (what was once, many moons and two or three houses ago, my desk) into the sitting room for the kids, and it has been so handy there that we haven’t bothered rearranging everything back again yet.

There were some things we couldn’t predict until we tried out having so many people in the house. Having an airbed in the guest room (in addition to the double bed) for our niece didn’t work too well, so after the first night we pushed the two settees together in the sitting room and she and Auri had a lot of fun sleeping there (there was absolutely nothing wrong with Auri’s bed, but sharing the settee with her cousin was understandably deemed much more fun).

The day after the family left, there was a significant snowfall, followed in the early-ish hours by a deluge of rain, resulting in a leak in the sitting room. We’d only fixed the previous one in early autumn, but I think the recent storms must have loosened another tile. Apart from that, though, the house survived the season unscathed, a host to happy memories being made.

On New Year’s Day, there was a display of the Merry Dancers and the sky was alive with stars. We took some photos outside from the back garden, some a tad blurry because of the night setting, our home a warm beacon of light.

Our home. The first day of a new year, the sky alive with stars.

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Crowditch

A First Christmas Eve

by Lydia

We and our house are still finding out about each other, getting used to our new relationship. But one thing I have been certain about for some time is that this house wants to be a family home. It has been a while since she has been that, and I am certain she appreciates it. Whatever has happened inside these walls, at some point children have been happy here. I have heard their footsteps, running in the hallway in the old part of the house, on more than one occasion. There have been one or two other things, too. Most of all, though, there is the feeling that this house wants to be loved for who she is, to be a part of a family. When I recently picked up a rocking horse for the girls from an auction, it immediately looked so right in their bedroom, as if it had always been there. I can’t explain it, just that it felt appreciated.

I was speaking about this yesterday to my family who live at Stempster, in Caithness. Their house also has history, and a back catalogue of characters (they have managed to do some research into the house and its previous inhabitants – something I am hoping to do for our own house when time allows). We were discussing how houses desperately want to be homes – they want to be lived in, properly.

Euan had just returned to the sitting room from being in the hallway, and reported that the door handle to my Mum and Dad’s bedroom had been turning on its own (we were all accounted for). “It’s the time of year,” said my sister, cheerfully, “these things happen at Christmas.”

At Christmas, a couple of years ago, when our young niece Ailsa was staying there, everyone at Stempster heard as clear as day a baby crying. My brother and his wife went to check on Ailsa, only to find her fast asleep. There have been other happenings.

It isn’t a surprise that many cultures have a tradition of winter tales, of telling stories together round the fire, often with a eerie theme. Perhaps there is a thinning at this time of year, making the past feel closer. I’m not even sure it is as clear as the past being relived, I think it is more that a house amplifies what you expect to find, and what you share with it.

When I was younger, I used to love the tales of animals being able to speak on the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve. I am sure that those tales contributed to my lifelong love of and fascination with folklore. I wonder if the same could be true of buildings. On the stroke of midnight, what might our new home share with us? What histories, what thoughts, what hopes? I hope that she knows that we’re doing our best to put her right, and that we look forward to sharing many happy years with her.

A toddler with her back to the camera, stares at a Christmas Tree in the window in front of her, pointing at it in wonder.
Elfi gazing at the smaller Christmas Tree, in the snug window.

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Crowditch

Our New Home

by Lydia

This update has taken about ten months longer to write than I thought it might.

Life has been a tad hectic this year but, though it doesn’t promise to slow down in any way, things have at least hit a certain stride. There is a skeleton of a pattern to most days now, meaning I can start to see how I might scratch out a little more time to share a few updates here.

In January 2024, we moved into our new home in a village on the Black Isle, in the Highlands of Scotland. Though we’ve covered most of the length of the UK between us over the years (well, Kent to the Mainland of Orkney, at any rate), this time we only moved a few handfuls of miles from the other side of Inverness.

The house is going to be a work in progress for some time. A “many-year project”, as I describe it to friends. But it already feels like home.

The first month was a challenge, moving into our house in the middle of winter, only to find the central heating didn’t work. We lived out of a single room, heated by electric radiators. When we needed to dash to the kitchen to get something to eat, we could see our breath in front of us by the time we got there. We picked up the keys on Auri’s fifth birthday, and Elfi had only turned one year old the month before.

There were (and continue to be) other less than great surprises. I’m sure I’ll mention them over the months that follow. But at no point – and perhaps this reflects more my underlying optimism than the reality of the move – did we regret moving. We love our new home, and we are enjoying bringing her back to life after a few years of being unloved.

I’m hoping to share some updates here a couple of times a month. After taking a step back from social media and whatnot in recent years and archiving a lot, I have now decided where and when I want to be (digitally, and for now at least). The easiest way of finding me elsewhere is by checking out my Inventory or signing up for my newsletter ((re)launching later this month.

A wintery landscape, with snow-covered fields, a strip of water, and hills and mountains beyond.
A view from our village, early February 2024.
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A notebook, filled with pictures of bats drawn in black ink by a child.
Crowditch

A Book of Bats

by Lydia

I am slowly resurfacing after being knocked for six by a particularly vicious bout of flu. Excepting childbirth, that’s the worse I’ve felt since I had Covid.

Here’s a book of bats – I opened my work notebook on Monday morning to find it full of these little creatures, courtesy of Auri.

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Books on bookcases.
Crowditch

Book Christmas

by Lydia

Yesterday, I spent twelve hours taking apart my old, rickety bookcases, dusting and cleaning the books, and putting them all on their shiny, new bookcases. This morning, walking into the sitting room was a bit like getting up the day after you’ve decorated the house for Christmas.

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