Finding my 'voice' again

The hardest thing about picking up blogging again is finding the right 'voice' . It's been the best part of two years, and that little internal chatterstream that sounds just right as your fingers fly over the keyboards sending mental conversation from brain to page has been formalized and structured into succint concise business speak. It's shaking loose again slowly but I still find myself revisiting sentences & word choices. Deciding whether to blog in the 'I' or in the 'we' is a continual challenge as I have wonderful people around me who do so much to make these activities happen together with me, but at the same time - do they really want to be referenced online?

Gosh, I wonder if I sound in a blog as antiquated as I sometimes think my colleagues think I sound in real life?

Hobbit eating plants - the extermination of Butterbur

When you get the keys to a new house in the Netherlands, you have to undertake a walk around accompanied by the departing owner and the estate agent to ensure that nothing has changed since you last saw it in the offer stages. You troop ceremonially to the water meter, the electricity and the gas meter to take note of the readings and the estate agent annotates it on a pre-prepared form and asks you both to sign to agree that the readings are correct. Presumably, this is normally quite an ordinary process - and it is eminently sensible to ensure no unhappiness later on.

As you can imagine, it wasn't quite that simple here! The mains water stopcock and meter are in a concrete bunker out in the front garden. It's buried deep in a mass of Butterbur (petasites hybridus) which was a small and delicate plant when I first made the offer. By the time all the contracts and legalities were ready to close it had swollen to enormous proportions - a lot like Tolkein's innkeeper in Bree. It was so large that the agent & W had to dive in and hunt for the bunker like Victorian explorers looking for the source of the Nile . With such thick foliage so close to the edge of the canal, the leaves acted as perfect hiding places for swarms of mosquitos all starving during the sunny daylight hours. I react horribly to mosquito bites so clearing this out as quickly as possible rocketed up to the top of the to-do list.

The garden has been essentially untouched for quite a few years - my best guess is that it's been at least 6-8 years since anyone tried to challenge the Butterbur in it's encroaching growth or the bountiful swathes of nettles that have spread throughout the entire garden area. Our first plan was to cut back the top level , dig out major corms and see if that would hamper the growth of the (at that time) unknown plant. I duly assigned A & M to doing getting out there with the Stihl Kombisystem brush cutter and a fork, shovel and wheelbarrow. 4 hours later, the area cleared was approaching one foot square and the gardening army was exhausted. There had to be another way! That said, plant identification had happened, and I was rapidly realising that I may have a larger problem on my hands than I originally thought. 

I really didn't want to start using chemicals in my garden, but faced with this challenge, and a very limited time window with large amounts of human resources we finally opted to strim everything back to ground level, wait for the first regrowths and to spray with weedkiller. The picture above is what it looked like 3 weeks after the spraying : virtually no dieback and ever expanding leaves. It had to be the good oldfashioned 'dig it out' way. This plant has the hugest roots - and sends thick meaty runners across the ground and long tendrils deep into the soil. We've been through 4 forks - all with bent tines, already. In desperation, I imported a Spear & Jackson Neverbend Professional fork with a 10 year from the UK in the hope that it might last a little longer than local Dutch brands - it lasted about a week longer, and now I'm looking forwards to seeing how well the guarantee is upheld. 

After two months of digging we have managed to clear back as much as we dare, without destabilising the banks of the canal, but already the damn thing is growing back despite our best efforts. We went nearly a foot deep and it's still rooting! We will keep digging through the winter, and hopefully in the spring we will be able to re-grass the whole area.

It's not quite the Hobbiton Green I'm dreaming of yet - but soon, soon!

Getting tulip & daffodil ready

The Dutch are famous for their tulips  - starting as early as 1637 when at the peak of the 'tulip mania' a single bulb would sell for as much as 10 times a craftsman's annual income. In the late spring, It was the first great economic bubble and despite it's subsequent collapse, the Dutch are still master tulip growers. The  Noord-Holland climate is perfect with cool damp springs that brings forth  a living kaleidoscope of color . Driving along the motorways, you pass field after field carpeted in glorious colors. Over the space of about 6-8 weeks from mid March to late April the vista constantly changes as different bulbs burst into bloom. Sadly too, sometimes you see fields where the tulip guillotines have been running - where the farmer has removed the flowers to encourage bulb growth and left the aisles between planting strewn with fading petals. 

                          

I was house hunting at just that time - and was super excited that the area around the stolpboederij has many tulip farmers. Being able to watch and smell the fragant harvest develop from the house windows is a wonderful treat to come. There are some additional perks as well : lots of farms have buckets with freshly cut tulips for sale next to honesty boxes during the blooming seasons and you can fill your house with flowers in every room for just pennies. In the winter, they often sell the bulbs as well, and I took advantage of another 'too good to say no' deal to buy a bunch of tulip bulbs to go into the garden.  They are a mystery variety, so I have no idea what color they will be - looking forwards to a spring surprise. 

