Waiting

I'm writing this post while I wait for a patio/landscaping guy who may or may not arrive tonight. He was supposed to come yesterday evening, but as usual it seems with any tradespeople I try to engage, he never showed up. I waited three hours before giving up on him, couldn't reach him by phone, he didn't reply to the text I sent until later in the evening when he apologised and said he'd had a day.  They always seem to be so busy that they can't let you know that they won't make it. He asked if he could re-arrange for today, I texted back that we could do that if he could let us know a definite time window.  Didn't hear from him all day until mid-afternoon when he said he would come at 6-6:30pm.  Then he texted at 5:45pm to say he's going to have dinner first so will supposedly get to us at 7pm which is when I was planning to have our dinner.  Sigh...

I've ordered components to build a pergola and I think we are going to have a go at doing it ourselves.  Think Leaning Tower of Pisa made out of treated softwood  :)   Hopefully the delivery will match up with my day off.

Today we spent most of the afternoon emptying our chaotic and overstuffed shed, sorting out better storage, and being very selective about what we put back.  It was in a terrible mess and most of the time I either couldn't find something or couldn't actually reach it over all the things in the way. We built a sort of potting table out of a dining table frame with plywood on top, and a shelf made out of scrap wood, and hung a lot more stuff on the wall. All the things I use regularly are within easy reach now. I forgot to take a Before picture but here is an After picture and a picture of all the stuff that is going to the dump.  Mostly bits of chipboard left over from when the kitchen was put in almost three years ago that we kept in case they would be useful - they weren't.

Thursday night I triumphantly finished my Outlander Socks at long last, they were such a pain to knit because the yarn was fine and I found the colouration made it hard to distinguish the stitches so I often knit two together by mistake.  I wet blocked them and it wasn't until I was putting them on the sock blockers that I realised one sock had a cuff that split on the side, and the other sock had a cuff that split at the back.  Grrr.  I will have to unpick the cuff on the one split at the back (the second one) and re-knit.  The pattern actually tells you to skip some stitches on the right sock but I didn't even read that, I thought I knew what I was doing.

I finished all the 'whole' blocks for my William Morris Grid Quilt.  The burgundy print is what I am considering using for the border.  It's not matchy-matchy but it is part of the fabric range and I am wavering between enjoying the contrast and wanting it to match better.  I was debating what to use for the setting triangles to fill in around the edges, but I think I can just about manage to make them out of the scraps I've got left over from cutting the main blocks. I haven't arranged the blocks yet, I've just bunged them up on the design wall to get a general idea.

On my day off I decided to investigate the lights on my Rik Pearce dollshouse which hadn't been turned on in several years.  One of them had even fallen off the wall and was just hanging by its wire.

I couldn't remember anything about the installation because I did it so long ago, but looking underneath the base (tricky to do without tilting the house too much which would knock everything inside over), I found that I had taken the wires from all five lights into a central circuit board which was wired to an earphone type jack - I must have bought the circuit board at a show. Unfortunately the jack was smashed in half and hanging partly loose, presumably a casualty of the several moves during the house buying process.  I improvised a metal bracket which I screwed on to hold the jack back up against the circuit board, and plugged in the transformer with fingers crossed.  To my relief all five lights still work. There are two downstairs and a glowing fireplace, one out on the dock, and one upstairs in the bedroom. I glued the downstairs casualty back onto the wall with silicon adhesive.

I had made a little wooden stand for my model yacht but then found out the boat was too tall to display on top of the dresser.  I had been planning to use a little metal set of coathooks to make a coat rack by the door, so I added a shelf to that so I still display the boat.

You can see the light and the fireplace glowing in this picture.

This house is almost done enough now for the club visit, I've just got to do a bit of dusting and I am painting a swan to go out on the river in front of the house.  

During TV watching I've mainly been working on my next block for my 25 block applique quilt.

Well it's 10 past 7 and the patio guy is still a no show but he has texted to say he is 10 minutes away.  Meanwhile my dinner has come out of the oven and is sitting there cooling down while I wait for him.  Grrrrr.  He had better be like the world's greatest patio layer.