I think I need to catch up a bit

Truth be told, I haven't really been in a blogging mood and I've spent most of the last couple of months redecorating anyway. I'll show you my before, during and afters of our bedroom as it's been a bloody nightmare, but - phew - it's finished now!

We have been out a number of times with Birding Languedoc. Back in February on a freezing day we saw our very first Lammergeier, also known as the Bearded Vulture. Not only was this amazing, but at our second stop, we saw another perched atop a ridge eating something. It flew off, then was joined by another. All of a sudden, over the top of the ridge a Golden Eagle appeared, and soared around the thermals with the Lammergeiers. What an experience! Keith did get some photos but even with his long lens you wouldn't know what they were without being told, so it's not worth sharing. He reckons we saw a Golden Eagle in Greece back in 2000, but I didn't really see it so I'm counting it as a lifer for me too. 😁

On our next trip I finally got to see a Bluethroat really properly, instead of vague partial glimpses which have been very frustrating! Just recently we saw our first Greater Short Toed Lark, but it was distant and in flight. Much better was a view of a Spotted Crake! I hadn't realised there were Crakes which live around marshy areas, as the only Crake I've heard of is the Corncrake, a grassland bird, but our bird guide told me there are three Crakes which we might see around wetland areas - all looking not unlike the Water Rail, as they are all part of the same family (which Moorhens belong to). Keith did get some decent photos even though it didn't stay around for long. So quite a few lifers already this year!

Photo credit: Keith Allen

Photo credit: Keith Allen

Spring has been a bit late coming but the garden is looking good and I've caught up with most garden jobs now - it's such a delight to have a small manageable garden! As usual the lawn is full of orchids - Early Spider, Sombre Bee and just the other day I discovered some Yellow Bee Orchids which was exciting, as we had had one solitary plant our first year but nothing since, and now there are four plants! There are some Lady Orchids flowering on the bank of next door's garden too. I saw a Dingy Skipper which landed in my Nectar Bar right in front of me just for a moment, but apart from flitting whites and something brown I haven't seen a lot of variety here yet (not that I have spent a lot of time outside, being indoors painting etc).

I did see some lovely butterflies a few days ago on an organised wildflower/orchid day out, also with Birding Languedoc, but that will be a separate post as I have loads of photos. 

Our dry weather continues although it is much worse nearer the coast than here. The crops in the fields round here are coming up well as there has been enough rain to keep the soil moist beneath the surface, but on many of our outings it has been dry as a bone on the garrigues and more rocky, free draining areas. So much for April showers, whatever became of them? So this summer is looking really worrying from a water shortage point of view. Many areas already have drought restrictions.

We have a holiday sorted for the last week of June/first week of July with my brother, in the Moho of course. We are heading to Provence to see the lavender fields and explore some more. Provence is a huge area and includes a lot of mountainous areas so we are heading up into some of the higher national parks for a look around. We also have a two night 'jolly' booked with Birding Languedoc in mid June, up into the mountains of the Pyrenees Orientale department to look for wildflowers, butterflies and birds, whatever takes our fancy. We are staying half board in a small guest house and it sounds like a lot of fun! Our October housesitter is booked for both these trips which is great as the cats like her and vice versa. We may go away in the autumn again, possibly to Spain again, but who knows. I need to do a bit more research into the Provence trip first!

Okeydokey, let's have a look at the bedroom then! You can scroll through the photos to look at the after pics if you find these boring, but I wanted to put these pics here for the record.

There were already some cracks, both on the wall and on the ceiling, but after last summer's drought they opened up to 2mm wide! After finally getting rain in Nov and Dec the cracks closed up to around 1mm but the ceiling looked a right mess, and where I had already painted dark red behind the bed had white cracks showing through. I didn't like the wallpaper that was already there on one wall which was peeling off in places and had a jaggedy crack all the way down it, so the plan was to remove that, repair the walls and ceiling, then repaint the wallpapered wall with the same colour, duck egg blue. I'd already bought the paint at the same time as I got the dark red paint. Both paints were matched up with cushion covers I took into the shop.

I love wallpaper removing with my steamer, but I don't like having to wash off the glue afterwards. I remember this from our bedroom in Brittany which was wallpapered all over, but this was a lot worse. I spent three afternoons washing this one wall. I tried sugar soap and washing up liquid and eventually ended up scrubbing the wall with a green brillo pad!

I then had to deal with the cracks which wasn't fun - I have no idea how this room was constructed but there seemed to be so many layers of materials which were all flaking around the cracks which I had to remove. On the walls it seems like they had put some weird coating on top of the plaster which was blown in places so that was why the wallpaper was coming off in places. To get at the ceiling I covered the bed in dustsheets (old duvet covers) then used old planks to stand on. So every time I had to do a layer of filler on the ceiling (some of the cracks were very deep) I had to put all this lot on the bed, then take it all off again as we had to sleep there! Just my luck the crack was over the bed. And no, it couldn't be moved, it is too heavy.

Below is looking up at the ceiling, with wall cracks visible as well.

Sanding was a nightmare as I wasn't as high up as on my stepladders so my arms were absolutely shrieking in agony. 😀 This was my first time using plasterboard tape, which I thought I did correctly until I covered the tape over with a thin skim coat the next day and saw bubbles. I thought I had smoothed it well enough against the plaster underneath but somehow air had got in. Cutting the tape didn't help as it just bubbled again when I added more plaster. Aaargh! In the end I cut out the tape in the worst places and filled in with more plaster! There are still some small bubbles visible on the ceiling but I don't care any more! It really got to that stage. It is not perfect by a long shot but I'm the only person who is really going to care, and it already looks 100% better than it did.

Ceiling finished and painted over - though I only bothered painting over the bits that I repaired.

As there was so much plaster filler on the wall, I even put a coat of undercoat on the wall before painting, something I don't usually do. Then it was time to paint. I thought I was nearly there........... 

until I opened the tin of paint, which looked a bit of an odd colour. Which it was. I have no idea how Keith and I could have colour matched this cushion cover to a paint colour like this. We had loads of colour charts in the paint shop which we matched up to and got the red colour 100% perfect. Maybe the shop made a mistake? The green was really horrible and there was no way I was going to leave that on the wall! In the photo it doesn't look the real colour - the cushion is duck egg blue and the wall is a sort of horrible hospital/school green. 

We weren't going back to the same shop an hour away so I ordered some Annie Sloan wall paint online, as I used her wall paint in the spare bedroom last year. I ordered Pemberley Blue which is a duck egg at the blue end of the scale. I'm really happy with the colour - a blue grey with green undertones. I didn't have enough for a second coat though so I had to water the paint down a bit and only just managed the second coat!

The ordeal wasn't quite over as when Keith put the picture hooks back in the wall, my woven baskets kept falling off! He tried some other picture hooks, but the same thing happened. So the heavy duty hooks with rawl plugs had to come out, and with our rock hard walls so did the heavy duty drill bit. We don't seem to have plasterboard here, more like walls of steel!

Anyway, it's all over now (until the wall and ceiling crack again, but hey, I have enough paint left over to fill in the cracks so it doesn't show until it gets really bad....). Phew!

I haven't forgotten the after photos of the office, but we only just got my new artwork hung on the wall (finally some of my own images!), so I haven't taken the photos yet. I'll do it soon. 😀