This autumn week is grey and damp, and it's definitely getting close to late in the season for planting bulbs. I have 150 mixed daffodils to plant as well as my tulips so we decided to focus on getting these all in the ground before continuing with the rest of the garden. The canal bank down the side of the  house is steeply sloping and hard to mow, so it seemed like a great candidate for a bulbfest!

We started with one traditional style bulb planter and a more advanced one with a 'release' handle that widens out the sides to allow the soil plug to drop out and cover the new bulb. Despite the extra technology, the soil has a high clay content and clings grimly to everything, so it took more time to push the plug back out, than to get it into the planter in the first place. After about 30 or so bulbs, we were both sore wristed and wondering how on earth we would get to the end. Thankfully W had a bright idea and pulled out our recently acquired post hole digging tool - it drilled out the holes super quickly and made in the process crumbled the soil as much as possible given the clay content. An hour and a half later, accompanied by an excited puppy who tried to dig up as fast as we planted, it was all done. The bank doesn't look a lot different - I can't wait for spring!

Home is where the Woofer is

Its been quite a few years since my Shadow crossed the rainbow bridge and for a long time, I didn't really want another dog. There are some dogs that are just that special that you are not likely to meet another one quite like it - and Shadow hit that perfect spot.

It's also hard to travel when you own animals, unless you take them with you or have a great relationship with a local kennel. As Shadow had a lot of health issues, kenneling generally wasn't an option, so it was travel with dog or find a friend! I also feel that its unfair on a dog to be alone during the day, and with the move to a new country that was pretty much on the cards all the time  - so another woofer just wasn't an option. 

Life changes though & with W's new job, the 'alone time' dropped dramatically and it became possible to think about having a dog in our lives. I made the mistake of looking around to see what woofers I could find and met this adorable chap. He really looked more like a guinea pig, than a puppy - and sounded remarkably like one too. 

As the largest puppy in the litter, he clearly shared some dietary traits of a porcine nature. Here he is with his sister, the day before he left for his new home. 


The first few days of settling in were quite challenging as the renovations were still in full flow, so the house was full of people wielding sharp implements and pots of paints. Luca quickly demonstrated his ability to get underfoot, find and remove the tool you have just put down, or simply cause chaos.  We have started puppy training, which is all done in Dutch and is a huge encouragement to accelerate my language skills. Thankfully, some of the basic commands sound almost the same in English and Dutch so I can claim to have a bi-lingual puppy. Or as close as you can come, when he wilfully and cheerfully ignores you because he's found something far more interesting than listening to his master's voice!

Despite the puppy training being second time around, I am struggling to find some comparative  commands to those we are learning here : 'high' and 'low' for 'stand on box' 'get off box to the ground' just don't quite sound right and Luca can definitely  hear the lack of confidence in my voice. If anyone knows what the commands should be, please let me know!

It's quite an exhausting experience for a young puppy to spend an hour concentrating hard, in a group of distracting and interesting other pups. So Friday nights usual end up rather like this - with Luca inelegantly sprawled on his own personal sofa .

First things first : planning the project & creepie crawlies

As I've been in the new place a while, I am going to play catchup for a bit in my posts - we've done a lot since we moved in and I would love to share the full journey!

With roots in project management, the first step in kicking off a renovation project had to be planning ahead  - working out what we want to do, choosing a style and color palette, setting a budget & booking the workforce. I started with good intent, but reality and time caught up remarkably fast - and many decisions needed to be made on the fly. 

To ensure that I didn't forget or lose information as the project happened, I ensured that the project team leaders (W, Ian) were all signed up to Evernote - it helped to structure lots of pieces of information into useful findable buckets. I loved the  mobile capabilities of the Premium subscription, as well as the ability to capture documents & business cards with just one click .

Pinterest  was valuable in finding inspirational pictures . With friends and family in different countries and timezone, it was a wonderful way of being creative together and stretching boundaries. A goodly number of pins from friends made their way into the project and I'm super happy with the end results.

Choosing colors ahead of time was critical : I  had a very short window to do a lot of  'base level' renovation & redecoration work in before the movers arrived with all the furniture & belongings. There's nothing to stop me doing more, but it gets ever so much harder when you are moving things around as you paint! Each room had it's own paint chip, and I tried to blend the color change through the house, with relaxing and soft greens in the main living areas, cool active blues in thinking rooms, warm pinks in cozy sleeping rooms. I spent hours on Design Seeds browsing through the color chips finding just the right blend of shades for each room. It even encouraged me to be far more adventurous in my color selections than normal as it was so easy to find a set of beautifully matched colors to work with. 

