Our house purchase completed this morning and we are now the proud owners of the house we’ve lived in for the last 9 months, which we love and prefer to all the other four houses we’ve had in the last five years.  Our first project is decorating our big spare room for Flopsy and Mopsy to share; and to do work on the garden.  I feel so grown up!

As I think the girls have wrecked the kitchen floor!  It’s now a lovely multi-coloured pattern thanks to the great fun we had doing this activity from Doodle-Do on CBeebies.  Flopys has been talking about doing it for a while, so this afternoon we went for it and they stayed totally engrossed in it for a whole hour!  Pretty impressive for a 2 year old and a nearly 4 year old.  Must remember that activity for the future.  They produced some fab art which I’ve neglected to take photos of…but I do think that the process was way more important than the product in this case anyway

We’ve also heard that our mortgage offer has come through, so that’s the money sorted out.  Just waiting for the solicitor to do the searches now…shouldn’t be much longer we hope.

Forgot to blog that on Wednesday we went to a new (to us) HE group which we all loved.  Flopsy and Mopsy fell head over heels in love with a little dog, which they played with most of the afternoon.  I knew a couple of the families there in real life and one or two from the internet and can’t wait to go to the next meet there.

I’ve sown salad seeds which I got free with Gardeners’ World magazine that DH kindly bought me - they’re now seedlings which is very exciting.  There were also tomato seeds so I now have 10 tomato plant seedlings and three more I’m waiting to come up out of the soil.  We managed to get a brand new fold-away wheelbarrow on Freecycle (I love Freecycle!) last night.  This afternoon I dug a hole and mixed the soil with manure from a friend’s farm so that in a few weeks I can plant a blackberry bush to grow up the shed.  Two of the girls’ sunflowers are now showing, which they’re very pleased about.  Other projects we have in mind over the next year or two are:

1. Digging up shrubs to make way for veg patch and more grass

2. Sowing grass seed so the ‘playing area’ is larger (as the veg patch will make it smaller)

3. Flower bed alongside the fence

This has now been transformed into this…

And the aftermath…  plus three big council garden refuse sacks -  it’s going to be some weeks before it’s all cleared!

One of the things I’m looking forward to most about owning our own house is the garden.  Up until now in our rented houses, I’ve half-heartedly planted up pots and hanging baskets but I’ve never felt much motivation to do anything else, despite being very keen to grow our own vegetables and maybe some berries.  It’s just too frustrating knowing that any work I do in the garden will not benefit us in the long-term as we may not be staying there for more than one summer.  Now it looks like we might be able to stay here for as long as we want, we are excitedly making plans for the garden (and the house…but of course house plans are relatively expensive so they’ll have to wait!).

 Over the summer we are planning to clear away the bushes beside the play house.  There’s a silver birch where the bushes start to get taller, so we’ll only clear as far as there.  Then we’re going to move the playhouse and, in the Autumn, dig that whole regtangle over with some rotted manure from a friend with a farm ready to grow some vegetables in next year.

 This weekend, we’re going to cut down the left hand side of this buddleia (can you see that branch growing diagonally?  It’s that one we’ll cut off).  We’re then going to move the hexagonal wooden ’sand pit’ thing into that space, which gets a lot of sun from noon onwards, fill it with compost from Mum and Dad’s ancient compost bin and plant a load of herbs I bought yesterday.

Yesterday the girls sowed their sunflower seeds that Flopsy won when playing pass-the-parcel at her friend’s birthday party:

  And I planted sweet peas:

And Cotton-tail lazed about on her mat:

Just to round off the photos post, here’s Mopsy before her bicycle accident on Saturday:  

and a great action shot of them both in the paddling pool: