Scavenging and skipping

A workshop near where we live is about to be demolished and there are about three cubic metres so-called waste wood about to go on a skip. People have been invited to help themselves, and that is what we've done. My shed down the bottom of the garden is fast filling up with firewood, which is not really what I wanted to do with it because all that wood is leaving hardly any room to do anything else arty or crafty.  Then again, it's far too wet to construct our wood shelter or Holzleg, so in the poolhouse is where the wood goes for now, guarded by a very soggy Headless Harvey.

Thanks to OH, who has arranged it and who has almost finished mortaring in our pamments, we now have our BIG DATE: August 2nd. That's when our stove is going to be delivered and installed. Hopefully, in the evening of that day, we will be able to fire up our lovely woodburner, all 8kw of it, for the first time and shove some serious heat through this house. Because, it has to be said, the persistent rain -- it's raining every day, for hours -- is now making the house clammy and uncomfortable. Clothes don't dry, the floor, I suspect, is by now wicking up groundwater from underneath the house and I am paranoid about a large pool of water silently collecting under our floorboards. Normally, a few days of sun would heat up the brickwork and the house would be its own storage heater, keeping everything nice and dry. But not a chance. If this is summer, it can go home and send autumn.

The poor weather is extra motivation to lay in a store of wood, and untreated waste wood that is destined for landfill has our name on it. We did a double run with our little car, one yesterday and another one today, and maybe, if we're lucky, I might persuade OH to help me unload the car in the rain and do another run tomorrow on the off chance that the place is still open

The house itself looks like a hoarder's den, with bulky rescued lab equipment piled incongruously next to buckets of mortar, crates of wastepaper for shredding but not yet shredded creating trip hazards in the hallway, boxes with files about to go in the loft, VHS tapes and shoes with holes for the bin (not even the charity shops are interested in VHS any more). I overdid it with the painting last week and made my wrist sore so was glad to be able to just tunnel vaguely through the labyrinth that is now the entire downstairs floor, pulling stuff, Prüll, off shelves and making final decisions about boxes that I hadn't touched for years. All very cathartic and necessary. The best soundtrack to this is Columbo: "Just one more thing." Or Loriot's Pappa Ante Portas: "Na wunderbar. Die Welt geht unter, aber WIR haben Senf, Wurzelbürsten und Badezusatz."