Visit to Kent

I have just come back from visiting Andy in Ashford in Kent where he works/trains as an outdoor instructor.

I flew down and back alone and am quite proud of myself as I have never flown before or been anywhere on my own. To say I was a little nervous.............. but all went well.

The flight down was good

The 3 trains from Gatwick and a taxi to my motel made sure I was knackered by the time I arrived at Travelodge.

Andy took a holiday from work and we had a fab time. I loved eating lunch/dinner in this old American diner with Buddy Holly and other good old tunes blasting out.

We had a lot of rain on Tuesday but Wednesday was lovely. In our usual ..really organised.. style we headed off the 3 miles to the train station and caught the first train in. We ended up in Ramsgate. There are absolutely no town centre signs from the train station so we walked quite a way around Ramsgate to find lunch. Once there we were not disappointed. We ate in an award winning fish shop before having a walk along the beach.

We even saw some locals having a swim, the temperature out of the water was only 13 degrees so I dread to think how cold it was!!!

There was a lovely old looking boat there, I would love to have had a look around it.

Unfortunately there were about 7 or 8 dead fish washed up on the beach, none of which were being eaten by the ever present gulls...strange???
They look to me like dog fish but I am no expert.

After 3 days of continuous walking I ended up with blisters on the pads of my feet. It seems like only yesterday that I could walk many miles pushing Chris and Andy in Chris's wheelchair loaded with bulging shopping bags and never a blister!! The joys of getting older .......hmph!!

And he said we couldn't do it!

We have a room in our home that I wasn't too keen on when we bought the house. It has the only downstairs room with a view of the garden and is fairly big so I should have liked it.

My problem was it was a room without character and without direction. I have spent over two years walking into the room we had dubbed 'the office' and searching for clues as to how it should evolve. Eventually I could picture a room where a modern day guy might wear an old 'smoking jacket' (though they had better not be smoking in my house!) and sit in comfort to read.

With little more than this as a starting point we set to on the room.

First we had to find out what was really behind the alcove wall to see if yet another multi-fuel burner (with boiler attached) would be joining us...it was not to be. We had a Megaflow fitted recently (through necessity) and this would be at odds with the burner with boiler.

So it was back to the drawing board!

I decided it would be a good idea to build in an alcove cupboard with new shelves. OH said we could never do anything like that. The nearest we had ever been to attempting a proper DIY project was years ago when we fitted some wonky shelves in a bedroom alcove!

Non the less I continued (nagged!!) until he agreed to at least try.

Firstly we had to rebuild the wall.

We thought we had managed this pretty well!!

Next the OH plastered the whole of the inside of the alcove.

Then we had quite a few days of blood, sweat, knackered cardi's, tears and tantrums and voila!!!

A totally hand build alcove cupboard with shelves!

And he said we couldn't do it!!!!!!!!