Finally the most challenging part of the preparation was expanding my slim dutch vocabulary exponentatially with many complex building/diy/technical words as I struggled with contractors with quotations for work that I didn't feel up to doing myself. Whilst W was happy to help in the majority, he has a strong belief that he shouldn't have to make all the calls  - and anyway, all Dutchies speak English, honest! I believe I've disproved that many times now, but the rule still stands - I have to at least try. 

With the house frame and structure being entirely wooden, a must have was a survey for insects and rot. The first company to come in was quite terrifying, leaving behind the impression that the entire building was about to collapse entirely with the next breeze unless they were paid lots of money immediately as the house was thoroughly infested with 'houtworm' (woodworm) and 'boktor' (deathwatch beetle). Thankfully, a web search rapidly identified them as being at the  more 'cowboy' end of the building world, and with a little help from colleagues, I got into touch with Van Lierop - a far more reputable company who confirmed the presence of both denizens, but that it was a new and very mild infestation, easily treatable with a very good spraying! So, all booked, all planned ready for key day!

Mosaic Experimentation

Random factoid 1 : I've always had a passion for mosaics - I love the complexity of creating a realistic image combined with a color by numbers approach to building up the image. Never actually tried making one before though....

Random factoid 2 : any self respecting archaeological unit or museum will tell you that they have hundreds of pieces of 'pot' - shards of broken pottery - which take up precious storage space and few are of sufficiently high quality to display publicly in large display cases,  yet must be kept since they may be of importance to research.

Not so long ago, I  saw a museum that has made great steps in cracking the 'shard display' issue : they turned an entire wall of a hall into a journey through time displayed through pottery shards. It was a graphic and impressive journey through human crafting over time - and started me thinking about a possible craft project.

The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, and this has left it's footprint in the soil : in many places, you can't dig your garden without finding hundreds of pottery shards, often in 'delft blue' or the trademark medieval greens and browns - as well as the remains of many clay pipes. This little treasure trove is just perfect for the piqué-assiette style of mosaicing and that's exactly what I decided to do.

I used the back plate of an old broken pendulum clock bought from the Kringloopwinkel (recycling store) for pennies as my base plate. Since I had substantially more blue'n'white than green'n'brown shards, I painted the plate brilliant white with some left over household wall paints. I laid out a couple of trial layouts , allowing me to experiment with the balance of the shapes, and to decide on the individual display direction. Some epoxy based glue and some sticky fingers later, the final layout was secured into place. Then the fun part - filling the gaps with grouting. I used a pure white grouting - I know many professional mosaicists mutter about it looking like kiddie craft projects, but guess what - I'm a big kid having fun, and the contrast was much better given the large amounts of delftware.

A night spent setting, and voila : a slice of Dutch life in a wall display.

New start, new home

It's been an unconscionably long time since I blogged but despite best intentions, my focus has been anywhere but online . A lot of life changes some tough, some just hard work but at the end of it all, I'm settled in a new home in the North of Holland. And that's the reason for restarting to blog : I've developed a passion for renovating my lovely old house and want to share some of the trials, tribulations & victories along the way.

So : let's start with a major catch up on the world!

In July, I bought a house. Or rather, I saddled myself with a large amount of debt owed to a large Dutch financial institution in exchange for the right to spend even more money whilst living in an old Dutch farm house.


The brochure picture from the real estate agent above makes it look just idyllic - and it very nearly is! It's called a 'stolpboederij' in Dutch and has a special construction that uses 4 major beams in a pyramidal shape to support all the roof weight. As a result the majority of the interior is not loadbearing - until you decide to build upwards.  This construction of beams is a 'vierkant'. Historically, a portion of the building was the farmer's home and the rest was a combination of hay barn and cow shed - just like this.We know that the house dates back to at least the 19th century : the surveyor stated that the building style inside looks more like 18th century. As a result it has many years of living, repair and DIY from different eras all over it.

The inside is no different to the exterior - the ground floor looked in reasonably good condition in the main, with modern plumbing, 2.5 kitchens (it was divided into two flats at one point, the .5 seems to have been an easy storage route) and a beautiful spacious living room - but some very dodgy pipes, wiring and gas flows. Upstairs is much less appealing, with stained ancient wallpaper, falling out walls and damaged floors.

The garden is a disaster zone - the previous owners were very very horsy : the horse environment is spotlessly maintained and beautiful, but the garden was mowed occasionally and left to run riot for nearly 10 years.

Over the next two-five years, W & I are setting out to transform this from an already beautiful house to our dream home.