Wisteria in the alley

Another flower-centric weekend. The wisteria in the alley has bloomed:

And I came home on Friday night to find the vacant shop across from my flat has turned into a florist! Super-pleased. I bought some flowers to celebrate.

Although it's been beautifully sunny, I've spent most of the weekend inside, stripping paint from the kitchen window. I worked from 10pm to 1:30am last night and from 11am to 4pm today and only have the central strip to show for my efforts (although it is the most fiddly part, because of the metal). It's not even perfectly finished, as this photo shows. Such hard work - I was already grateful for my parents' work on my bedroom but I now really understand how much my Dad had to do to get such a good finish on the bedroom window.
Oh, and it seems I'm doomed with shelving. I screwed the shelves to the brackets, did some polyfilla-ing and painting to cover the screwheads, and loaded them up with books... to find that I'd forgotten to take account of the added height of the books when working out where to position the shelves on the wall so they look a bit too high now. :(

Shamefree shelving

I managed to borrow an extension lead from work so I put up my shelves this afternoon. I had a day off (my old school friend was over for the weekend and left this afternoon) - holy smoke but it felt good to have a three-day weekend, especially because I had a few sleepless nights last week, finding myself hopping out of bed in the middle of the night to check that my wall wasn't collapsing... hem.
I need to buy some little wood screws to attach the shelves to the brackets before I load them up, and I also want to cover and paint the screws, but the hard bit's out of the way. They're nothing special but I'm pleased.

The hole in the wall...

...just got bigger.
Back in September, I excavated a chunk of my bathroom-kitchen wall. Other than pointing out the hole in the wall to interested visitors, I haven't really thought about it much since then. For some reason, however, the words "dry rot" lodged themselves in my brain last weekend and ended up keeping me awake half the night on Sunday and Monday. I know dry rot smells, and that the absence of a smell meant I was probably in the clear, but I couldn't get past the niggling thought that something dark and dangerous and possibly very expensive was going on behind my bathroom tiles. So I decided to reduce my chances of something rotten by removing at least one potential culprit, namely the rest of the wooden supports.

It was all so rotten I was able to do all this while I was waiting for my washing to go round in the laundrette. The big panel was so flimsily held in place that it just lifted out. All that remains is to get rid of the evidence. It's almost dark enough now for a trip down to the bins...

Fantastic flowers: part II

Just looked up from my computer and found this lovely surprise sitting across the room from me:

It must just have opened in the last ten minutes or so.

I bought this passion flower yesterday but the earth in the flower pot I want to use is so water-logged I can't plant it out yet. Certainly didn't expect to be seeing any flowers on a chilly April evening among the paint pots. :)

Fantastic flowers

I spent the weekend catching up with friends so I didn't get anything done in the flat. Thought I'd share the remarkable shelf-life of these flowers though. I bought them for 4 euros the Saturday after my parents left, as in on the 1st of March. And they're still going strong! Five weeks later!! (Well, strongish - they're no longer on top form but until about a week ago they were still good enough that I would probably have bought them in a flower shop).

Don't know what variety they are, but I'm certainly impressed. Oh, and in all that time I've topped up the water once. I think they must break some kind of record for low maintenance...